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Bios/Filmography of Key
Production Personnel
Leon Gerskovic (Director) was born in Zagreb before Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia. As the son of a
former ambassador, he spent his formative years in the western hemisphere. When the Berlin
Wall fell, his family returned to Croatia where his father
tried to encourage Serbs and Croats to keep the peace. In 1992, war broke out, and at age
18, Gerskovic began taking TV crews to the front lines for WTN, a British television news
network. He came to the United States in 1994, earned a
degree in television production from Montgomery College (Maryland and established
Video Palette Productions, an independent production company specializing in digital video
productions. In 1998, Gerskovic wrote, produced and directed his first film, Sufis, a fiction film
which explored man’s search for soul in modern society. Gerskovic has also
worked as a cameraman and video technician for various documentary, news, corporate, and
government clients and currently works as a streaming media specialist. In 2000, Gerskovic
was invited to be a guest speaker for a Johns Hopkins course on Genocide and at Books and Ideas 2000 sponsored by the
Paul Peck Institute for Humanities. He has teamed up a second time with Erica
Ginsberg to co-direct Talking Threads, a web
documentary produced in response to the events of September 11.
Erica Ginsberg (Producer/Story
Editor/Web Producer) is
a freelance producer, researcher, and writer. She
has produced informational videos on international exchange programs for the U.S.
Department of State and one of these productions was honored with a Communicator Crystal Award of Excellence. With Leon Gerskovic, she
co-produced/directed Talking Threads and
her other current project is Avenue of
Aspirations: 16th Street and Washington DC, a living history
documentary about the different neighborhoods along this major Washington DC thoroughfare. Erica holds a B.A. in International
Affairs from the George Washington University, an M.A. in Film and Video from American University, and has also studied film in the Czech Republic and political science in Ireland. She
is an active member of the Women in Film and Video – Washington DC chapter and the online documentary
forum, the D-Word Community. She recently
served on the screening committee for the Silverdocs Film Festival in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Rob Shire (Co-Producer/Cinematography/Sound) has worked in the Washington and
Baltimore areas since 1994 as a freelance audio technician for local, national, and
international news bureaus and production companies so that he can remain active in
independent productions. He won an award from
Montgomery Community Television for a documentary about Habitat for Humanity, Building Humanity: The 1992 Jimmy Carter Work Project. He also shot and co-produced Leon Gerskovic’s
first film, Sufis.
Penny Lee (Editor) brings 19 years of editing
experience to the project. She is an award-winning Avid editor based in the Washington DC area. Her
clients have included PBS, National Geographic, Discovery Communications, BET, Video
Action Fund, and the American Red Cross. Recent
projects include National Geographic’s Inside Base Camp, an Emmy-award winning series
on experts in a variety of fields; The Children We Sacrifice, an independent documentary
about women survivors of incest in South Asian communities; and Against the Odds: The Next
Generation, a PBS documentary about the inspirational stories of students who overcame
adversity to receive the Horatio Alger National Scholarship.
Penny is active with the DC chapter of Women and Film and Video and
previously served on their Board, as their Vice President for Programming and the
Chairperson of the Image Makers Program, a program to mentor local teenagers in video
production.
Sandra Stojanovic and Saša
Brajovic (Field Producers – Serbia) both worked for B-92, the Serbian
opposition television station which continued to operate underground during the Milosevic
government. Sandra graduated from the film program at the University of Belgrade and has worked on many movies and
documentaries and freelanced as a cameraman for various television series. She served as
Director of Photography for the Yugoslav film Happy
for Two which was shown at festivals in Germany and Mexico. Saša
also graduated from the University of Belgrade with a major in film. He worked on
several 16mm shorts and was First Assistant Cameraman for documentaries Orthodox Christian Fate and Portrait of a Artist.
Dejan
Bošnjak (Field Producer - Bosnia) is a former law student from Mostar, Bosnia who is currently studying with a full
scholarship at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. Dejan also served as the Special
Assistant to the Director of the OSCE in Brcko. There he helped organize the 1996
municipal elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina, helped implement the return of refugees,
election results, and the monitoring of human rights.
Public
Communications, Inc (Fiscal Sponsor) is a not-for-profit public education
group dedicated to producing public interest documentaries and arts projects. PCI’s
past projects have been broadcast on PBS and have won everything from an Academy Award to
a CINE Gold Eagle.
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