Team
Katja Esson
Writer/Director/Producer
Katja Esson is an independent filmmaker based in New York City who mixes documentary and narrative genres. She has directed a variety of award-winning documentaries, short films and commercials. Born and raised in Germany, Esson brings a unique European sensibility to the distinctively American subjects she chooses; like the documentary ‘Ferry Tales’ (2003), which turns the unlikely setting of the Staten Island Ferry Powder Room into a celebration of sisterhood. The film received an Academy Award®-nomination in 2004 and premiered on HBO.
In 2004 Esson founded her own production company, Penelope Pictures and was commissioned to do several documentaries on American subjects for European audiences: ‘Adam: Made to Order Savior’ and ‘Siegfried & Roy: A Fairy Tale for Grown Ups’, both aired on ARTE and on Germany's ARD in 2004. In 2005 Esson directed a French/German co-production for ARTE: ‘Vermisst: Geiseldrama in der Wüste’ (‘Lost: Hostage Crisis in the Sahara’) and ‘Gateway to the World: The Port of New York’. In 2006, Esson completed ‘Hole in the Sky – The Scars of 9/11’, which premiered on ARD and received the Gold Award at the World Media Festival. ‘A Season of Madness’ (2006), her first narrative short film, is now playing at international film festivals. Currently, Esson is in post-production with ‘Breast Side Story’ a documentary about the cultural complexities behind the simple act of breastfeeding; she is in production with ‘Skydancer’, a documentary about Mohawk ironworkers and in the last phase of production with ‘Poetry of Resilience’ for which she received the Simons Fellowship for the Humanities at Kansas University in 2007 and was nominated for the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship in 2008.
Corinna Sager is an award winning director and producer. Her company, Lifestyle International, is a production agency for TV and video productions, live events and corporate communications serving global clients such as Bugatti, Pepsi, Kraft Foods, Mediterranean Shipping Company and Heidelberg Print. The documentaries she produced have been seen on various cable and TV networks, such as HBO, PBS, CNBC and the Franco-German cultural channel Arte. She co-produced ‘Ferry Tales’, directed by Katja Esson. She directed and produced the documentary ‘Women – Our Century’, which toured the US with Billy Jean King and Star Jones as part of a Roper Research presentation, as well as ‘Container Shipping – A Revolution for World Trade’. Ms Sager has won many awards for her videos and documentaries such as the Gold Hermes Media Award, the Silver Golden Reel Award and the Bronze Telly among others.
Corinna Sager was also the Co-Founder and Co-Executive Producer of the United Nations Documentary Film Festival, “Stories From The Field”, produced in association with the United Nations Department of Public Information and The New School.
Alison Granucci
Associate Producer
Alison Granucci is the owner and president of Blue Flower Arts, LLC, a literary speaker’s bureau, in Millbrook NY, representing many nationally known poets, authors, and speakers for readings and live appearances. Alison also curates and produces the Spoken Word Series at The Guthrie Center, in Great Barrington, Mass, housed in the old trinity church of Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant fame.
In 2006, she co-produced with Jan Warner ‘The Resilience of the Human Spirit: An International Gathering of Poets’ as part of the Spoken Word Series at the Guthrie Center. Formerly the Executive Program Manager for conferences at the Omega Institute, the country's largest non-profit education retreat center, Alison helped program and produce several national conferences, such as Women and Power, Fearless Living, and Celebration of Poetry, working with many celebrities such as Christopher Reeve, Debra Winger, Frank McCourt, Jane Fonda, and others. She also co-produced, with playwright Eve Ensler's organization V-Day, a star-studded benefit concert at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem.
Martina Radwan
Cinematographer
Martina Radwan started in her native Germany in the film industry as a Camera Technician at ARRI, Berlin and consequently worked as an Assistant Camera for DP's like Robby Mueller and directors like Wim Wenders and Albert Maysles. In 1995 she moved to New York where she attended the film program at NYU. Shortly after, she started to work as a Director of Photography. Her features and documentaries could be seen in theaters, festivals, HBO, Sundance Channel and PBS.
