Director
Ed Perkins
Ed Perkins has directed, filmed and edited for National Geographic, The New Yorker, Stateless Media, Vanity Fair, The Guardian and Focus Features. After graduating from the University of North Carolina as a Morehead-Cain scholar in 2009 - where his student documentary ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE’ won ‘Best in Show’ at the Carolina Film Festival and ‘The Eva Marie Saint-Jeffrey Hayden Humanitas Award’ - he then developed and directed a series of TV documentaries for National Geographic Channel as well as directing the behind-the-scenes documentaries for ‘PROJECT NIM’, ‘THE EAGLE’, the BAFTA winning ‘THE IMPOSTER’, and the Academy Award winning ‘SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN’. GARNET’S GOLD is Ed’s first feature length documentary.
Editor
Paul Carlin
Paul Carlin has been as an editor for over twenty years, working in a variety of genres, from high budget feature films, feature docs, television, commercials, music videos and art installations. His work includes award winning documentaries: ‘Baby it’s you’ (Emmy - best documentary series), ‘Ghosts of Rwanda’ (Peabody Prize - best documentary), ‘The Death Train’ (Hugo Award - best documentary), ‘Staying Lost’ (BBC Indie Awards - best documentary series) and ‘A Death in Tehran’, (Emmy, best current affairs documentary). Paul has been nominated three times by the Royal Television Society for best editing for: ‘Visions of Heaven and Hell’, ‘Staying Lost’, and ‘The Hospital – A+E’. His directorial debut ‘Salgado’s Spectre of Hope’ was selected for the Montreal film festival in 2001.
Producer
Simon Chinn
Simon Chinn is a double Academy Award winning producer who has been responsible for some of the most successful feature documentaries of recent years, known for their high production values, powerful narratives and innovative blending of documentary and fiction techniques. Chinn conceived and produced Man on Wire, directed by James Marsh, which won over thirty international awards, including the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film, the Producers Guild of America (PGA) Award and the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and was named by The London Observer as one of the best British films of the past 25 years. It was released theatrically in over 25 territories around the world in 2008/9 and became one of the highest grossing documentaries of recent years. His follow-up film, Project Nim, also directed by James Marsh, opened the Sundance Film Festival where it won the World Cinema Documentary Directing award. It was released theatrically around the world to great critical acclaim and won the Directors Guild of America’s (DGA) Award, was nominated for a BAFTA and a PGA Award and shortlisted for an Academy Award.
Chinn launched three new films in 2012: Searching for Sugar Man, The Imposter, and Everything or Nothing – a feature documentary directed by Stevan Riley for MGM and Sony Pictures to mark fifty years of the Bond film franchise. Searching for Sugar Man, directed by first time filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul, opened the Sundance Film Festival where it won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury and Audience Awards and was the very first acquisition of the festival - by Sony Pictures Classics. It was released around the world in 2012 and has made over M at the box office internationally. It went on to win more than thirty international awards including the PGA, DGA and WGA awards, the BAFTA and the Academy Award for best documentary.
The Imposter, which was also launched at Sundance in 2012, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Miami Film Festival, best documentary at the Zurich Film Festival, the Filmmaker Award at Hotdocs, two British Independent Film Awards, was shortlisted for an Academy Award and won the BAFTA for best debut for its director Bart Layton. It was released in the UK by Revolver and Picturehouse and grossed .8M, becoming the eighth highest grossing (non-concert) documentary of all time in the UK.
Garnet’s Gold is one of several feature documentaries Chinn is launching in 2014 through his company Red Box Films. He has also recently completed The Green Prince which won the audience award Sundance in 2014 and The Legend of Shorty which premiered at SXSW 2014. Chinn has recently launched Lightbox, a new multi-platform media company aimed at producing high-end non fiction content for the small screen.
Exec. Producer
John Battsek
John Battsek runs Passion Pictures’ film department and is one of the most successful and prolific feature documentary producers in the industry. In 1999, Battsek conceived and produced the Academy Award-winning ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER and he has since been involved with over thirty high profile feature documentaries, including: SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN (Academy Award winner 2013); THE IMPOSTER (BAFTA winner 2013); RESTREPO (Academy Award nominated 2011); SERGIO (Academy Award shortlisted 2010) and THE TILLMAN STORY (Academy Award shortlisted 2011). Battsek and Passion Pictures launched four new feature films at the January 2014 Sundance Film Festival: Jeremiah Zagar’s CAPTIVATED: THE TRIALS OF PAMELA SMART, produced by Hard Working Movies for HBO and Sky; Amir Bar Lev’s HAPPY VALLEY for A&E IndieFilms; Greg Barker’s WE ARE THE GIANT a co-production with Motto Pictures for Corniche, Bertha Foundation and Screen Pass Pictures. Nadav Schirman’s THE GREEN PRINCE, based on the New York Times Bestselling memoir THE SON OF HAMAS by Mosab Hassan Yousef, was selected to open the festival and went on to win Audience Award.
New projects include: Margaret Brown’s THE GREAT INVISIBLE for Participant Media - a longitudinal character driven film about the unfolding effects of the BP oil spill on the Gulf Coast - which premiered at SXSW 2014 where it won the Best Feature Documentary Grand Jury Award.
Battsek has been twice nominated for a PGA Award in 2010 and in 2011 for SERGIO and THE TILLMAN STORY respectively, and was the recipient of this year’s prestigious Grierson Trustees Award for Outstanding Contribution to Documentary.
Music
J. Ralph
J. Ralph is an Academy Award® nominated composer, singer/ songwriter and producer whose professional career began at age 22 with the signing to Atlantic Records as a solo recording artist. He is the founder of the internationally award winning production company The Rumor Mill, and has written and produced the music for numerous Grammy winning Artists, Oscar® winning films, Symphony Orchestras and The President of The United States, Barack Obama.
Highly regarded for his contributions to the documentary medium, J. Ralph has written and produced the music for 4 out of the last 6 Oscar® winning/ nominated documentaries including the back to back winning films MAN ON WIRE (2009) and THE COVE (2010) followed by the back to back nominated
films HELL AND BACK AGAIN (2012), and CHASING ICE 2013) for which he received an Oscar® nomination for Best Original Song with “BEFORE MY TIME” performed by SCARLETT JOHANSSON and JOSHUA BELL. In the 86 year history of the Academy Awards®, J. Ralph’s song “Before My
Time” is one of only three songs from a documentary ever to be nominated for an Oscar®. It remains the only song nominated from a documentary when the film was not. Most recently J. Ralph produced, engineered, and mixed this years Oscar nominated song “THE MOON SONG” performed by Karen O and Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, accompanying the
duo on guitar, from the Academy Award winning film HER directed by Spike Jonze.
Other recent work includes writing and producing the music for the upcoming documentaries FINDING VIVIAN MAIER, THE HEIST (by The Cove director Louie Psihoyos) and GARNETS GOLD for which he also wrote and produced the films original songs including “UNTIL THE END” performed by LIZA MINNELLI and WYNTON MARSALIS. The song also features Sean Lennon on guitar, David Garza on piano and sax, Arthur Pingrey on clarinet, and Jeff Haley on Bass. To help capture the spirit and sound of the “Golden Age” for the song, J. Ralph used the personal piano of legendary performer Jimmy Durante on the recording. J. Ralph’s music encompasses a wide variety of genres and mediums. He is a fellow of Yale University, a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the only composer ever to win two consecutive A.I.C.P. awards. Several of J. Ralph’s works are included in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in New York City.
