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J. Michael
Seyfert
has been a constant commuter
between journalism and the creative arts,
leaving behind the limitations of entertainment
in favor of a more substantial task: to
meaningfully and directly affect the plight of
his subjects through his work. Bye Bye Havana,
his award-winning first feature documentary has
been an official selection at many prestigous
film festivals around the world. As a
multilinguist in a multicultural world, Seyfert
displays an uncanny sensitivity by spotlighting
rather serious subjects without relying on old
standards of filmmaking, delivering thoughtful
entertainment to international audiences. Some
of his films include Waorani, (Ecuador, 2006),
and Opposite Land (Bolivia/Mexico, 2007).
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Laurence Magloire
was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but has lived
most of her life in Montreal, Canada. She has
been working as a producer for children
programs. Two years ago she started going back
to her country of origin, working on a
documentary for Société Radio-Canada.
Co-Director Anne Lescot was born in Paris in
1969 to a Haitian father and French mother. She
has worked on Haitian Voodoo for the past 10
years as an anthropologist, using video
equipment as an ethnographic tool.
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Inge Blackman
is an award-winning director/producer, and
cameraperson. She has produced and directed for
galleries, television and the corporate market.
Legacy (2006) the award winning film she
directed for the Arnolfini Gallery in the UK
explores the lasting impact of slavery on Black
families. It was also shown at Tate Britain. She
recently completed Fem (2007), an experimental
short on queer femininity, which was at the
London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival 2007.
Image, Memory and Representation a retrospective
of her work was also programmed there. She is in
post-production for Atonement (2008), a visual
interpretation of a BBC Radio 4 play, written by
Mark Norfolk, funded by Film London.
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Elspeth Duncan
is an independent writer, musician, performer,
producer, composer, graphic/visual artist, art
photographer and award-winning video/filmmaker
(camera woman, director) with internationally
screened work. After completing a B.A. in
English Literature (UWI, St. Augustine) and a
Masters (M. Phil) in Criminology (Cambridge
University, England), Elspeth did an about turn
and worked for nine years as an advertising
copywriter. In October 1999 she left agency life
to explore and expand her creative potential.
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Frankie Sooknanan,
a native of Suriname with an Indo-Guyanese
background, moved to New York in 1991. He
graduated from NYU's School of Education in May
2003. Frankie's dream has always been filmmaking
and upon graduating he jumped right into writing
a feature based on the immigrant Indo-Guyanese
experience. That film, Sacrifice, was made on a
$1,000 budget and went on to win the Metropolis
Best Feature
Award at the 2004 Indo-American Film Festival,
and was screened at the 2006 Guyana Film
Festival. His second feature film, Truth, is
being screened at film festivals later this
year. Karma, his third feature film will have
its world premiere at the Trinidad and Tobago
Film Festival.
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Michèle
Pearson Clarke
is a filmmaker and health
educator who has lived in Canada for fourteen
years and still misses her other home, Trinidad
and Tobago. She has directed one short film,
"Surrounded by Water", which was made in the
LIFT Guerilla Filmmaking in Super 8 for Absolute
Beginners workshop. In 2006, she participated in
the Fraternité themed commission program at
Trinity Square Video, where she completed a
short video entitled "Black Men and Me'. Later
that year, she was named one of Toronto's 10
best Filmmakers of the year by Cameron Bailey in
NOW Magazine, and most recently, she won the
Best Canadian Female Short Award at the 2007
Inside Out Toronto Lesbian and Gay Film and
Video Festival for Black Men and Me.
Michèle is currently in development on her third
project which is about her apparent resemblance
to celebrity golfer, Tiger Woods.
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Franco de Peña
is a Polish-Venezuelan film director. He was
born and raised in Caracas. In 1983 he left the
study of economics at a local university and
relocated to Montreal. He spent some time in
Paris, London, and Berlin before moving to
Poland in 1987. Wanting to study at a faculty
for future film directors, de Peña passed his
exams to the Lódz Film School but had to abandon
his plans due to financial problems. He moved to
Warsaw and studied at the National Higher School
of Theatre for two years. He was finally
admitted to the Lódz School and graduated in
1997. His films include: Moze to Grzech, ze Sie
Modle (Perhaps it's a Sin I Pray, 1993) - a
documentary on a thirty-three-year-old prisoner
suffering from AIDS; Szepty Wiatru (Wind
Whispers, 1995), on a friendship of an old
Andean man with his donkey; El Porvenir de una
Ilusión (Future of an Illusion, 1997) - a poetic
description of dreams of modern inhabitants of
Havana; and Amor en Concreto (Love in Urban
Jungle, 2003) - a sketch of lives of several
inhabitants of a modern city. Apart from his
film career, Franco de Peña also played the role
of a journalist seeking the alleged unknown
Argentinean son of Witold Gombrowicz in a
provocative para-documentary, Letter of
Argentina, directed by Grzegorz Pacek. In
addition, he was the cinematographer for the
Brazilian documentary Bem-Vindo a São Paulo on
Caetano Veloso.
