Ady Barkan is a social justice activist and cofounder of the Be A Hero PAC, one of the nation’s leading health care advocacy organizations. In 2019, Barkan interviewed nearly every leading Democratic candidate for President as part of a groundbreaking series on health care, life, and legacy. In 2018, he and Be A Hero raised over $4 million in small dollar donations against Sen. Susan Collins during the fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Barkan was a law clerk to the Hon. Shira A. Scheindlin in the Southern District of New York and a Liman Fellow with Make the Road New York. He graduated from Yale Law School and Columbia College, and built two programs at the Center for Popular Democracy: Fed Up and Local Progress. He lives with his wife Rachael and their young son Carl in Santa Barbara, California. His book, Eyes to the Wind: A Memoir of Love and Death, Hope and Resistance, was published in September by Atria Books.
Liz Jaff is a Political Strategist, Founder at her firm Leopard Strategies, and co-founder of Be A Hero which she started with Ady Barkan back in 2017. She was VP for business development at Crowdpac and has expertise in online video content, fundraising, campaigns, political brand building, political ads, and organic content creation. She works with candidates, super pacs and organizations on fundraising strategy, campaign plans and political brand development. Jaff worked in the Obama administration and 07,12 campaigns and sits on the board of Netroots.
Vayabobo / Chandler Evans (Director/Producer/Writer) is a writer/director, whose award winning videos have garnered over 200 million views online. Vayabobo wrote and directed for Disney Interactive and subsequently helped to launch Buzzfeed Video. He wrote Visions of Everest, a feature length documentary about the only blind man to summit Mount Everest and has written for TV shows on CBS, Syfy and CW. His work in advertising includes directing commercial spots for companies such as Disney, Singapore Airlines, Hamilton Beach and KB Homes. When not working, you can catch Vayabobo playing and documenting Capoeira around the world.
Sachi Cunningham (Director/Director of Photography/Producer) is an award winning documentary filmmaker and Associate Professor of Journalism at San Francisco State University. A graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Brown University, Cunningham has worked on the staffs of PBS FRONTLINE/World, where she covered stories from the first Presidential election in Afghanistan to sex trafficking in Dubai, and the Los Angeles Times, where she was recruited to start their first video team. When not making documentaries, Cunningham can be found swimming somewhere in the Pacific, where she is known for her pioneering big wave water surf photography.
Ruper Vásquez graduated from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. Since 1991, he is part of the band « La Trapatiesta », as a dancer and musician. He has worked for many years on choral singing, popular guitar and percussions, traditional dance, dramatic art and cinema. He traveled in several international tours as a dancer and musician, in Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Swiss, Turkey, Egypt and Mexico. The Special by Ignacio Márquez is his first feature film as a lead actor.
Matthew is an assistant professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Previously, he was the director for multimedia and creative at statnews.com in Boston, Mass. He is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist with two decades of experience in video production. Before joining STAT, Matthew worked at The New York Times for 12 years as a senior video producer and the organization’s first full-time staff video journalist.
Sergio Morkin is an Argentinean documentary filmmaker living in Mexico. He studied cinematography in Buenos Aires and graduated in 1995, and was drawn into film and drama direction. His critically acclaimed documentary film “Oscar” (2004) has received numerous international awards. Since then, Morkin has worked for several production companies and directed different documentary films for TV. He also designs and teaches documentary filmmaking workshops throughout Mexico and is project consultant for documentaries.
In 2012 he filmed and directed “The Ginger Ninjas Ride Mexico”, a feature documentary film that audiences have responded enthusiastically to at film festivals.
Morkin is a founding partner of Lupe & Hijos Films and produced “The Charro of Toluquilla”, a documentary film by director José Villalobos Romero and coproduced by IMCINE.
His most recent documentary “Maricarmen”, coproduced by IMCINE, will be premiered in 2019. This film has received many awards in several festivals: Best Documentary Feature at the San Diego Latino Film Festival, Public’s Choice Award at the Morelia International Film Festival, among others. The official premier in Mexico at cinema halls is planned at the beginning of 2021, and will be distributed by Cinepolis.
His projects have obtained support from several institutions like Fondo Nacional de las Artes, (Argentina), Altercine (Canada), Aeci (Spain), Docsforum (Mexico), ITDP (Mexico), IMCINE (Mexico), Tribeca Film Institute (USA) Gabriel Figueroa Fund (Mexico) Fundación Cinépolis (Mexico), EFICINE (Mexico), among others.
