FILM TEAM

DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, WRITER, CO-EDITOR

Suja A. Thomas is a first-time filmmaker, a law professor and a lawyer who lives in Chicago and Urbana, Illinois. Her film The Best Justice System in the World received Ford JustFilms funding and won the CAAM Ready, Set, Pitch!, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Suja was a 2023 fellow with the Center for Asian American Media and served as a 2020 fellow with Kartemquin Films’ Diverse Voices in Docs program. In 2016, with TED, she produced a short animated video on the justice system that currently has more than 850,000 views. Her current project brings a comedic approach to unearthing absurdities in the justice system. Suja serves as the Peer and Sarah Pedersen Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law, where she has written on subjects related to the film including authoring the book The Missing American Jury (Cambridge University Press 2016) and co-authoring the book Unequal: How America’s Courts Undermine Discrimination Law (Oxford University Press 2017). Suja has appeared on CNN, speaking about jury trials, and her research on subjects related to the film has been featured in news outlets such as The New York Times, Slate, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Wall Street Journal.

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

Kirsten Johnson is at work on her next form-breaking film, The Great Disappointment. Her two previous films Dick Johnson is Dead and Cameraperson are on the 2026 International Documentary Association’s Top 25 Documentaries of the 21st Century list. Dick Johnson is Dead premiered at Sundance 2020, where it won the Jury Prize for Innovation in Nonfiction Storytelling. Listed by The New Yorker as one of the films that "Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking", the movie won the Primetime Emmy for Directing, made the Oscar shortlist and is currently showing on Netflix. Widely taught in film schools, Cameraperson made the Oscar shortlist and is a part of the Criterion Collection. Johnson’s camerawork appears in Academy Award winner Citizen Four, Academy-nominated The Invisible War, and Cannes Winner Fahrenheit 9/11. She is a member of the American Society of Cinematographers, of which only 5% of members are female. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Shorenstein Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School. She served as President of the Cannes "L'Oeil D'Or" jury in 2023. She recently finished making a video installation piece for the Los Angeles Airport due to open in Fall 2026.

CONSULTING PRODUCER

Kurt Engfehr is an Emmy award-winning producer and editor, best known for his work on Michael Moore’s Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine, for which Kurt won the American Cinema Editors award for best documentary editing, and the Cannes Palme d’Or winning, box-office hit, Fahrenheit 9/11. Through his career, Kurt has edited, produced and directed countless films and television docs. Kurt co-directed The Yes Men Fix the World, which aired on HBO and won the audience award at the Berlin Film Festival, and directed Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, a humorous doc about weight loss and self-realization that became a world-wide sensation seen on Netflix, CNN and other outlets in 17 countries. His work on the HBO news show Axios secured him his Emmy.

CONSULTING PRODUCER

Tony Hale is a multiple Emmy Award-winning documentary editor and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He has edited 11 feature-length documentary films (including A Will for the Woods, The Story of Plastic, YOUTH v GOV, Israelism, and The Memory of Darkness Light and Ice), as well as short films for publications (including The New York Times and The New Yorker), organizations (including The Committee to Protect Journalists and The Schomburg Center), and narrative directors (including Lulu Wang and Lucy Liu). His films have played at top festivals and major streamers, earning multiple Emmy Awards and nominations, a Jackson Wild Media Award for Editing, a Grierson nomination, and over 50 festival awards. For Tony, nonfiction editing is always an exercise in deep listening and context building, and he is motivated as much by a love for the craft as he is by the themes, stories, and missions represented in the work. He has a degree in Mathematics from Boston College and once upon a time was selected as one of DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40. His latest project, Giants Do Fall, is set to premiere in festivals this fall.

