The Filmmakers

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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, which will be broadcast on October 11th, 18th, 25th and November 1st and 8th 2011. 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. She 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.

Along with her husband, Pierre Hauser, Abigail co-founded the Daphne Foundation, which works with low-income communities in the five boroughs of New York City. Her work in philanthropy, women’s engagement and leadership, and conflict resolution has been recognized through the Epic Award from the White House Project, the Changing the Landscape for Women Award from the Center for the Advancement of Women, and 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 lives in New York City with her husband and four children.

Kirsten Johnson's (Director of Photography) most recent film, Deadline, (co-directed with Katy Chevigny), premiered at Sundance in 2004 and was one of the first independent documentaries to be acquired by a major network (NBC). Her previous documentary as a director, Innocent Until Proven Guilty premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and was broadcast on HBO in 1999.

As a cinematographer, she has worked with directors such as Raoul Peck, Barbara Kopple, Michael Moore, and Kirby Dick. Her cinematography is featured in Fahrenheit 9/11, Academy and Emmy Award-nominated Asylum, Emmy-winning Ladies First, and Sundance premiere documentaries, This Film is Not Rated, American Standoff, and Derrida.

A solo show of her still photography, “Cabinet of Curiosity” was exhibited at The Miami Museum of Science, and a chapter is dedicated to her work in the recently published book, “The Art of the Documentary.” She has traveled and worked extensively in 13 countries throughout Africa and 38 countries around the world.