For Ahkeem

Jeremy Levine is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, co-founder of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, and an assistant professor at Suffolk University. His films explore race in a society steeped in active denial of its own past. For Ahkeem, his last feature, is a love story set against the backdrop of the Ferguson uprising.

Landon Van Soest won an Emmy Award for co-directing, with Jeremy Levine, Good Fortune, a feature documentary about how efforts to aid Africa may be undermining the very communities they aim to serve. The film was awarded the Witness Award for Human Rights at its 2009 Silverdocs Film Festival premiere, the 2010 Overseas Press Club Carl Spielvogel Award for international reporting, a 2007 fellowship from the Sundance Institute, and was broadcast on the award-winning PBS series, POV. The team’s first film, Walking the Line, a feature documentary about vigilantes along the U.S.-Mexico border, was screened in dozens of film festivals around the world, broadcast nationally in five countries, and recognized with several awards for production, reporting, and preserving human rights. Van Soest and Levine have a special passion for telling stories that highlight innovative ideas in education. Van Soest spent two years directing a documentary about an experimental global education center in the Middle East. Levine and Van Soest co-founded the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, a non-profit organization that provides support to independent filmmakers in New York City.

Nicholas Weissman is a documentary filmmaker and contract producer for Time Inc. Studios. Since coming to New York in 2006 he has worked as a producer and cinematographer for numerous media outlets including Sony Pictures, National Geographic Channel, Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, People Magazine, MSNBC, PBS, TNT, and The History Channel. His first independent film, The Minutemen, produced by Weissman and directed by Corey Wascinski, won the Silver Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival and both Best Documentary and Grand Jury Prize at the Brooklyn International Film Festival.