Arts and Events Calendar

As part of the USC School of Cinematic Arts Visible Evidence XVI Conference, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute will host a panel discussion and audience participatory Q&A session.

The institute has been in contact with a number of documentary filmmakers over the past years, all of whom have been involved in the creation of documentaries or film projects dealing with the topic of genocide. These filmmakers have interviewed survivors and/or witnesses of these genocides, and included footage of the witnesses in their films. While clips are taken from these interviews to weave into a film's narrative, the interviews as a whole often remain intact in a filmmaker's collection of footage. The value of these interviews or testimonies potentially goes above and beyond the documentary for which they have been created. For example, they may be of value to secondary and/or post-secondary education, for scholarly research of particular genocides or tolerance teaching.

This panel discussion and Q&A will focus on issues related to interviewing genocide survivors, the circumstances in which such interviews take place, and the logistical and political issues filmmakers encounter when conducting them.

The panelists — Anne Aghion, Ted Braun, Andi Gitow (moderator), James Moll and Socheata Poeuv — have produced films and work on a range of genocides, such as the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995), and the genocide in Darfur (2003-).

About the Guests

Andi Gitow is a two-time Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist, news producer and psychologist currently working at the United Nations. She has reported on human rights abuses, genocide, conflict and post-conflict and humanitarian crises in more than 30 countries, shooting in such crisis spots as Rwanda, Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sarajevo, Beirut and Laos. Gitow produces and senior-produces broadcast features and documentaries on international issues, specializing in stories on the emotional effects of living in conflict situations. She also helped develop and senior-produce a television news magazine program now airing on BBC. Gitow has interviewed hundreds of survivors of trauma, and has authored more than 15 manuscripts, and lectured at universities and conferences. She has received 18 journalism awards, including two Emmy Awards, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, a National Headliner Award, two awards for international reporting, and a Los Angeles Moondance Film Festival Award.

Anne Aghion, an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, created a film series on Gacaca justice in Rwanda (2002-2009). Filming for more than a decade in a tiny rural hamlet in Rwanda, Aghion has charted the impact of the Gacaca on survivors and perpetrators alike. Her films include Gacaca Living Together Again in Rwanda? (2002), In Rwanda We Say... The Family That Does Not Speak Dies (2004), The Notebooks of Memory (2009) and My Neighbor My Killer (2009). Aghion received an Emmy in 2005 for In Rwanda We Say, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and a Fellini Prize for Gacaca in 2003.

Theodore Braun, writer-director, spent the first five months of 2007 in Sudan with unprecedented access to the internally displaced people of Darfur, international aid workers, the government and the rebels. The resulting documentary — his critically acclaimed first feature film, Darfur Now — was produced by Academy Award-winning producer Cathy Schulman, Academy Award-nominated actor Don Cheadle and Academy Award-winning documentarian Mark Jonathan Harris, who is also a distinguished professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Darfur Now won the NAACP Image Award for best documentary of 2007, was named one of 2007's top five documentaries by the National Board of Review, and was nominated for best documentary by the Critics Choice Awards, the Chicago Film Critics Society, the San Francisco Film Critics Circle, the International Press Academy and Cinema for Peace. For his work writing and directing the picture, the International Documentary Association gave Braun their 2007 Emerging Filmmaker of the Year award. Braun taught screenwriting at Amherst College before joining the faculty at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he is currently an associate professor in Screenwriting.

James Moll, an Emmy- and Oscar-winning filmmaker and a USC School of Cinematic Arts alumnus, has directed and produced many documentary films. In addition, he established and operated The Shoah Foundation with Steven Spielberg for the purpose of videotaping Holocaust survivor testimonies around the world; the foundation has videotaped more than 50,000 testimonies, in 56 countries. Moll received an Academy Award in 1999 for directing and editing The Last Days, a 90-minute feature documentary chronicling the lives of five Hungarian Holocaust survivors. Moll also produced Voices from the List, a documentary about Oskar Schindler, for the Schindler's List DVD. Moll was the producer of Broken Silence, a series of five foreign-language documentaries for which he received a Christopher Award. Survivors of the Holocaust, a two-hour documentary produced by Moll for TBS and CNN International, was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards in 1997 and won two; it also received the Peabody Award. Moll received the Edward R. Murrow Award for producing The Lost Children of Berlin for A&E. In 2007, he completed Inheritance, a feature documentary about the psychological legacy bequeathed by a prominent Nazi leader upon his daughter. Moll established Allentown Productions to develop and produce nonfiction theatrical and television films.

Socheata Poeuv, filmmaker, created the documentary New Year Baby (2006), in which she interviewed survivors of the Cambodian genocide. The film received numerous awards such as the Movies That Matter Human Rights Award, an initiative by Amnesty International. Poeuv said: "I was born on Cambodian New Year in a Thai refugee camp, and my parents never told me how I got there. New Year Baby is my personal documentary, a search for the truth about how my family survived the Khmer Rouge genocide and why they buried the truth for so long." Poeuv's newest project is Khmer Legacies, a visual history project that has the goal of videotaping 10,000 Cambodian genocide survivors as interviewed by their children.