Sarvnik Kaur
DIRECTOR – PRODUCER
Sarvnik Kaur is a documentary filmmaker whose work takes a skeptical stance towards the ‘grand narratives’ of modernism and ‘Scientific Certainties’. Made of moments that hide anxiety and conflict just beneath the surface of the normal and the mundane, her films speak of the predicament of being human in our times. Her latest feature documentary Against the Tide premiered at Sundance 2023 where she bagged the Special Jury Award for Verite Filmmaking. The film since then has received several awards including the Grand Jury at the Seattle International, the Best Documentary Award at IceDocs, the UN Perception Change Award at Visions-du-Reel, the Sustainability Award at Sydney International, The Warsaw Peace Award and also the Paznun City Freedom Award at Millenium Docs Against Gravity. Her first film Soz – A Ballad of Maladies was awarded the President of India’s 64th National Award for best debut direction besides bagging the best film at IDSFFK 2017 and the Ram Bahadur Trophy for Best Film at the Film South Asia 2018. Her films have been part of several PHD thesis of film scholars at New York University, Harvard University, JawaharLal University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences etc. She is a HotDocs Accelerator Lab, Chicken & Eggs Eggcelerator lab and IDFA Academy fellow. Her films have been supported by Catapult Film Fund, Sundance Documentary Fund, San Francisco Film Fund, IDFA Bertha Fund etc. 

KOVAL BHATIA
PRODUCER
Koval Bhatia is a Filmmaker and producer based in India. She has been heading A Little Anarky Films for 12 years, during which time she has directed and produced commercials, impact Films and TV shows. She began her journey as an international producer with Against The Tide, which she has pitched at multiple markets and forums across the world. She is currently a Getting Real Fellow at the International Documentary Association (IDA). Koval is a graduate from Eurodoc and a recipient of the Emerging Producer’s Bursary from the World Congress for Science and Factual Producers, and her feature documentaries as a producer have been awarded grants by Sundance Documentary Fund, Hot Docs, Catapult Film Fund, Docs By The Sea, SFFILM, Al Jazeera, and DOKLeipzig. She is a member of EWA and BGDM.

SAMUDRIKA ARORA
CO-PRODUCER
New York and New Delhi based film producer Samudrika Arora has a long-formed career in international cinema, having collaborated on several Academy-Award winning feature films such as Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, amongst others.

Her most recent producing credits include Afghan Dreamers, an international feature film directed by two-time Academy Award winning filmmaker Bill Guttentag, starring Nikohl Boosheri, Ali Fazal and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Prior to this, she produced  A Call to Spy, directed by Academy-Award nominated filmmaker Lydia Dean Pilcher, starring Radhika Apte and Stana Katic – which premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June 2019; and Radium Girls, starring Emmy-nominated American actress Joey King and Abby Quinn — released at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.

Samudrika is currently developing her next feature film, AMRI, set to be directed by Mira Nair. Born and raised in New Delhi, she is a graduate of the prestigious art school École Boulle, in Paris.

QUENTIN LAURENT
CO-PRODUCER
Quentin Laurent founded Les Films de  L’œil Sauvage with Frédéric Féraud in 2015. Based in Paris and Marseille, the company mainly produces art-house documentaries and Quentin is particularly interested in non-Western narratives and viewpoints, in approaches that reveal spaces that have remained invisible or try to reconsider the perception of familiar places. He has recently produced or co-produced, Kinshasa Makambo by Dieudo Hamadi (Berlinale 2018), Overseas by Soa Yoon (Locarno 2019), Aswang by Alyx Arumpac (IDFA awarded 2019), Downstream to Kinshasa (Cannes 2020), Dreaming Walls by Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier (Berlinale 2022), Things I Could Never Tell My Mother by Humaira Bilkis (Visions du Réel 2022), and Kristos the Last Child by Giulia Amati (Venise 2022).

MIRA NAIR
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Academy-Award nominated film director Mira Nair is best known for her groundbreaking films that cross borders of all kinds: Salaam Bombay! (Caméra D’or, Cannes 1988), the pioneering Asian-African romance Mississippi Masala (1991), Golden Globe & Emmy-winning Hysterical Blindness (2001), and the international hit Monsoon Wedding (2001), for which she was the first woman to win Venice Film Festival’s prestigious Golden Lion. Also known for her literary craftsmanship of subcontinental fiction, Mira has filmed The Namesake (2006), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012), Vanity Fair (2004), A Suitable Boy (2020) and Queen of Katwe (2016). Her next film will be AMRI, an experimental portrait of Amrita Sher-Gil. She returned to the theatre for her most recent endeavor, directing Monsoon Wedding the Musical, which opened in New York City at St Ann’s Warehouse in May 2023 and is bound for Broadway. An activist by nature, Nair founded Salaam Baalak Trust for Indian street children in 1989 and the Maisha Film Lab in 2004, a free school to train filmmakers in Africa. In 2012, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honour.

RUSSELL LONG
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
After losing his Mom to lung cancer in 1988, Russell initiated and led the successful campaign in San Francisco to ban smoking in restaurants and workplaces, the beginning of a career in environmental and public health activism. In 1996, he founded and become executive director of the national environmental group Bluewater Network. During that time, he was responsible for numerous state and federal laws and regulations to reduce pollution from various industries.

He has written opinion pieces on environmental issues for major media outlets such as the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe, and has executive-produced films on sea-level rise and other environmental threats –Someplace with a Mountain, The Island President, Chloe and Theo, A Sheltered Sea. Early in his career, he was an America’s Cup Skipper and held the world-record for breaking the 50 mph barrier in a sailboat. ​ He received his BA from Harvard University, MBA from Columbia University, and Ph.D. in Deep Ecology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. He continues to serve as a Strategic Advisor to Friends of the Earth, U.S., on whose Board he served from 2006 to 2015. In 2001, he was appointed by California State Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg to serve on the California Oil Spill Technical Advisory Committee where he served from 2001 to 2006.

ROBINA RICCITIELLO
CONTRIBUTING PRODUCER
Robina Riccitiello is the communications director for Million Person Project, a company that teaches values-based personal storytelling. A longtime journalist, Robina worked for UPI, KTTV, Space News, and Newsweek, covering everything from the Scott Peterson trial, Academy Awards and the European space industry. Robina is president of the board of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and has helped produce films including The Social Dilemma, The Infiltrators, Dark Money, Stage Mother, and Sell/Buy/Date.

Robina was also an early investor in One Mind Catalyst, a One Mind initiative that aims to accelerate the progress of brain health treatments and biomarkers. She also sponsored a One Mind Rising Star Award in 2021, named for her nephew Nick LeDeit.

In addition to her work with One Mind, Robina works with the UCLA Depression Grand Challenge, a wide-ranging program that is studying depression and anxiety from all angles and intends to find effective treatments and, eventually, a cure for depression.