Danae Elon graduated from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 1995. Her first feature length documentary film was Another Road Home in 2004, which premiered at the Tribeca film festival, and was theatrically released in the US. In 2009 Danae was the recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship in Film.

Photographer and filmmaker Adam Sjöberg has traveled to over 40 countries covering conflict and natural disaster, design and architecture, beauty and suffering, light and darkness. His work is imbued with his unique personal touch – and an intimacy with his characters – and Adam’s voice as a storyteller has been recognized most recently as GOOD magazine’s GOOD 100 for storytelling. His projects have been featured by dozens of international outlets including BBC World News, WIRED magazine, PASTE Magazine, ESPN Magazine, and the CBS Evening News.

Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami was born in Tehran and studied filmmaking and animation in Tehran Art University. Her short documentary works include Pigeon Fanciers (2000), A Loud Solitude (2010), Born 20 Minutes Late (2010), Going Up the Stairs (2011), and the animated documentary Cyanosis (2007).

Matt Black is a photographer from California’s Central Valley. His work has explored themes of migration, farming, poverty and the environment in his native rural California and in southern Mexico. Recent photo essays have been published inThe New Yorker, Mother Jones, and Vice Magazines.

He was named Time Magazine's Instagram photographer of the year in 2014 and is a contributor to the @everydayusa photographers’ collective. He has produced short films and multimedia pieces for msnbc.com, Orion Magazine, and The New Yorker, and has taught photography with the Foundry Photojournalism Workshops and the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Anastasia Photo gallery in New York represents his fine prints. He is a nominee to Magnum Photos.

His work has been profiled by National Geographic, The New York Times, National Public Radio, Time and Slate, and has been honored by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation, the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, World Press Photo, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Pictures of the Year International, the Alexia Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation, among others. He lives in Exeter, a small town in California’s Central Valley.

David Holbrooke (Director) is a filmmaker whose latest project is The Diplomat. The film is about his father, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the peace that ended the Bosnian War. He is also Festival Director of Telluride Mountainfilm in Colorado since 2008. His last film, Hard as Nails, aired on HBO in December 2007. Other documentaries include Freaks Like Me, Time for a New God and A Redwood Grows in Brooklyn, featuring acclaimed nature photographer James Balog. All are part of an ongoing series he created called "Original Thinkers." Other notable projects include The Soul of Healing with Deepak Chopra and co-producer of The Trials of Henry Kissinger. Before he became a filmmaker, David spent a year in the dotcom world and previously, worked extensively in television news, producing long- form pieces for "The Today Show," CBS News and CNN. David has also written for the Huffington Post, CNN.com and National Geographic Adventure. His production company, Giraffe Partners, is developing narrative features and several documentaries. He lives in Telluride, Colorado with his wife Sarah, three kids, two big dogs and a bunch of bikes.

Florian studied Directing at the Film and Television University “Konrad Wolf” (HFF) in Potsdam Babelsberg. His graduation film LEBENDKONTROLLE won the Dialogue en perspective prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2010. Since then, he has worked on television documentaries and independent film productions.

Katharina studied Montage at the Film and Television University “Konrad Wolf” (HFF) in Potsdam Babelsberg, but soon began directing projects of her own. She concluded her studies with the film MY GLOBE IS BROKEN IN RWANDA, which won the Documentary Film Prize at the Max Ophüls Film Festival in 2010. Since then, she has continued to work in documentary filmmaking and WE WERE REBELS is her second documentary feature.

"The boundaries, the ones drawn up and familiar, like countries, caste, and gender feel easy to define and to direct a finger at. It is the confines tucked in between those more tangible that make being human beautiful, complex, and difficult. 

When we set out to make a film about a girl in Nepal who left her village to get an education on scholarship, we believed we were telling a story about a girl who was breaking cultural and social boundaries. We naively—stupidly even—made assumptions about what this looked and felt like—we had so predetermined the end to our story that we were blind to the obstacles she was actually facing—the ones we should have seen because they are familiar."

- Amy Benson and Scott Squire | Directors, Drawing the Tiger