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KEY PERSONNEL
Producer
FRANCES
REID
Directors
FRANCES REID
DEBORAH
HOFFMANN
Editor
DEBORAH HOFFMANN
Co-Producer
JOHNNY SYMONS
Cinematographers
EZRA JWILI
FRANCES REID
Original Score
LEBO M
Post Production
Supervisor
MEGAN MYLAN
Second Editor
KIM ROBERTS
Narrator
HELEN MIRREN
FRANCES REID
Director / Producer / Director of Photography
Frances Reid has been producing, directing, and shooting documentary films for over 30 years. Her most recent production, with Deborah Hoffmann, was Long Night's Journey Into Day: South Africa‚s search for Truth & Reconciliation. It won the Grand Jury Award for best Documentary at Sundance 2000, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2001 and a DGA award in 2002, and has been exhibited at festivals worldwide, including the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2000 where it won the "In the Spirit of Freedom" award.
In 1995 Frances produced and directed Skin Deep, a film exploring race relations on college campuses. It was broadcast nationally on PBS and is now in use by nearly 2,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. In 1994, she received an Academy Award nomination for her documentary short Straight From The Heart. Additional producing and directing credits include such films as the groundbreaking documentary on Lesbian mothers and child custody, In the Best Interests of the Children (1977), a Blue Ribbon Winner at the American Film Festival. Her film The Faces of AIDS (1992) won a First Place at the Black Filmmakers‚ Hall of Fame. Her cinematography credits include The Times of Harvey Milk, Visions of the Spirit, The Ride to Wounded Knee, Reno‚s Kids, and scores of other award-winning documentaries including Deborah Hoffmann‚s Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter.
Frances has traveled widely to speak and lecture with her films and on filmmaking and cinematography. Most recently she served on the Grand Jury for the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. She is also the recipient of the James Phelan Art Award in Video. Frances is one of the original members of Iris Films, founded in 1975.
DEBORAH HOFFMANN
Director / Editor
Deborah has worked for over 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area as a film and video editor, editing numerous internationally acclaimed documentaries on a wide range of sensitive and challenging topics. For editing The Times of Harvey Milk she received a National Emmy and the film received an Academy Award. Marlon Riggs' video Color Adjustment, which she edited, received a Peabody and an International Documentary Association Award. She also edited Marlon Riggs‚ Ethnic Notions and the Frontline program Men Who Molest, which both received National Emmys, Straight From the Heart which was an Academy Award nominee, and was an editor of Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt another Academy Award winner. Deborah also edited Mulholland's Dream, the opening show of the PBS series, Cadillac Desert., and Jon Else‚s Sing Faster winner of the Filmmaker's Trophy Award at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival
In 1994 Deborah chronicled her caregiving experiences with her mother‚s worsening Alzheimer's Disease. The resulting film, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, received over 30 international awards, including an Academy Award nomination, an Emmy Award, a Peabody, and a duPont-Columbia Award. Complaints... aired nationally on PBS in June 1995, and received rave reviews from virtually every major paper in the country.
In 2000 Deborah and her partner Frances Reid completed the Academy Award nominated feature documentary Long Night‚s Journey into Day: South Africa‚s Search for Truth and Reconciliation.
Deborah is a lecturer at the UC Berkeley Journalism School. She has served on juries for the Sundance, San Francisco and Mill Valley Film Festivals and on the Independent Spirit, and Gotham Awards. She is on the board of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
JOHNNY SYMONS
Co-Producer
Johnny Symons has produced and directed several award-winning documentaries, including a film about black gay men in southern Africa, "Out in Africa," which won the best documentary award at the Turin International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, and "Beauty Before Age," which received an NEMN Gold Apple and an IDA award nomination. His work has screened on PBS and foreign television and at more than 75 international film festivals. He has a master's degree in documentary film and video production from Stanford University.
EZRA JWILI
Cinematographer
Ezra Jwili has worked for many years as a cinema-tographer for South African Broadcasting Corporation in Cape Town.
His keen eye for detail has earned him wide acclaim as a shooter. He lives near Guguletu, the township which is the focus of two of the stories portrayed in "Long Night's Journey." Ezra is related to one of the Guguletu 7 victims, and has been invaluable in facilitating the production of the film.
MEGAN MYLAN
Post-Production Supervisor
Megan Mylan directed and produced the documentary "Batidania: Power in the Beat" profiling a youth percussion group fighting police brutality and drug violence through music in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It won Best Documentary at the Marin Latino Film Festival and has screened on national and international television.
She has also worked in a variety of capacities on documentary films including Jon Else's "Sing Faster: the Stagehand's Ring Cycle"; "Yesterday's Tomorrows" by Barry Levinson for Showtime; and "Inside the Tobacco Deal" for PBS Frontline. She has a Master's Degree in Journalism and Latin American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley.
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