Emily Strong
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, DIRECTOR
EMILY STRONG is an award-winning filmmaker and location sound mixer. Her directing work celebrates heritage through the lens of food, culture, and immigration history and patterns.
Emily produced Keep Moving Forward (Big Sky Documentary Film Festival Official Selection) and A Letter For Sang-Ah (CAAMFest Loni Ding Award for Social Justice). She was selected as a DOC NYC, HBO Documentary Films, and Topic Studio’s 40 Under 40 honoree in 2020, and received a NYC Artist Corps Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) in 2021 for her documentary, Coming of Heritage, and was one of the 2022 recipients of Kartemquin Films’ Peng Zhao and Cherry Chen AAPI Voices Fund for the film.
In 2022, she was presented the “Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing” award in the motion pictures documentary category from the Cinema Audio Society for her work on the Academy Award winning documentary, Summer of Soul (dir. by Questlove | prod. Joseph Patel) and has worked as a location sound mixer on other notable works such as Attica (Academy Award nominee 2022), Netflix’s Taylor Swift: Miss Americana (Sundance 2019), and Conan O’Brien’s Conan Must Go on HBO Max.
Sebastián Pinzón Silva
CINEMATOGRAPHER
SEBASTIÁN PINZÓN SILVA is a Colombian documentary filmmaker. He studied film and television at the Savannah College of Art and Design and a master’s degree in documentary media at Northwestern University in Chicago. His directorial work has been screened at festivals such as Locarno, True/False, FICCI, SFFILM, Camden, RIDM, and New Directors/New Films and has received support from Catapult, Sundance, Visions SudEst, the National Cinematography Fund of Colombia, and Nia Tero. His film Palenque won Best Latin American Short in FICValdivia in 2017.
Sebastian was an assistant editor for Minding the Gap (2019 Oscar Nominee). He has since worked as an editor and cinematographer for productions for National Geographic, Honnold Foundation, and the Truth Commission of Colombia. He has been recognized with awards from the Directors Guild of America, Cinélatino, and Rencontres de Toulouse, among others. Sebastián is a Sundance Documentary Fellow and was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2019. He is co-founder of Jarana Cine, SITE Collective, and Video Consortium Colombia, a global network of support and connection between documentary filmmakers.
TEAM
diane quon
PRODUCER
DIANE QUON is an Academy Award-nominated producer who worked as a marketing executive at NBC and at Paramount Pictures in LA before moving back to her hometown of Chicago. Diane has produced multiple documentaries including: the Oscar and Emmy-nominated, Peabody and Sundance award-winning film, Minding the Gap directed by Bing Liu (POV, Hulu); Oscar short-listed Bad Axe directed by David Siev (SXSW 2022, IFC Films); Emmy-nominated Finding Yingying directed by Jiayan “Jenny” Shi (SXSW 2020, MTVDocs); The Dilemma of Desire with Peabody Award-winning director Maria Finitzo (SXSW 2020, Showtime); For the Left Hand (PBS) directed by Gordon Quinn and Leslie Simmer; Emmy-nominated Wuhan Wuhan ( POV) directed by Yung Chang with producing partners Donna Gigliotti (Hidden Figures, Silver Linings Playbook) and Peter Luo for Starlight Media (Crazy Rich Asians); Surf Nation (PBS, Mountainfilm Telluride 2022); Breaking the News (Tribeca 2023, Indie Lens) and aka Mr. Chow (Telluride 2023, HBO). Diane is also developing a fiction feature based on the New York Times best-selling book, “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet”.
Diane is an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences member, a Television Academy member, and a PGA member. She is a recipient of the 2020 Cinereach Producer Award, and is a Sundance Creative Producing Fellow, an IFP Cannes Producer Fellow and a Film Independent Fellow. She is the very proud mother of four.
Sam Paakkonen
CINEMATOGRAPHER
SAM PAAKKONEN is a cinematographer and editor based in New York City, specializing in documentary and commercial projects. After graduating from Tribeca Flashpoint College in Chicago with a focus in post-production, he has produced and edited for major companies including Business Insider, Bloomberg News, Washington Post, Great Big Story, AJ+, and Voice of America.
Sam views creativity as a way of operating and strives to share something new with every project.
grace sin
PRODUCER
GRACE SIN is a producer and consultant committed to supporting underrepresented filmmakers and championing projects with a strong social justice impact. She has produced non-fiction content for Netflix, HBO, HULU, CNN, NatGeo, and more. Recent credits include Phoenix Rising (Sundance 2022, Dir. Amy Berg) for HBO, Look at Me: XXXTentacion (SXSW 2022, Dir. Sabaah Folayan) for Hulu, and In The Company of Rose (DOCNYC 2022, Dir. James Lapine). She has collaborated with partners including Imagine Documentaries, RadicalMedia, Anonymous Content, and A24. Her company, PARADOXIC, is currently developing a non-fiction series with Story Syndicate, a scripted web-series with BricTV, and two independent scripted projects.
Brent Bandemer
EDITOR
BRENT BANDEMER is an award-winning Chicago-based filmmaker and freelance editor specializing in documentary and branded docu-style content. Past clients include Communities in Schools, Unite Here, and Gatorade.
After studying post-production at Columbia College Chicago, he was accepted into Oscar-nominated Chicago documentary house Kartemquin Films’ internship program. His film Keep Moving Forward, about a Vietnam veteran who finds peace from his PTSD through Disney, had its world premiere at the 2017 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.