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Turbulence
Director and Producer Anne Aghion, Producer Cynthia Kane
Logline
Having traveled the world bearing witness to survivors of the most extreme circumstances, a filmmaker grapples with shadows cast over her own life–losing her mother as a child and her father’s Holocaust trauma. Through a series of tender and visually arresting cinematic letters to her mother, she recounts her sometimes shocking odyssey in search of resolution and peace.
Anne Aghion - Director and Producer
Widely praised as a poetic documentarian who gets to the emotional core of the stories she covers, multiple award-winner Anne Aghion is best known for her series of four films on post-genocide justice and social reconstruction in Rwanda, including My Neighbor My Killer, which was in Official Selection at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, nominated for Best Documentary at the Gotham Awards, and earned Aghion the Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. Additionally, films in the series received an Emmy and the UNESCO Fellini Prize. Her acclaimed feature Ice People, produced with ARTE France, ITVS International in association with Sundance Channel, also released in 2009, explores the physical, emotional and spiritual adventure of conducting science in Antarctica. Aghion has been a juror for L’Oeil d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) the International Documentary Association (IDA), etc.
Cynthia Kane - Producer
Cynthia Kane co-created Sundance Channel’s DOCday and brought Jean-Xavier de Lestrade and Denis Poncet’s documentary series, The Staircase (2006 Peabody, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Awards) to U.S. television. At ITVS, she shepherded both international and U.S. co-productions for public media. At Al Jazeera America, she commissioned documentaries and series including Albert Maysles’ final work, In Transit, and duPont Award-winning series, Kartemquin Films’ Hard Earned among many others.
Project logline and bios courtesy of the grantees.