‘Ferry Tales’, a documentary she shot in collaboration with Katja Esson, was nominated for the 2004 Academy Award. Her work also includes collaboration with Ellen Kuras and directors like Rebecca Miller, Alison McLean and Jeff Lipsky, the well-known independent film distributor. Her narrative work includes ‘Flannel Pajamas’, by Jeff Lipsky, ‘Singapore Dreaming’ one of the first Singaporean feature productions, which won numerous international awards and ‘Killing Floor’, a thriller directed by Gideon Raff and produced by Doug Liman & Avi Arad. Martina Radwan also photographed ‘Rain’, the first indigenous film of the Bahamas, produced & directed by Maria Govern. In the summer of '07 she re-teamed with Gideon Raff for a horror film, ‘Train’ produced by Millennium Films.
Ferne Pearlstein
Cinematographer
Ferne Pearlstein is a graduate of Stanford's Master's Program in Documentary Film, the International Center of Photography, and the University of Michigan. In 2004 she won the Excellence in Cinematography prize for documentary at the Sundance Film Festival for her work on ‘Imelda.’ Among her other cinematography credits are DP on three-time Academy Award nominee Deborah Dickson's ‘Ruthie and Connie: Every Room in the House’ for HBO (World Premiere, 2002 Berlinale); Jan Krawitz' ‘Big Enough,’ a sequel to her award-winning PBS film ‘Little People’ Robert Edwards' ‘The Voice of the Prophet’ (Sundance, Toronto, Human Rights Watch, 2002); Sam Ball's ‘Pleasures of Urban Decay’ (Sundance, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, 2000); DP and co-producer on ‘Taken In: The Lives of America's Foster Children,’ by 2008 Academy Award winner Vanessa Roth (Sundance 1998, DuPont-Columbia Award 1999); ‘Mustafa’, a pilot for a TV series on Spike TV; and the controversial new film, ‘2 Million Minutes,’ by Frontline reporter Chad Heeter. Currently she is shooting a new feature documentary on women leaders and global security for two-time Oscar nominees Deborah Hoffman and Frances Reid, winners of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in Documentary for ‘Long Night's Journey Into Day’ and ‘Black Dahlia’.
Carolyn Forché
Consultant
Known as a “poet of witness”, Carolyn Forché is the author of four award-winning books of poetry, ‘Gathering The Tribes’, ‘The Country Between Us’, ‘The Angel of History’, and ‘Blue Hour’, and she is the editor of the highly acclaimed anthology ‘Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness’. Forché has held three fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1992 received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship.
In 1977, Forche traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran – exiled poet Claribel Alegría, and upon her return, received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate. Her translations of Alegria's work have been published in two volumes, ‘Flowers From The Volcano’ (1983) and ‘Sorrow’ (2000). In 1998 in Stockholm, Forche was given the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award, in recognition of her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture.
Paula Heridia
Consultant
Paula Heridia is a director and editor based in New York. She was awarded with an Emmy for the HBO documentary ‘In Memoriam, NYC 9/11/01’ and an ACE Eddie Award for the acclaimed documentary ‘Unzipped’. ‘Addiction’, a documentary series for HBO received the 2007 Emmy Governors Award. ‘Alive Day Memories – Home from Iraq’, executive produced by James Gandolfini, has been nominated for a 2008 Emmy Award as Outstanding Non-Fiction Special. Her directorial work includes the documentaries: ‘George Plimpton and the Paris Review’, ‘Ralph Gibson and The Couple in the Cage’. Other editorial credits include: ‘The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not For Sale’, ‘The Vagina Monologues’ and ‘Jaques D’Ambois in China’, a documentary film submitted for the 2009 Academy Awards.
Felix Drawe is an editor based in Hamburg, Germany who also works in Berlin, Vienna, Austria and Zurich, Switzerland as well occasionally in the United States. His work is very diversified and includes award winning commercials (Cannes Lions Award, German Art Directors Club Award), music videos for major European acts as well as documentaries for German broadcasting networks and cable channels.
He has edited several documentaries with Katja Esson including: ‘Gateway to the World: The Port of New York’, ‘Hole in the Sky – The Scars of 9/11’(co-editor) and he is currently also in production with Katja Essons other project ‘Skydancer’.