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This is the first film by
Emilie Upczak,
whose background in comparative religious
studies and practice as a performing artist
influenced her look at the Orisha spiritual
tradition in the central region of Trinidad. Her
focus is on cross-cultural ethnography with a
particular interest in ritual practice. Ms.
Upczak currently makes her home in Port of Spain
with her husband and their son.
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Janine Fung
was
born in Trinidad, grew up in Toronto and studied
film at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
Her short film Leftovers (1994) premiered at the
Toronto International Film Festival. Janine’s
first feature, The Doctor’s Daughter Or The
Secret And The Lie (2005) had its world premiere
at the San Francisco Lesbian & Gay Film Festival
2007 and has been officially selected for the
Los Angeles Lesbian & Gay Film Festival 2007.
She is currently working on her second feature
length script and plans to be in production in
2008.
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Richard Fung
is a Trinidad-born, Toronto-based video artist
and writer. His tapes have been widely screened
and collected internationally, and broadcast
across Canada and in the United States. He is
the co-author, with Monika Kin Gagnon, of 13:
Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics,
and his essays have been published in numerous
journals and anthologies. A former Rockefeller
Fellow at New York University, and a winner of
the Bell Canada Award for achievement in video
art, Richard teaches at the Ontario College of
Art and Design.
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Jaime LeeLoy,
a Trinidadian born in1980, obtained a First
Class Honours B.A. in Literature and Visual Arts
at the University of the West Indies, St
Augustine and pursued two years of a MPhil in
literature while on scholarship. She is Exchange
Programme Coordinator for Caribbean Contemporary
Arts (CCA), and has for five years been
experimenting with video. Her paintings have
appeared in over a dozen exhibitions. A
contributing artist to Galvanize (September
2006), she has participated as
Artist-in-Residence in Trinidad (CCA) 2004 and
the USA (Vermont Studio Centre) 2007. Her
writing and art explore the nuances of the
female psyche and interrogate the social
frameworks that negatively impact that psyche. A
young single mother, she produced the
documentary Pro-Test based on young mothers in
Trinidad in 2004, as well as the videos Madam
(2003) and Unease (2006). The recipient of a
TTFC production grant, Jaime is currently
producing a film based on Bury Your Mother
(2007), a short story written for the anthology,
Trinidad Noir.
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Juan
Carlos Cremeta Malberti
was born in 1961
and began his career by writing and acting in
children’s programmes for the Cuban Institute
for Radio and Television, from 1981 to 1987. A
drama school graduate, he worked as assistant
director on the Ecuadorian film, La Tigra, in
1989. In 1995-95, he taught film editing and
directing in Buenos Aires. He received a John
Simon Guggenheim grant in 1996, thanks to his
short film, Oscros Rinocerontes Enjaulados. Nada
+ is his first feature film. Juan Carlos Cremata
Malberti graduated from the Cinema, Theatre and
Drama programme at the Higher Institute of the
Arts in Havana. He began his career as an actor,
writer and director of children’s television
programmes. Viva Cuba is his second feature
film. Nada his first film won several festival
awards and in 2003 was nominated for Best
Spanish Language Film Goya Award.
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Frances-Anne
Solomon
is a director, producer and
writer in film, TV and radio. She grew up in
Trinidad, and studied Theatre Arts at the
University of Toronto before moving to the UK
where she lived and worked for several years. As
a director, her credits include Lord Have Mercy!
(Vision, Toronto/One/Showcase/APTN 2003), Peggy
Su! (BBC Films 1997), What My Mother Told Me
(Channel 4 1995), Bideshi (British Film
Institute 1994), and Valentine's Night (BBC
1993). Documentaries directed include Reunion
(BBC,1993), and I Is A Long Memoried Woman (Arts
Council of England, 1991). Alongside directing,
between 1992-98, Frances-Anne also worked as a
script editor, producer and executive producer
for BBC Single Drama & Films, where she was
responsible for several films and TV movies,
including the Black Screen Strand, (for black
writers, producers and directors) and Screen on
the Tube (for new feature directors).
