New Crew

DIRECTOR/CO-PRODUCER BARBARA ETTINGER‘s first film Martha and Ethel screened at the Sundance Film Festival and was distributed theatrically by Sony Pictures Classics. Her most recent film Two Square Miles was co-produced with her husband Sven Huseby. Two Square Miles aired nationally on PBS’s Independent Lens in November 2006 and again in January 2007. Sven and Barbara bring to this project a similar story-telling style, the same film values seen in their earlier work.

CO-PRODUCER SVEN HUSEBY is a retired independent school head who worked as a teacher and administrator at The Putney School for 30 years. He remains involved with non-profits to build organizational capacity and to plan for the long term. He has a B.A. in history from Yale.

CO-PRODUCER SUSAN COHN ROCKEFELLER has directed, produced and written three documentaries. Green Fire: Lives of Commitment and Passion in a Fragile World and Richard Nelson’s Alaska have an environmental focus and were aired on PBS affiliates. Her third film, Running Madness, was also produced with an eye to the balance between man and nature: it won multiple awards, including the prestigious platinum Aurora award. Susan spent time in the Alaskan Arctic working on fisheries and agriculture projects in the early 80’s. She is completing a memoir, Arctic Prayer, about her time living in the far north. Susan is a board member of the Alaska Conservation Foundation.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER BEN KALINA directs, produces and edits documentary shorts, features and short fiction films. His latest fiction short, Diorama, won top prize for fiction filmmaking at the 2007 Sehseuchte film festival in Germany, Europe’s largest student film festival, as well as top prize for fiction films at the Diamond Screen Film Festival. Ben’s documentary credits include Co-Director of Leaps of Faith, Associate Producer of Two Square Miles, and Director/Producer for many short-form documentaries. Ben is pursuing his MFA at Temple University in Philadelphia.

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY CLAUDIA RASCHKE-ROBINSON is an award-winning cinematographer. She is known for her work as DP on the feature documentary Mad Hot Ballroom, directed by Marilyn Agrelo and produced by Amy Sewell. She has filmed several documentary features presently nearing commercial release, including Shoot Down and Frame of Mind. Claudia has also received acclaim for her cinematography on fiction feature films, including The Last Good Time directed by Bob Balaban, starring Armin Muehler-Stahl and Olivia D’Abo, and No Way Home, directed by Buddy Giovinazzo, starring Tim Roth, Debora Unger, and James Russo.

EDITOR TOBY SHIMIN began her film career as a sound editor, where she worked on such projects as Fire from the Mountain and Working Girls, which won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. She switched to picture editing in 1988 when she cut The Children’s Storefront, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject Documentary. Since then, she has cut numerous films that have been accepted at Sundance, including A Leap of Faith, Martha and Ethel, and Out of the Past, which won an Audience Award. She has cut several diverse projects for PBS, including AIDS Warriors for the 2003 season of Wide Angle and two projects for American Experience: Miss America, which premiered at Sundance in 2002; and Seabiscuit, for which she was nominated a 2003 Emmy. More recently she edited episode two of the Emmy-nominated Reporting America at War, Three of Hearts: A Post-Modern Family, which premiered in September 2004 at the Toronto Film Festival, and Two Square Miles which was part of the 2006 Independent Lens series on PBS. Her latest project, Everything’s Cool, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Toby is a principal of Dovetail Films, a production and editing company she co-founded with Dina Guttmann in 2001. She studied film at Hampshire College, where she earned a Bachelors of Arts.

OUTREACH COORDINATOR ANGELA ALSTON is a maker of short films, including the award-winning Reclaiming Water (2003). She has served as publicist/outreach director for her own work and for other projects, including the Loisaida Cortos Latino Film Festival, Listen With Your Eyes, and Alwan for the Arts. For two years, Angela was workshop director for CineWomen NY. She also served as public affairs coordinator for Cornish College of the Arts for three years. She is the former technical director of Democracy Now! Angela has an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA in biology and philosophy from Swarthmore College. She has attended the National Black Programming Consortium New Media Institute and the Western Arts Management Institute (WAMI). She is a member of D-Word, an electronic community of documentary filmmakers, and of New York Women in Film & TV (NYWIFT).


STRATEGIC PARTNER Sailors for the Sea (SfS) is an action-oriented nonprofit organization dedicated toproviding education, programs and resources to motivate and empowersailors and other boaters to preserve, protect, and enjoy the harbors,bays and oceans upon which they sail.Sfslogo

More To Explore