TEAM
IRENE LUSZTIG (DIRECTOR / PRODUCER / EDITOR) is a feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, educator, and amateur seamstress. She works in a space of delicate mediation between people, their pasts, and the present-tense spaces and landscapes where unresolved histories bloom and erupt. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present, inviting viewers to contemplate questions of politics, ideology, and the complex ways that personal, collective, and national memory are entangled. Born in England and raised in Boston, Irene is a first generation American whose parents fled Ceaucescu’s Romania as political asylum-seekers. Her work, including three previous feature length films, has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, BFI London Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival, DocLisboa, and RIDM Montréal. She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2021), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Fulbright, two MacDowell fellowships, the Flaherty Film Seminar, and the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship. She teaches filmmaking at UC Santa Cruz where she is Professor of Film and Digital Media.
SARA ARCHAMBAULT (PRODUCER) Sara Archambault is a Creative Producer dedicated to artful and impactful nonfiction filmmaking. Sara champions films with bold vision that take risks and center a practice of equity, care, collaboration, and justice in their creation. Recent producing credits include RIOTSVILLE, USA (Sundance, Magnolia Pictures); Truth or Consequences (Rotterdam, Sentient Art Films), and A DECENT HOME (Denver Film Festival, America Reframed). She also has an extensive professional history in production, programming and foundation work, including 10 years as Program Director at the LEF Foundation, and 9 years as Founder/Programmer of the award-winning documentary film series The DocYard. Sara's films have screened in festivals around the world and received support from Sundance Film Institute, SFFILM, Catapult Film Fund, IDA, Hot Docs Pitch Forum, and Film Independent among others. Sara was a 2020 Impact Partners Producing Fellow, a 2013 Sundance Creative Producers Lab Fellow and was named the 2020 SF DocFest Vanguard Awardee. Guided by a belief that we all must contribute and tend to our creative communities, she is a member of the Documentary Producers Alliance and a board member of The Flaherty. She is mother to two inspiring children, partner to a tireless public school teacher, and resides in Providence, RI. Sara loves to going to the movies by herself.
HELKI FRANTZEN (CINEMATOGRAPHER) Helki Frantzen is a documentary cinematographer based in Los Angeles. Her camera work has regularly appeared on TV and online outlets such as PBS, the L.A Times, and Rollingstone Magazine, as well as the BBC, Frontline, the Atlantic, Vice News, and the Dutch television network, HUMAN. The documentaries she has filmed, including L.A. Roll, which she directed and shot, have screened at festivals including Camden, DOC NYC, Big Sky, Short of the Week, and AFI Fest. Documentaries Helki has DP’d have received multiple awards, including a Los Angeles Area Emmy, numerous Los Angeles Press Club awards and a Golden Mike award. Helki is a member of the International Collective of Female Cinematographers.
MAILE COSTA COLBERT (SOUND DESIGN AND COMPOSITION) is an intermedia artist, researcher, and educator with a focus on time-based media. She has collaborated with director Irene Lusztig for over a decade, working on three of her previous films. Her current practice and research project is titled, Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place, and asks what we might gather from sounding the past. She is a collaborator with the art organization Binaural and is an editor and author at Sonic Field. She has exhibited, screened, and performed around the globe, including in The New York Film Festival, The Ear to Earth Festival for Electronic Music Foundation in NY, LACE Gallery in Los Angeles, MOMA New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles, among other venues. She has designed sound and composed for such works as Courtney Stephens’ and Pacho Velez’ The American Sector (2020), Irene Lusztig’s feature documentaries Yours in Sisterhood (2018) and The Motherhood Archives (2013), Rebecca Baron's film How Little We Know of Our Neighbors, winner of the Black Maria Film Festival Best Film, Adele Horne's feature documentary The Tailenders, broadcasted on PBS POV and winner of a 2007 Independent Spirit Award, and Allan Sekula's epic The Lottery of the Sea.