The Filmmakers
Gini Reticker (Director) is one of the world's leading documentary filmmakers whose primary focus is on individuals, particularly women, engaged in struggles for social justice and human rights. Her films cover subjects often overlooked by mainstream media, such as women in war zones whose stories have largely gone untold. Her filmmaking has taken her to conflict zones around the globe, including.Liberia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan.
Ms. Reticker is an Executive Producer on a groundbreaking five-part special series, Women, War & Peace for PBS. The series challenges the conventional wisdom that war and peace are solely the domains of men, examining how war affects women and highlighting their efforts to bring about peace. Previously, Ms. Reticker directed the award-winning documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell. Produced by Abigail E. Disney, the film presents the story of Liberian women who overcame barriers of gender and politics to end their country’s century-long civil war. “If you don’t tell the story, then it’s not history; it just totally evaporates,” Ms. Reticker said of this film—a statement that aptly describes her work as a whole.
Ms. Reticker currently sits on the board of Peace Is Loud, an organization launched from the groundswell of interest in Pray the Devil Back to Hell that supports female voices and international peace-building through nonviolent means.
Ms. Reticker produced Asylum, a 2004 Academy Award®-nominated short focusing on the story of a Ghanaian woman who fled female genital mutilation to seek political asylum in the U.S. She was also the producer/co-director of Heart of the Matter, the first full-length documentary about the impact of HIV on women in the U.S. The film won a Sundance Award in 1994. She produced and directed the 2005 Emmy Award-winning documentary Ladies First for the PBS series Wide Angle, which focuses on the role of women in rebuilding post-genocide Rwanda. For Wide Angle she also directed The Class of 2006, which told the story of the first fifty women in Morocco to graduate from an imam academy in Rabat.
Reticker's other credits include: Producer: A Decade Under the Influence, a look at the heyday of 1970s filmmakers, winner of a National Review Board Award and an Emmy nomination for Best Documentary; Director: In the Company of Women, IFC's spotlight on women in Hollywood; Co-Producer: The Betrayal, Nerakhoon, Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phravasath's brilliant portrayal of a Laotian refugee family’s epic tale of survival and resilience, 2009 nominee for both an Academy Award® and Independent Spirit Award; Executive Producer: Live Nude Girls Unite, Julia Query and Vicki Funari's raucous look at the successful union organizing efforts of San Francisco-based strippers.
Reticker started her career as an editor on renowned documentaries such as Michael Moore's Roger & Me; Deborah Shaffer’s Emmy-nominated Fire From the Mountain; and The Awful Truth: The Romantic Comedy, for the PBS American Cinema Series.
Abigail E. Disney (Producer) is a filmmaker and philanthropist. Her longtime passion for women’s issues and peacebuilding culminated in her first film, the acclaimed Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about the Liberian women who peacefully ended their country’s fourteen-year civil war. The film premiered in 2008 at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the honor of Best Documentary. Abigail is currently executive producer of the groundbreaking PBS mini-series Women, War & Peace, the most comprehensive global media initiative ever mounted on the role of women in peace and conflict. The series has received a number of awards, including a Television Academy Honor, two Overseas Press Club Awards, two Gracie Awards, and a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.
Abigail co-founded the Daphne Foundation, which works with low-income communities in the five boroughs of New York City. She also founded Peace is Loud, which amplifies women's voices for peacebuilding using the power of media. Abigail serves as a board member for a number of organizations, including the Global Fund for Women and the Peace Research Endowment. Her work has been recognized through numerous awards, including the prestigious International Advocate for Peace (IAP) Award from the Cardozo Law School’s Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution.
In addition, Abigail holds degrees from Yale, Stanford, and Columbia. She has been a judge at the Tribeca Film Festival, sits on the advisory board of ITVS’s groundbreaking initiative, Women and Girls Lead, and is a sought-after public speaker. She frequently travels around the country and across the globe to deliver keynote addresses, commencement speeches and lectures, and has participated in panels in diverse locations such as The Hague, Davos, the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and at dozens of universities and community centers. She is a member of the Writers Guild of America.
Kirsten Johnson's (Director of Photography) who works both as a cinematographer and director, recently shot the Sundance 2012 Audience Award winner, The Invisible War. In 2011, she was the supervising DP on Abby Disney and Gini Reticker's series, Women, War and Peace, traveling to Colombia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. She shared the 2010 Sundance Documentary Competition Cinematography Award with Laura Poitras for The Oath. Her cinematography is featured in Farenheit 9/11, Academy Award-nominated Aslyum, Emmy-winning Ladies First, and Sundance premiere documentaries, Finding North (now titled "A Place at the Table"), This Film is Not Yet Rated, American Standoff, and Derrida. A chapter on her work as a cinematographer is featured in the book, "The Art of the Documentary”. She is currently editing a documentary on sight that she shot and directed in Afghanistan. Her previous documentary as a director, Deadline, (co-directed with Katy Chevigny), premiered at Sundance in 2004, was broadcast on primetime NBC, and won the Thurgood Marshall Award.
