The Film Creative Team

RICHARD ROWLEY (director, cinematographer, editor). Over the course of fifteen years, Richard Rowley, co-founder of Big Noise Films, has made multiple award-winning documentary features including Fourth World War and This Is What Democracy Looks Like. His shorts and news reports are also regularly featured on and commissioned by leading outlets including Al Jazeera, BBC, CBC, CNN International, Democracy Now!, and PBS. Rowley is a co-founder of the Independent Media Center. Rowley has been a Pulitzer Fellow, Rockefeller Fellow, a Jerome Foundation Fellow, and a Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellow.

JEREMY SCAHILL (producer, writer) is a co-founder, with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, of THE INTERCEPT. He was previously National Security Correspondent for The Nation magazine and is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is author of the New York Times best-seller Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books, 2007). Nation Books released Scahill's second book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, simultaneously with the film.

Scahill has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria, Yemen, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere across the globe. Scahill is a frequent guest on a wide array of programs, appearing regularly on The Rachel Maddow Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Democracy Now! He has also appeared on ABC World News, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, BBC, al Jazeera, CNN, The NewsHour, and Bill Moyers Journal.

Scahill’s work has sparked several Congressional investigations and won some of journalism’s highest honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award, in 1998 for foreign reporting and in 2008 for his book Blackwater. Scahill is a member of the Writers Guild of America, East.

ANTHONY ARNOVE (producer) is co-founder of the non-profit creative group Civic Bakery. Arnove wrote, directed and produced The People Speak with Howard Zinn, Chris Moore, Josh Brolin, and Matt Damon. The documentary is the film companion to Howard Zinn’s bestselling book A People’s History of the United States and its primary source companion, Voices of a People’s History, which Arnove co-edited with Zinn. The People Speak premiered on the History Channel in 2009.

International commissions of The People Speak include an original production in Britain, written and directed by Arnove and Colin Firth, broadcast in 2010, and a second original production in Australia, broadcast in 2012.

Arnove is the editor of several books including Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal. His latest books are The People Speak, co-edited with Colin Firth, and Howard Zinn Speaks.

BRENDA COUGHLIN (producer) is co-founder of the non-profit creative group Civic Bakery. Coughlin produced the 2009 (US) and 2010 (UK) The People Speak documentaries. Since 2014, she was worked with Laura Poitras, first as distribution producer for CITIZENFOUR, which won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary, then as producer of ASTRO NOISE, Poitras' 2016 solo museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and of Poitras' feature documentary Risk, which premiered at the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2016.

She has been a fellow in the Sundance Institute Women Filmmakers Initiative and both a fellow and a creative advisor at the Sundance Institute Creative Producing Lab and Stories of Change Lab.

With Anthony Arnove and historian Howard Zinn, she co-founded the non-profit organization Voices of a People’s History, which runs performing arts and education programs in communities and schools through the United States.

DAVID RIKER (writer, editor) is an American screenwriter and film director. Riker is a graduate of the New York University’s Graduate Film School where, in 1992, he made his first fictional film, The City. The short received critical acclaim and, among other accolades, won the Gold Medal for Dramatic Film at the Student Academy Awards and the Student Film Award from the Directors Guild of America.

His 1998 feature La Ciudad (The City), a neo-realist film about the plight of Latin American immigrants living in New York City, won awards at the SXSW, Havana, San Sebastian, and Human Rights Watch film festivals. His latest film, The Girl, premiered at 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. Riker received the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance as co-writer of Sleep Dealer. He is a member of the Writers Guild of America, East and teaches at Columbia University.

DAVID HARRINGTON (music supervisor) and KRONOS QUARTET (original score, formed in 1973). For nearly forty years, the Kronos Quartet — David Harrington, John Sherba (violins), Hank Dutt (viola), and Jeffrey Zeigler (cello) — has pursued a singular artistic vision, combining a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to expanding the range and context of the string quartet.

In the process, Kronos has become one of the most celebrated and influential groups of our time, performing thousands of concerts worldwide, releasing more than forty-five recordings of extraordinary breadth and creativity, collaborating with many of the world’s most eclectic composers and performers, and commissioning more than 750 works and arrangements for string quartet.

In 2011, Kronos became the only recipients of both the Polar Music Prize and the Avery Fisher Prize, two of the most prestigious awards given to musicians. The group’s numerous awards also include a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance (2004) and Musicians of the Year (2003) from Musical America.