MICHAEL MOSHE DAHAN
DIRECTOR |WRITER | PRODUCER
is an Israeli-American scholar, filmmaker, and artist who earned his MFA in Studio Art with a Critical Theory Emphasis from UC Irvine in 2012. His current work interrogates the entwined legacies of descendants of victims and perpetrators of the Nakba and considers the transmission of such phantasmatic legacies across generations. His experimental film, Two Points of Failure, was screened at the Rotterdam, Edinburgh, Jihlava, Bucharest, and Melbourne International Film Festivals, as well as the Tribeca Film Festival and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. Before receiving his MFA, he spent a decade working as a film executive.
SARAH SZALAVITZ
PRODUCER
is an accountability architect, a storyteller and an artisanal database maker. She uses data to build narratives that inform the design of our systems and encourage us to do better. A graduate of the University of Southern California, the London School of Economics and Harvard Law School, Sarah has run content acquisition at an online video platform, served as a film development executive at Brooklyn Films, practiced IP & entertainment law, started a grilled cheese restaurant and worked for the California State Assembly. For nearly a decade, Sarah was an External Fellow at the Center for Future Storytelling at the MIT MediaLab, where she has taught
Social Design. In recent years, along with writing & producing award-winning stories across media platforms, her work has ranged from researching algorithmic bias to creating an app, Follow Bias (to determine the gender of who users follow on Twitter), to building support networks for trauma survivors. Over the summer of 2020, she cofounded CTRL-Z, a SuperPAC dedicated to registering and turning out young BIPOC voters in swing states.
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Sarah is a member of the Producers Guild, sits on the advisory board for SXSW and on the board for Truth Not Lies.
BENJAMIN SHEARN
EDITOR
is a film editor and writer. His work has played at South by Southwest, Tribeca, Berlinale, BFI London, CPH:DOX, Fantastic
Fest, Fantasia, TIFF: Next Wave, Edinburgh, Outfest, MIFF, Beyond Fest, Sitges, ComicCon San Diego and the Frontieres Showcase at Cannes. A retrospective of Shearn’s collaboration with filmmaker Amanda Kramer was featured at the 2022 Rotterdam Film Festival. Projects Shearn has edited for have been featured in Variety, Sight & Sound, New York Times, The Guardian, Art Forum, Film Comment, L.A. Times, Senses of Cinema, Nowness, Mubi Notebook, AV Club, Film Threat, Paste Magazine and Film School Rejects.
N. BRAXTON POPE
PRODUCER
produced Focus Features’ acclaimed The Card Counter written and directed by Academy Award nominee Paul Schrader, Executive Produced by Martin Scorsese and starring Oscar Isaac, Tiffany
Haddish, Tye Sheridan and Willem Dafoe. The film premiered in competition at the Venice International Film Festival and was selected by the Telluride Film Festival. He recently produced Looking Glass starring Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage and the feature The Smiley Face Killers. Pope also produced The
Canyons directed by Schrader and starring Lindsay Lohan which was released theatrically by IFC, and was selected by the Venice International Film Festival and named as one of the year’s best by the New Yorker. He produced a contemporary art video for Yoshua Okun, visual works for Paris based fashion label Kenzo and a film for Milan fashion week for Roberto Cavalli as well Tribeca selection Two Points of Failure about Jean-Luc Godard which was
directed by Michael Moshe Dahan.
BJ IWEN
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Born and raised in Houston Texas, he was enamored by art and cinema in his formative years. This passion for the craft grew in high school where he was greatly influenced by his teachers and peers. After graduating in the early aughts, he entered film school at Columbia College Hollywood in Los Angeles, completing his BFA in Cinema and Television in 2010.
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As a Director of Photography, BJ’s work encompasses numerous documentary television series including CNN’s multi-season decade series, The 2000’s and The Nineties in addition to ESPN’s 12 part series The American Game.
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BJ lives in Los Angeles with his husband Daniel and their two rescue dogs Banjo & Archer.