Productions include Speak Like A Child (director
John Akomfrah), Love Is The Devil (director John
Maybury), The Sixth Happiness (director Waris
Hossein), Flight (director Alex Pillai) and
Siren Spirits (directors Ngozi Onwurah, Pratibha
Parmar and Dani Williamson). Prior to this she
worked as a radio drama producer/director for
the BBC, responsible for some 35 productions
including Monsoon by Maya Chowdhry, Nadir by
Parv Bancil, Afrogoth by Pete Kalu, The Adoption
Papers by Jackie Kay and Her Father's Daughter
by Winsome Pinnock. Frances-Anne returned to
Toronto in 1999. Through her company Leda Serene
Films she continues to create, produce and
direct film, television and new media projects.
She has just completed the groundbreaking sitcom
Lord Have Mercy! which was broadcast on 4
Canadian networks, and was nominated for two
Geminis.
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Lorraine O'Connor
has been directing, scripting and/or producing
documentaries and music videos since 1991. Her
credits include Pan Fusion, Why Settle for Less,
Panman, and Calypso @ Dirty Jims. In the series
Caribbean Young Explorers, she combines all
three aspects to bring to life the first local
children's television series in over 10 years.
"In 1994, Lorraine was one of the founders of
Rituals music, a ground breaking record label in
Trinidad & Tobago, promoting and producing such
acts as 3canal, Brother Resistance, Mungal
Patasar. Although Rituals closed its doors in
2001, Lorraine continues to be involved in the
music industry at different levels. At present,
she runs an event production company, Riddums
Productions and has just launched a legal music
download site:
www.trinidadtunes.com."
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Mariel Brown
is the director of the creative and production
company Savant, and has been working in
television and print since 1997, when she worked
as a reporter at Trinidad and Tobago Television.
She has produced features for TV6 and the Witco
Sports Foundation Awards, and her programmes and
news reports have been broadcast on CNN and
Caribscope. Mariel is the creator of Sancoche,
Makin' Mas, Island Hop and Life Stories – all
television series designed with Caribbean
content for a Caribbean audience. She recently
began directing documentary features, The
Insatiable Season being her first. As a writer,
Mariel has contributed features to Caribbean
Beat, The Jamaica Observer, The Express, MACO
and Island Life. She also writes short stories,
a selection of which are to be published by
Macmillan Caribbean. Mariel is currently working
on a feature-length documentary about
Trinidadian jeweller, Barbara Jardine.
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Patricia Mohammed
is a professor of Gender and Culture Studies at
the University of the West Indies. Together with
Rex Dixon, she produced an exhibition of
photo-based works by 13 Caribbean artists
entitled the Caribbean in the Age of Modernity,
which was exhibited at the National Library in
Port of Spain in 2006, and which subsequently
travelled to the Museum of Modern Art in Santo
Domingo the same year. Her book Imaging the
Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation is
currently in press at Macmillan UK ltd. She is
also currently working with Luke Paddington on a
documentary film series entitled A Different
Imagination, of which the film Sign of the Loa
comprises one segment. Luke Paddington is a
freelance editor and filmmaker who resides in
Los Angeles, California. He graduated in Film
Studies from McGill University in Montreal.
Co-director and editor for the film Jab, Luke
and his colleagues have received various
festival awards for their film portraying the
blue devils of Paramin.
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Roger McTair
is a filmmaker, writer and professor of media
writing. He was director of the Afro-Caribbean
Theater Workshop, served on the board of the
Caribbean Cutltural Committee, is a founding
member of the Black Film and Video Network and
was president of the Ryerson Afro-Caribbean
Association. In 1993, Roger received the Award
of Merit from the City of Toronto for his
contribution to the life of the city. His 2002
film Journey to Justice won the Black Film and
Video Network’s award for best documentary.
Other films include Jane/Finch Again and Home
Feeling.
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Hugh Robertson,
born in 1932 in the US of Jamaican parentage
died in 1988. Before directing Bim, the
African-American filmmaker filmed an adaptation
of Derek Walcott’s play Dream on Monkey Mountain
in Trinidad for NBC, and with local directors
and investors had established a Trinidadian
production company, Sharc Productions. Sharc
brought in professional film equipment and a
custom-built production vehicle for location
filming. It created a sound stage at Tucker
Valley in Chaguaramas, and produced commercials
and documentaries; but its real mission was to
establish a local film industry. Robertson was
ideally suited for this task – he was sensitive
to local cultural issues, having filmed in
Trinidad before, and was married to a
Trinidadian, Suzanne Nunez. Robertson also
directed the thriller Melinda (1972), edited
Shaft (1971), and was nominated for an Academy
Award for his editing work on Midnight Cowboy
(1969).
