On the Front Lines

Amber Fares is an award-winning documentary director. producer and cinematographer. Her recent projects include America Inside Out with Katie Couric (National Geographic 2018, Senior Producer/Cinematographer), Transparent (Amazon 2017, Associate Producer) and The Judge (TIFF 2017, Cinematographer/Co-Producer). She also Directed, Produced and filmed Sundance supported Speed Sisters (Hot Docs 2015, Netflix) which the New York Times called “SUBTLY REBELLIOUS AND DEFIANTLY OPTIMISTIC”. Amber‘s films have won numerous awards and have played in film festivals around the world, including TIFF, Sheffield, Hot Docs, IDFA, CPH:Dox, and Doc NYC. Her work has been featured on CNN, Al Jazeera, ALLURE, Amazon, Hulu, PBS, and National Geographic. Amber was a 2014 Sundance Catalyst fellow, 2014 Sundance Institute Edit, and Story Lab Fellow and is currently a Sundance Momentum Fellow.

Elizabeth Mirzaei is a director and cinematographer of nonfiction films. Her first feature film Laila at the Bridge screened at dozens of festivals including Locarno and CPH:DOX and picked up numerous awards. Elizabeth previously lived in Afghanistan, where she directed films for Al Jazeera, the BBC, Discovery, and numerous nonprofits. Elizabeth was a director and cinematographer on the BBC’s The Killing of Farkhunda, which was nominated for a Royal Television Society Award, and a cinematographer on the Emmy-nominated documentary, What Tomorrow Brings. Her short films have also been shown before world leaders and key policy makers at the Oslo Conference on Women’s Rights, the International Conference on Afghanistan in London and before an audience of 60,000 at the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park, New York. She is a 2020 Film Independent Fellow and a Moving Picture Institute Screenwriting and Cinematography Fellow. As a cinematographer, her work has been shown at Venice Film Festival, TIFF, and on POV. She is currently co-leading a peer mentoring circle with Women in Film, and is a member of Film Fatales and the Alliance of Women Directors. Elizabeth lives in California with her husband and daughter.

Award winning, Independent filmmaker and producer, Sedika Mojadidi directed the ITVS and Sundance funded feature documentary, Facing the Dragon (2018), which follows the lives of two extraordinary Afghan women as they are forced to choose between their family and their country. In 2018, the film won the Human Rights Watch Nestor Almendros Courage in filmmaking award and the Savannah Film Festival’s Jury Award for Unheard Voices. Her first film, Motherland Afghanistan (2006), followed her father’s struggle to make a difference in the maternal mortality epidemic gripping Afghanistan in 2003 and aired on the Independent Lens and Global Voices Documentary Series. Motherland Afghanistan screened nationally and internationally at numerous festivals. Sedika has worked as a supervising producer on the critically acclaimed ABC documentary series, Boston Med and as a producer and camera woman on many television projects for the A&E Network, The Discovery Channel, Guardian Multimedia, TLC Network, and the Food Network. Her writing was published in an anthology of Afghan American writing, One Story, Thirty Stories, winner of the 2012 Independent Book Publishers Silver Award for Best Anthology. Sedika was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up in the United States. She has a MA in Film Theory from the University of Florida and an MFA in Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.