In-Person Q&As with WRITING WITH FIRE Filmmakers Rintu Thomas & Sushmit Ghosh, Co-presented by Brown Girl Doc Mafia
Sunday, November 28, 4:40 show
Moderated by writer/filmmaker Farihah Zaman
Brown Girls Doc Mafia is an initiative advocating for over 4,500 women and non-binary people of color working in the documentary film industry around the world. We fight inequality by building community and sharing resources, nourishing our creative brilliance, demanding access and visibility in creative and professional environments, enriching our community with the knowledge to sustain ourselves financially, and by cutting through oppressive industry structures to advocate for our members.
Rintu Thomas is an award-winning director-producer from India whose work is supported by the Sundance Institute,Chicken & Egg Pictures, IDFA, SFF Film Fund, Doc Society, Tribeca Institute, Finnish Film Foundation and Bertha Foundation, among others. Over the last 10 years, Rintu’s films have been used as advocacy tools for social impact, included in the curriculum of universities and exhibited globally in spaces such as the United Nations Climate Change Conference and The Lincoln Center for Performing Arts – becoming catalysts for new conversations. She is a Sundance and Japan Foundation fellow. Sushmit Ghosh is an award-winning director and cinematographer from India whose work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Tribeca Institute, Doc Society, SFFFilm Fund, IDFA, The Bertha Foundation, Sorfond and the Finnish Film Foundation, among others. In 2009 Sushmit co-founded Black Ticket Films, a production company invested in the power of storytelling. With a strong eye on social justice stories, Black Ticket Films’award-winning slate of films are being used as advocacy, impact and education tools by institutions across the world. Five years in the making, WRITING WITH FIRE is Rintu Thomas & Sushmit Ghosh’s debut feature documentary. The film has played at over 90 festivals and won 17 international awards. Married for six years Thomas & Ghosh live between New Delhi and the mountains and, in their spare time, enjoy discovering quaint bookshops.
Farihah Zaman is a queer Bangladeshi-American filmmaker, critic, educator, and curator whose award-winning work has screened at Sundance, Toronto, New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, South By Southwest, and more. Her first feature was REMOTE AREA MEDICAL, followed by THIS TIME NEXT YEAR, and the doc-fiction hybrid FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY, as well as several shorts (KOMBIT, NOBODY LOVES ME, AMERICAN CARNAGE, and TO BE QUEEN, which is part of the Emmy-nominated New York Times Op-Doc series From Here to Home). She produced the Sundance-award winning Netflix Original, GHOSTS OF SUGAR LAND, which was shortlisted for 2020 Academy Award nomination. Zaman has written for Reverse Shot, Film Comment, Elle, Huffington Post, Filmmaker Magazine, and AV Club, among others, and her diverse background in the film industry includes roles at independent distributor Magnolia Pictures, IFP, The Flaherty Seminar, and serving as the Production Manager for Laura Poitras-founded Field of Vision, where she worked with artists like Garrett Bradley, Lyric Cabral, Steve Maing, and Ramell Ross on films eventually published at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Buzzfeed, Vice, Wired and more. Zaman supports other filmmakers and the documentary community through equity driven collectives like Beyond Inclusion and Brown Girls Doc Mafia, where she is the Director of Grants and Programs, and various teaching and mentoring roles over the years at SVA, NYU, Uniondocs, NYFF Critics Academy, University of Iowa, and others. She was the Documentarian in Residence at Bard College 2018-2019, has been named a Top 40 under 40 filmmaker by Doc NYC, and is a member of the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.