CO-EDITOR

Connor O’Keefe is a trans nonfiction editor, filmmaker, and professor based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He uses a queer lens to shape the realities captured in his films. He tells stories with people that push the boundaries of what it means to live and share the world with others. His short film Imagine A Body, an essay film on the spiritual nature of hormone replacement therapy for transgender men, premiered in The New Yorker Documentary Series in 2022. His most recent film, Quiet on the Ice, follows players finding community and courage with Team Trans, the Minnesota Chapter of an all trans and nonbinary hockey league. It will premiere at the Grove & Pines Film Festival in September of 2026. His works have also played at SFFilm, Frameline Film Festival, and MixBrasil among others.

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Derek Wiesehahn is a New York based Director of Photography with 35 years of experience in film and television. DP credits have included the 2010 Academy Award winning documentary short film Music By Prudence, the 2013 Academy Award nominated documentary feature How To Survive A Plague, the 2025 Academy Award nominated short documentary Death By Numbers, the 2013 Academy Award shortlisted documentary feature God Loves Uganda, the 2018 Tribeca winner Notes From Dunblane and the 2024 Tribeca winner Black Girls Play. Derek has also received additional cinematography credits on the 2016 Oscar nominated documentary Life Animated, the 2024 Academy Award nominated and Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning documentary Going To Mars, and the 2011 Sundance winner, and Academy Award nominated documentary, Restrepo. Additional Sundance selected documentary credits include The Librarians, Newtown, Trapped, Us Kids, Welcome to Chechnya, and Coded Bias. His work has won several New York Festivals Awards as well as Addy and headliner awards. Narrative credits also include several feature films, and shorts, which have been well received at Sundance, the Tribeca Film Festival and the New York Film Festival.

ANIMATOR

Kay Liu is an Asian-American experimental animator and illustrator who investigates the subconscious, dreamscapes, and places of transformation and darkness. Her work heavily draws from her identity and what that means to her. She received her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a MFA graduate of the CalArts Experimental Animation program.

ANIMATOR

Kira Dane is a Japanese and American filmmaker, editor, and animator from New York City, currently based in the Kansai region of Japan. She is best known for Mizuko, an animated documentary short supported by Field of Vision's If/Then Shorts program (formerly of Tribeca Film Institute). The film received a nomination for the IDA Awards, Special Jury Awards at SXSW and IDFA, and Best Documentary Short at Atlanta Film Festival; it streamed on the Criterion Channel. Kira was chosen as a fellow of the Sundance Ignite Program in 2019, and Berlinale Talents in 2023. Most recently, she was awarded funding from the National Endowment for the Arts for the JUSFC Creative Artists Fellowship Program, to create an animated film installation about the traditional Japanese lunisolar calendar, which divides a year into seventy-two micro-seasons. Outside of—and deeply informing—her artistic practice, Kira has experience volunteering and leading meditations at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Nepal, and is currently living in a traditional farmhouse in rural Japan.

COMPOSER

Eric V. Hachikian is an Armenian-American composer whose music has been hailed by The New York Times as “lovely and original.” A classically trained musician and perpetual researcher of world music, his personal sound draws inspiration from diverse influences and artists, and thrives in audiovisual collaboration. His work can be heard in a variety of major motion pictures and network television shows: The White Lotus; Batman Knightfall; Marty Supreme; Black Rabbit; The Audacity; Marco Polo; Sugar; Boom! Boom! The World vs. Boris Becker; I, Tonya; Mortal Kombat Legends; Smugshot; How High 2; When We First Met; The Place Beyond the Pines; The Wrestler; Homeland; and Entourage. As Creative Director and co-founder of Soundcat Productions, a boutique music collective with studios in New York City and Los Angeles, Eric has written and produced music for numerous brands and advertising campaigns: Apple, Google, Samsung, Budweiser, BMW, Ford, Snickers, Visa, Mastercard, Kate Spade, and McDonald’s, among many others. His concert works include Voyage to Amasia, a personal reflection on his Armenian heritage, later developed into a feature documentary; and his music has been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Pops Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, and Boston Pops Orchestra, and in such venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall, and The Getty.