Hayder Mousa Daffar currently resides in Baghdad, Iraq, where he has lived his entire life. Daffar matriculated from Baghdad University and went on to a graduate program of film at the Baghdad School of Fine Arts. Due to a lack of resources, he did not have access to video camera during school, let alone film equipment. As such, Daffar honed his eye by using a 35 mm still camera that was donated to him by a German diplomat. After the fall of Baghdad, Daffar, then working as a cashier in the Palestine Hotel, offered his services as a translator and fixer for free to journalists and diplomats, so long as they promised to tell any American producers they might know that Daffar was "The Iraqi filmmaker with No Camera". Within a few months, Daffar came in contact with Aaron Raskin of Harbinger Media, and the two rapidly began to assemble the Iraq Eye Group, an Iraqi run film collective.
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Aaron Raskin graduated from Columbia University in 2002 with a strong desire to make media. He promptly dove headfirst into a number of short films and documentary features, the most successful of which was The Dreams of Sparrows (2005), which premiered at SXSW, toured a number of festivals and won critical acclaim from a large number of television and magazine journalistic outlets. Raskin's work has consistently focused on socially conscious issues, marginalized subjects or otherwise obscure stories that deserve to be told.
Kianne Sadeq is an Emmy award winning news producer who has worked in Baghdad for CNN, NBC and others for the past five years. Kianne is truly an expert at news media in Iraq, having shot, edited, produced and otherwise created documentary coverage of the conflict and the people caught in the crossfire.
Ali Taleb is a passionate young Iraqi filmmaker currently living in Sweden as a refugee and documenting the Iraqi refugee experience in Jordan, Syria and elsewhere. He has continuously documented the life of Iraqis from the start of the war on, creating short stories, documentaries and news packages for audiences worldwide. His last film, LOST GIRL, screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and the AFI Festival in 2008. His most recent project is a series of mini-docs exploring the refugee experience, including one about being smuggled into Sweden and one about being forced to leave the country.
