Winner of Webby, 8 Fest Audience Awards & 4 Grand Jury Prizes
2017 ACADEMY AWARD® Nominee for Documentary Short Subject
Kahane Cooperman - Director / Producer
Kahane Cooperman is a documentary filmmaker and television producer. Currently, she is the Executive Producer and Showrunner of the Untitled Clutter Project with Radical Media for SundanceTV. Prior, she was the Executive Producer and Showrunner of The New Yorker Presents , a series with Jigsaw Productions for Amazon Prime. Before The New Yorker Presents, she was Co-Executive Producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Originally hired for her documentary background, she was with The Daily Show from its inception in 1996, starting out as a field producer before becoming Senior Producer, Supervising Producer and then Co-Executive Producer from 2005-2015. For her work at the show, she received eleven Primetime Emmy awards and two Peabody awards.
Kahane began her documentary career at Maysles Films in NYC. She has directed and produced several documentaries prior to Joe's Violin including Cool Water, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and Making Dazed about Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, which was broadcast on AMC and acquired by the Criterion Collection. Kahane also produced the feature doc Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, directed by Nick Broomfield. Kahane has an MFA in Film from Columbia University.
Bios
Raphaela Neihausen - Producer
Raphaela Neihausen is the founder and Executive Director of DOC NYC, America’s largest documentary film festival. She is also Executive Director of Stranger Than Fiction, a weekly series at IFC Center now its 11th year, described as “indispensable” (New York magazine) and voted “NY’s best documentary programming” (Time Out New York). She also co-hosts WNYC's "Doc of the Week" and Executive Produces the podcast Pure Nonfiction. From 2011 - 2014, she launched the Montclair Film Festival, as Executive Director.
Raphaela produced the documentary Miss GULAG (recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation and Sundance Documentary Fund) that premiered at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival and was broadcast all over the world.
For seven years prior, she worked for Mercer Management Consulting (now Oliver Wyman) where she advised Fortune 100 companies on business strategy and rose to the position of senior associate. She speaks six languages and holds a BSFS/MA joint degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.
Bob Richman - Director of Photography
Bob began his career in film working with vérité pioneers Albert and David Maysles. He worked his way up from production assistant to assistant cameraman to cameraman. In 1991, he shared the director of photography credit with Albert Maysles on Christo's Umbrellas. In 1993, Richman teamed up with Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky to shoot Paradise Lost: the Robin Hood Hills Child Murders that won an Emmy and Peabody award. Richman continued his collaboration as director of photography with Berlinger and Sinofsky on Paradise Lost 2, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, and the Sundance series Iconoclast.
His other doc credits include The Producers: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks, Good Rockin' Tonight, A Tickle in the Heart, Constantine's Sword, Killing Kasztner and My Architect (nominated for an academy award in 2004). In spring of 2005, Richman filmed former Vice President Al Gore that became an integral part of the film An Inconvenient Truth, one of the highest grossing documentaries of all time and winner of an Academy Award. In 2007, he shot The September Issue and won the Sundance grand jury prize for best cinematography. He then directed Ahead of Time, that premiered at TIFF. Visit his website here.
Amira Dughri & Andrew Saunderson - Editors
Newlyweds Andrew and Amira fell in love making short documentaries together. Now, they work together under the creative umbrella of Knockbangboom Productions.
In addition to Joe's Violin, they are working together with directors Brian Lindstrom and Andy Brown on How To Give My Heart Away, a feature-length documentary about the life of musician Judee Sill. Amira is also in post-production on a short documentary about the dreams of indigenous women in the Andes and producing shorts with the Women's Prison Association. Andrew is finishing post-production on the short film Birthday Boy, with Executive Producer Jean-Marc Vallée (director of Dallas Buyers Club & Wild). He is also in the development of two narrative feature films.
Before moving to New York last year, Andrew edited and produced the award-winning documentary Alien Boy. Meanwhile, Amira worked on Magic Trip, cut the TV show NW Wild, and taught documentary workshops at NW Documentary. They have edited numerous films together for director Brian Lindstrom including, Writing Myself and Mothering Inside.