Hana Elias
Hana is a Palestinian-American documentary filmmaker and journalist. Her work explores the interrelationships between land, and identity in the Middle East and the United States. She aims to center the perspectives of people from underrepresented backgrounds as they imagine alternative realities and challenge hegemonic narratives. This ranges from her first film, 'The Rooftops of Jerusalem', a coming of age story about Palestinian parkour players in Jerusalem’s old city, and 'Holding Fire', about a grassroots movement of Muslim immigrant women fighting for their rights in the New York City political arena. She has been working on documentaries for the last 8 years, as a video editor, camera person, and associate producer and is currently a Video News fellow at Democracy Now.
For over two decades, Maha and Nassib have made it their lifetime project to build a home in Nassib’s Palestinian town. Their winding paths of rupture and displacement from Palestine are captured in their own words and personal footage, as they tend to these mementos in the soil. Years later, their daughter and filmmaker Hana, picks up the camera where they left off and documents their process of return. Using methods passed down to Nassib from generations, the Elias family rebuilds stone terraces, tends to olive trees and harvests Zaatar in their garden, as they continue to search for a sense of belonging. “If These Stones Could Talk” is a deeply personal film where we uncover the nuanced social relationships that tie the family to the land.
Meghan Mcdonough
Meghan McDonough is a filmmaker and journalist who directs and edits documentary shorts and series to better understand our world. She won Aesthetica/Audible’s Listening Pitch in 2023 to fund her documentary short Old Lesbians, which was commissioned by The Guardian and has screened at institutions, community centers, and film festivals around the world, including the California State Capitol, the British Film Institute, and the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York. Meghan has worked as a staff video journalist at Quartz and a producer/editor at NBCUniversal. Her freelance work has also appeared in Scientific American, Thomson Reuters Foundation, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and more, and has been supported by the Pulitzer Center. She received her BA in Film and Media Studies from Amherst College.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Lesbian Connection, the longest-running lesbian publication in the U.S. The documentary will uncover the lesbian print pioneers who tirelessly typed a new world into being, bringing isolated individuals across the country together and shaping American history through ink and paper.
Sidney Fussell
Sidney Fussell is a filmmaker and journalist in NYC. His documentary work has been supported by Catapult Film Fund, the Ford Foundation, Sundance Documentary Fund, and the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Wired Magazine, and Time.
Raised in Philly’s baptist church, Nathan Townsend was diagnosed with AIDS at the height of the epidemic, selling his life insurance to pay for his own funeral; then, a miracle — he didn’t die. Thanks to the invention of life-saving medications, Nathan is 70 today and a man of profound faith, using his second chance at life to combine sex-positive activism with old school spirituality.