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This year artist
Kwynn Johnson
participated in two group
shows: “Radical Designs – Jeans Art” at the
National Museum and “Bat n Ball” at the 101 Art
Gallery. At Queen’s Hall, she designed the “3
Canal” Carnival Show and the set design for the
UWI Chorale’s Oliver Musical. Courtesy a film
grant from the Trinidad Film Company, she shot,
directed and edited a short film on bee-keeping,
entitled The Keepers. This year she was a
nominee for The Most Outstanding set design
category for her set in 2006 Fiddler on the
Roof. In July she presented her fourth solo
exhibition – “Treading water over dead coral
when you’re feeling blue.” This exhibition
featured her film, The Keepers, for two weeks.
She will be taking part of this exhibition to
Texas in September.
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Director,
Steve
Rahaman
was born in the Caribbean
islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Upon moving to
New York, he spent his early years in Brooklyn,
but now resides in Queens. Although film,
especially horror, was the more prominent of
interests for Steve, he also takes on the
challenges of writing his own scripts and
directing and composing the music for all of his
films.
In mid-May of 2005 while filming one of his
movies, he felt the urge to make it official by
creating his own company to produce and bring to
life his visions and to put his hard work to the
test. As a writer Steve sets out to mirror the
horror and tragedy we see in real life and has
written such scripts as his current project, The
Hands That Holds us Together. However, it is his
recent film releases, Follower, Ten Till
Midnight, Stained, One Mistake, Waiting Room,
Stranger in the park and, his favorite,
Christmas Day, that have all made an impact on
his audience. With rave reviews from newspaper
columnists and film critics, there lies the
inspiration to keep the ball rolling and ideas
flowing.
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Arnold Antonin
In addition to being a filmmaker, Arnold Antonin
is also a university professor, debate organiser
and Director of the Pétion-Bolivar Cultural
Centre in Haiti. He has been a judge at many
prestigious international film festivals and
received the Djibril Diop Mambety prize , at the
Cannes Film Festival in 2002 for his documentary
‘Courage de Femmes’ (Courage of Women). Mr.
Antonin has directed many documentaries
including ‘Ayiti, men chimen Libète which was
used to mobilise campaigns against Duvalier and
a feature film Piwouli et le zenglendo.
Skene Howie
Skene Howie studied photography, film and
television management in England in 1990. Since
then he has worked in numerous film production
projects throughout the Caribbean, ranging from
feature films to TV commercials for the
international market. He is a widely published
professional photographer and a very
accomplished wind-surfer and surfer with a
lifelong passion for the ocean and nature
conservation.
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Owen Day
Owen Day is a founder member and director of the
Buccoo Reef Trust, an award-winning NGO based in
Tobago that focuses on research, education and
conservation in the marine sciences. He obtained
his Bachelors from Oxford University in 1988,
and his masters and doctorate in marine biology
from the University of Wales in 1991 and 1996
respectively. He has spent the last 7 years in
Tobago developing research and education
programmes for the protection of Caribbean coral
reefs and believes passionately in the need for
stronger partnerships between government, NGOs
and the private sector for environmental
conservation.
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Jean Ahn
was born
in New Haven, Connecticut but spent most of her
childhood in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Korean-American, she also lived for two years in
South Korea, after which she moved to
California, where she currently resides when she
is not attending college. A Junior at Trinity
College in Hartford, Connecticut, she spent her
sophomore year studying abroad in Trinidad.
Ramdilla Seen is her first attempt at filmmaking
and the documentary was named so because Jean
felt it was important to underscore that what
the audience would be seeing was what she had
seen in her first exposure and experience of
Ramleela.
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Sean Russell,
Writer and Producer of The Kite Flyer, has been
a Medical Practitioner in a General Practice for
15 years. The Kite Flyer is Sean’s first effort
at film, having had no previous experience in
film, drama or creative writing. He started the
script about 15 years ago just as a creative
writing exercise. About four years ago, he took
the dialog to Director, Thom Cross, and
progressed towards making it a film about four
years ago. He continued during this period to
acquire further information on filmmaking. The
film was funded out of pocket – about US$20,000.
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Kaz Ové
Kaz grew up in a ‘film’ family and had a minor
role at the age of 9 in Horace Ove’s series shot
in Dominica “The Orchid House”. Kaz lived in
Jamaica and Trinidad before returning to London
to study earning B.A. honours degree in film and
video at The University Of the Arts London: LCP.
