Two Syrian directors in Za’atari Refugee Camp, Jordan and two indigenous Shipibo directors in Lima, Peru correspond through film diaries in a cross-border project from Another Kind of Girl Collective.
ONLY THE OCEAN BETWEEN US tells four profoundly personal stories of motherhood, displacement, and the power of both personal and communal resistance.
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Directors/Cinematographers
Khaldiya AMer Ali
A Syrian filmmaker living in Za'atari Refugee Camp, Jordan. Her short film Another Kind of Girl (2015) premiered at Sundance, screened at Cannes, SXSW, won numerous awards including the emerging filmmaker production grant from Kassel Documentary Film Festival and was featured on the New York Times’ Op-docs. Her first feature-length film, Only the Ocean Between Us, supported by the Sundance Institute and Creative Capital, will have its world premiere at Hot Docs 2021.
Christy Cauper Silvano
A Shipibo photographer, filmmaker and cultural practitioner living in Cantagallo, Lima, Peru. She co-directed the short film Un Pedacito de la Selva en la Ciudad (2015), which won an audience award at Mi Primer Festival, in Lima. Her photographs were also featured in the group exhibit “Fotos por el Cambio” at the Peruvian North American Cultural Institute. Her first feature-length film, Only the Ocean Between Us, supported by the Sundance Institute and Creative Capital, will have its world premiere at Hot Docs 2021.
Marah Mohammad Alkhateeb
A Syrian filmmaker living in Za'atari Refugee Camp, Jordan. Her short film Children (2015) won numerous awards at film festivals. She also won top award at Punto De Vista International Documentary Film Festival. More recently, she created a short film for the Thomson Reuters Association and completed a 360 film. Her first feature-length film, Only the Ocean Between Us, supported by the Sundance Institute and Creative Capital, will have its world premiere at Hot Docs 2021.
Karoli Bautista Pizarro
A Shipibo filmmaker, cultural practitioner and activist living in Cantagallo, Lima, Peru. Her short film Escúchame Cantar (2016) screened at the North Carolina Latin American Film Festival and Alice Fest. Her photographs were featured in an article in the Peruvian investigative journal Ojo Público about human rights issues in her community during the 2020 lockdown. Her first feature-length film, Only the Ocean Between Us, supported by the Sundance Institute and Creative Capital, will have its world premiere at Hot Docs 2021.
PRoducers/Editors
Eb Landesberg |Producer/Editor
A filmmaker, producer, educator and translator. She has collaborated with young people through educational programs, media workshops and community organizations throughout the Americas. As a 2014-15 Felsman Documentary Fellow, she facilitated documentary workshops with teens in Lima, Perú, who investigated and created projects about their own communities, families and cultures. It is with two of these teenagers that the Syrian members of Another Kind of Girl Collective began their first cross-border collaboration. She is also co-director of the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and was a 2019 Skidmore Storytellers Institute Visiting Fellow. Her most recent short film premiered at the 2020 Cosmic Rays Film Festival.
Tasneem Toghoj | Producer/Editor
An animated documentary filmmaker and educator. Previously working as an Assistant Professor for Design and Digital Media at the Applied Science Private University in Amman. Assisted in curating the new major Design and Digital Media at the university. She began a community-based arts education project in Zaatari Refugee Camp, Jordan in 2014 with young Syrian refugees and co-founded Another Kind of Girl Collective (AKGC) where she is also a producer and editor. She is currently teaching and facilitating multi-media projects with AKGC in their cross-border collaborations in New Orleans, LA.
Laura Doggett | Producer/Editor
A filmmaker, community artist, and educator who works with teenaged girls and young women to create spaces where they can tell their stories in their own voices through video, audio, writing, performance, and the visual arts. For 25 years, she has worked with displaced and marginalized communities around the world in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, immigrant and foster care communities of New York City and Washington, D.C., Syrian refugee camps and settlements in Jordan, and undocumented Central American communities in New Orleans. In 2014 she founded, with young Syrian women, Another Kind of Girl Collective. She has received Felsman and Hine Documentary Fellowships, and is a 2019 Creative Capital awardee.
Lali Madueño medina| Producer
A producer and filmmaker, graduated in Audiovisual Communication with experience designing participatory audiovisual workshops and communication strategies in the environment, citizenship, interculturality. She was co-founder and general producer of DOCUPERU for more than a decade (2015-2017). In 2017 she co-founded Travesía Films, and in 2019 she created her own production company Perpetua Cinema. Her purpose is to develop audiovisual projects, cinematographic works, and film training programs that lay the foundations for the local film industry's growth, exploring new languages and ways of storytelling.