Grand Jury Award Best Documentary 2010 Slamdance Film Festival
STAFF BIOS PRESS KIT

Mark Claywell

Director

Mark Claywell (Director), founder and CEO of the New York production company Hype Media, Inc. has over 20 years of experience as an award-winning director of film and television. Claywell has directed and created various national and international advertising campaigns for fortune 500 companies including Nike, AT&T, Sony, the United Way, Sears Craftsman, Pfizer, and Wyeth. He has also directed the well-known spots for New York tourism's "I Love NY" campaign which was the first filming permitted in NYC just a few days after 9/11. The spots have gone on to garner much praise and recognition for their honest and heartfelt approach. This is his first feature documentary.


 

Jody Jenkins

Producer/Writer

Jody Jenkins (Writer/Producer), is an editor at France 24, a twenty-four-hour news network in Paris. He has covered the Czechoslovakian and Romanian revolutions, the Kurdish refugee crisis in the wake of the first Gulf War, and the Serbo-Croatian and Bosnian wars. For the past ten years he has been researching American Muslims who fight as jihadis. His work has appeared in Salon, The Spectator Magazine and Fodor's. He is currently researching the life of Larimer Mellon for Claywell's next documentary "A Spark In The Darkness.


 

Francois Bringer

Cameraman

Francois Bringer (Cameraman), has more than 20 years of experience as a director, producer, reporter and cameraman covering events in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for some of the most prominent networks in international news. As a staff producer for CBS News in Paris and London for more than 15 years he intensively covered many of the major news events of the last two decades including the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism in Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany,  the conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Northern Ireland, Northern Iraq.

As a staff producer for CNN In New York for five years he produced more than 200 in-depth reports for Senior Correspondent Garrick Utley as well as others and won an Emmy-award for his work as part of the team at Ground Zero during and after 9/11.  As a freelance producer and cameraman based in France since 2003, he regularly  produces documentaries and reports on immigration and other social issues affecting France and Europe for Channel 4 (UK), CNN, CBS 60 MINUTES,  the History Channel and Al Jazeera English.

In addition, he produced for Morgan Spurlock(Supersize Me) documentary "Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?" which premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and served as principal camera on "A Good Year: Behind the Scenes of a RIdley Scott Movie".  He produced, directed and filmed  “Muslims in Marseilles,” a 22 minutes documentary for Al Jazeera English in 2007.