During this period Kaz worked as a runner on
various music promos frequently working with
acclaimed director Jake Nava. During a year
working at Addiction TV as head
runner/production assistant he directed his
first self-financed short film Love, which he
wrote, shot, directed and edited. Cold Dead
Hands is Kaz’s first fully, professionally
funded film to date. He is currently working at
MTV London.
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Horace Ové
Trinidad born Horace Ové is internationally
known as one of the leading black independent
filmmakers to emerge in Britain since the
post-war period. His work includes the
ground-breaking feature Pressure (1974), King
Carnival, The Orchid House, Playing Away,
Baldwin’s Nigger, Reggae, A Hole in Babylon and
many others. His subject matter was always
socio-political and the subject matter often
contraversial; Pressure was in fact banned for 2
years.
Alongside his film career, Ové has worked
extensively as a photographer. He has had
several exhibitions over the years across the
world as well as various retrospectives at UCLA,
The British Film Institute in London and the
University of Tuebingen in Germany. He had the
first exhibition of a black photographer at the
Photographers Gallery ‘Breaking Loose’ followed
up by another exhibition focusing on his images
of Trinidad Carnival ‘Farewell to the Flesh’ in
1987 at Cornerhouse in Manchester. In 2001 he
was invited to exhibit his works in Recontres de
la Photographie in Bamako, Mali, alongside
another photographers from the African diaspora.
In 2004 he had a major exhibition of his work
touring Britain entitled ‘Pressure’, It featured
his social and political reportage work from the
1960’s and 1970’s. He also had an exhibition at
the National Portrait Gallery in 2005, work
exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
London and The Tate Liverpool, The Whitechapel
and a retrospective of his film and photographic
work was held at the Barbican, London. He has
received several major awards and was recently
honored by The Queen with a Commander of the
Order of the British Empire award for his
services to the film industry in Britain.
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Franco Rosso
Franco Rosso’s film career began as an editor
working on many projects including Horace’s
Ové’s Reggae and King Carnival. As director he
is best known for such films as Babylon which he
wrote and directed, The Mangrove Nine based on a
famous case in London, and Dread Beat an Blood.
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Isaac Julien
A co-founder of Sankofa Film and Video, a
pioneering group of young black British
filmmakers, Julien has collaborated with them on
several ground-breaking, radical dramas for film
and television since the mid-1980s. With Sankofa
Julien co-wrote and co-directed The Passion of
Remembrance in 1986, an ambitious feature film
drama which offered a fresh and revealing look
at black feminism and black gay politics. There
followed the award-winning short film Looking
for Langston in 1988. Set in Harlem in the
1920s, this homoerotic, hauntingly beautiful
study of the black gay American poet, Langston
Hughes, cleverly blended his words with those of
the contemporary black gay poet Essex Hemphill.
In 1991 Julien directed Young Soul Rebels, a
seductive, engaging and challenging feature film
drama set in 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth
II's Silver Jubilee. Once again Julien explored
sexual and racial identities in a provocative
way, and walked off with the Cannes Film
Festival's Critics' Week prize. In 1992 he
directed a two part documentary Black and White
in Colour on the history of black people on
television.
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Thom Cross,
Director of The Kite Flyer, is the former
Director of the Jamaica School of Drama,
Producer of 100s of TV ads and Programme Manager
at CBC TV. He has been involved with theatre in
Barbados as writer and director for many years.
Now film is the magic eye that enthralls and
enlightens.
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Kirk Budhooram
started writing aged 13 and is the author of two
novels: The Festival, which was published in the
USA and sold internationally, and Kirk
Budhooram's Ibis Agents. He graduated from the
University of the West Indies in Engineering but
his real passion lay in film making. With the
opening of the industry in Trinidad and Tobago,
Kirk has helped produce, direct and star in a
6-episode comedic series (soon to air on TV)
entitled Herman's Tales. One of those episodes,
Herman's Tales: Banana Robber (2006) premiered
at the first Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival
2006 and was later screened on the local TV
channel CMNG and at both Carifesta 2006 Film
Festival and UNESCO Film Festival 2006. The
fourth episode, Herman's Tales: Kidnapped is
being premiered at Trinidad & Tobago Film
Festival 2007. He recently started his own
production company, K.B. Productions, and has
just completed his first feature film
PARASKEVIDEKATRIAPHOBI, which he hopes to
premiere at the Sundance Film Festival 2008.
Kirk hopes to continue writing and making movies
and to be part of a huge and successful film
industry in which many citizens will be able to
pursue the arts as a full-time career.
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