Survivors

Banker White directed and produced the award-winning documentary The Genius of Marian, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast on PBS's award-winning series POV in September 2014. The film also received support from the Sundance Documentary Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tribeca Film Institute, Impact Partners, LEF, Britdoc, the Catapult Film Fund, and The Fledgling Fund. Banker also directed Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars (POV, 2007). The film was nominated by the IDA for Best Feature in 2006; won grand jury awards at AFI Fest, Full Frame Film Festival and Human Rights Watch Film Festival; and earned audience awards at SXSW and Miami International Film Festival. It was broadcast on POV in North America, HBO Latin America, and NHK in Japan among others. Banker also founded the WeOwnTV Freetown Media Center, a collaborative filmmaking and storytelling project in Sierra Leone which is supported by Creative Capital, Freedom to Create, The Bertha Foundation, and BAVC.

Arthur Pratt is a Sierra Leonean filmmaker and community leader based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Arthur is a co-founder of the Sierra Leone Film Council, the country’s first media makers union. He has started and leads multiple community film and theater groups, collaboratively writing and performing numerous films and plays with ex-combatants, former child prostitutes and community members. He is a co-founder and manager of the WeOwnTV Freetown Media Center in Sierra Leone with numerous credits and awards for the films and plays he has produced. Film credits include: Charity (writer/director) which received festival awards at the Pan African Film Festival Los Angeles, Cinema by the Bay San Francisco, and Semana del Cine Experimental de Madrid, Spain; Black Sugar (director, writer, and camera), They Resisted (director/writer); Hustler (director, writer, and camera); Gift of My Eyes (camera and editor); and M'Pora (camera and editor).

Anna Fitch is an Emmy Award-winning director. Her natural history and science documentaries have aired on the National Geographic Channel, Channel 4 UK, and PBS. BugWorld: War of Two Worlds (2003) won an Emmy Award in Best Documentary Directing and was a Best Science and Natural History Program finalist at Banff Television Festival. She co-directed the feature documentary The Genius of Marian (2013), which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast on POV in September 2014. The film also received support from the Sundance Documentary Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tribeca Film Institute, Impact Partners, LEF, Britdoc, the Catapult Film Fund and The Fledgling Fund. Her narrative short, The Burning Wigs of Sedition (2010), was in competition at many festivals, including the Seattle International Film Festival, SFFS’s Cinema by the Bay, Revelation Film Festival Perth, and Rooftop Films NYC. It also won the Best of Festival prize at the Black Maria Film Festival and the Audience Award at SF IndieFest.