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Laura Bialis
Producer/Co-Director
Laura graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in History in 1995. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television.
Among the films she made her first year at USC was Attitude, a short documentary about thirteen year-old musician and athlete Tyler Dumm, who is blind and disabled. Attitude captured, in a very honest way, Tyler’s energy, creativity, and personality — and serendipitously introduced Laura to the documentary genre. The film was honored later that year at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.
TAK FOR ALT: Survival of a Human Spirit, grew directly from her experiences with Attitude. Laura, with her two colleagues from USC, Broderick Fox and Sarah Levy, took Holocaust Survivor Judy Meisel back to Europe to re-trace her steps during the war, from the Kovno ghetto through the Stutthof concentration camp to her ultimate liberation and recuperation in Denmark.
In 2001, Laura completed Daybreak Berlin, a narrative docu-drama based on the wartime memoirs of Ilse-Margret Vogel, a German artist and anti-nazi resister who worked in Berlin’s Underground movement. After obtaining the rights to Mrs. Vogel’s memoir, Laura interviewed her extensively, working with Vogel in the transition of her story from page to screen. The film has been screening in festivals across the country, and recently was awarded First Prize in the Kodak National Student Film Competition.
Through Sirena Films, Laura produces and directs documentaries. She is also working on a narrative feature, which she plans to direct in the near future.
Broderick Fox
Co-Director/Editor
Broderick spent several of his formative his early childhood years in Japan, exploring Tokyo’s streets and taking photographs, later writing short stories inspired by the images.
As an undergraduate, Broderick attended Harvard University, where he studied an eclectic mix of marine biology, creative writing, painting, and documentary filmmaking.
Broderick received his MFA in production from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television, where he focused on screenwriting, directing, and editing. It was here where his original script love, death, & cars was selected as one of four graduate projects to be produced at USC in the fall of 1999.
Broderick is presently completing a Ph.D. in Critical Studies at USC, writing a dissertation investigating manifestations of, and potentials for, subjectivity and autobiography on film and video.
Integrating his film/videomaking and critical endeavors, Broderick’s production works of late have fittingly embraced the new amateur potentials of digital video and PC based digital editing--playing around with notions of “home movies” and seeking out new forms of audiovisual autobiography.
Broderick continues to work professionally as an editor on various documentary and narrative projects. He has also penned two feature scripts and continues to strike a balance between narrative and critical writing. A recent critical work of Broderick’s was published in the Summer 2001 issue of Film Quarterly.
A Silverlake, Los Angeles resident and artist, Broderick was in Berlin for four months last summer, working as assistant director and editor on German filmmaker (and boyfriend) Alexander Pfeuffer’s Frühstück? (Breakfast? 2002). Broderick is in pre-production on his next documentary project, Death and Dying for Dummies, a how-to guide to end-of-life decision making and other after-death considerations, intended to demystify and destigmatize discourse on death and dying. He is also at work on two new feature scripts, one of which, Migration, he hopes to direct as an independent feature within the next two years.
Sarah Levy
Co-Director/Cinematographer
Sarah Levy is an award-winning cinematographer of documentary and narrative films. Her work has aired on PBS, VH1, A&E, CBS, the Sundance Channel, Showtime, and in festivals worldwide.
Sarah received her MFA from the USC School of Cinema-Television where she was awarded the Thomas B. Bush Memorial Scholarship for Excellence in Cinematography. In 2001, Sarah received the prestigious Arthur Miller Heritage Award from the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) and the Kodak Emerging Filmmaker honor for her body of work from USC.
In 1998, Sarah co-directed and shot "Tak for Alt, Survivor of a Human Spirit," a documentary featured in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Contemporary Documentary series for 2000 – "A survey of outstanding recent work in the documentary field." She is currently shooting a Roger Weisberg PBS documentary about foster kids aging out of the system and a series for VH1 about teenage plastic and reconstructive surgery.