The Devil’s Miner

Kief Davidson is an award-winning feature film and documentary director born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His film The Devil’s Miner had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2005 and won more than a dozen awards including: Tribeca Film Festival, Hot Docs/Toronto film festival, Chicago International Film Festival. Most recently, he was nominated for a Director’s Guild Award — Best Documentary Director, as well as Best Documentary Director for the European film prize. In addition, he has directed and produced documentaries for The Discovery Channel, ABC News, PBS, and A&E. He is currently directing a feature length documentary about Kassim Ouma, junior middleweight boxing champion of the world who was a child soldier from Uganda. Kief began his filmmaking career in 1993 as editor on the Academy Award-nominated documentary, Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann. He is the recipient of two Emmy nominations for his work with National Geographic, and on the journalistic film What’s News?, he earned an International Monitor Award for Best Editing. Kief currently divides his time between Los Angeles and New York City.

Richard Ladkani has worked as director and cameraman on documentaries ranging from wildlife (Encounters with the Great White Shark) to political films like Escape Over the Himalayas, a film about Tibetan refugee children, that won 15 international awards. He has also worked as a cinematographer on big-budget historical documentaries involving large-scale reenactments as well as character-driven personal stories shot on location in Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Mongolia. A 20-part series, Monasteries of the Danube River, earned him the Austrian cinematography award for best picture. The Devil’s Miner is his first feature length documentary as a director.