User:Tamiworonoff/Sandbox

Anne Aghion is a French-American Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker.

A filmmaker whose awards include an Emmy, a UNESCO Fellini Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anne Aghion has been praised by critics as a documentarian who succeeds in conveying, without preconception, a strong sense of the people and places she covers. Two of her previous films, which deal with post-genocide justice in Rwanda, are recognized as seminal works that have played a key “real-life” role both within Rwanda and across the globe.

Fascinated by people who survive extreme circumstances, Aghion chose as her latest project ICE PEOPLE, a feature-length documentary that explores the physical, emotional and spiritual adventure of living and conducting science in Antarctica, the earth’s coldest continent. Based at McMurdo Station, the U.S. scientific research facility, Aghion and her crew spent four months on the ice, including seven weeks camping in the “deep field” with a small team of geologists searching for fossilized vegetation on Antarctic lakebeds estimated at 14-20 million years old. Made with the support of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program—which gave Aghion the longest film permit ever granted—ICE PEOPLE is already slated to air on Sundance Channel and on ARTE in 2008. The film also received major funding from ITVS International, and is timed for release during the 2007-2009 worldwide celebration of International Polar Year.

Aghion’s most recent works, “Gacaca, Living Together Again In Rwanda?” and “In Rwanda we Say…The family that does not speak dies,” the first two of a trilogy, received accolades around the world. Journalist Philip Gourevitch, author of “We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families,” noted that Aghion “captures quite precisely much of what is most compelling and unsettling about Rwanda’s quest for justice after genocide.” The broadcast of “Gacaca” on French television yielded “Special Picks” in eight of the country’s top national publications, along with reviews calling it “remarkable,” and “riveting,” and praising Aghion’s “open, human approach.”  When both films aired on Sundance Channel in April 2004 to mark the ten-year commemoration of the genocide, the Washington Post called “In Rwanda we say…” “astonishing, ” and the Connecticut Post said they were “two of the best documentaries you are likely to see this year. ” “In Rwanda we say…” won a 2005 Emmy Award; “Gacaca…” received the 2004 Fellini Prize from UNESCO.

Filmed over the course of seven years in a tiny rural community, both films have been used by organizations involved with peace studies as a universal tool in understanding the “heart and mind” issues involved in bringing stabilization to a society after strife. They have also screened in Rwanda—by NGOs as part of their training, and in programs to re-acclimate confessed perpetrators of genocide crimes, before release back into their communities.

The third film in the Rwanda trilogy is currently in production, for release in 2009.

Her first film, “Se Le Movió El Piso (The Earth Moved Under Him)—A Portrait of Managua” was the winner of the Havana Film Festival’s 1996 Coral Award for Best Non-Latin American Documentary on Latin America. That film explored how slum dwellers in Nicaragua’s capital had survived a series of natural, political and economic disasters.

For most of her life, Aghion has been a dual resident of New York and Paris, working at The New York Times Paris bureau, and at the International Herald Tribune. Moving into film, she worked in a variety of capacities including videographer, production and post-production manager, before producing and directing her own films.

Aghion was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and has received repeat grants from the Soros Documentary Fund, the Sundance Documentary Fund, and from the United States Institute of Peace. She also received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Compton Foundation, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, and Oxfam-Novib. In addition, she was able to generate funding for “In Rwanda we say…” from the Austrian Development Agency, the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Swiss Development Cooperation, thanks to the significant impact of “Gacaca...”

Anne Aghion holds a Bachelor of Arts Magna Cum Laude in Arab Language and Literature from Barnard College at Columbia University in New York, and following her studies, spent two years living in Cairo.

Anne Aghion official website

Ice People official website