Aghion presented clips from Living Antarctica—in which she tries to convey the cold and the scale and the enclosing silence (a silence unlike anything most people have ever known, she notes)—and shared information about her experience at the American Museum of Natural History's upcoming Polar Weekend on Saturday and Sunday [March 10 & 11, 2007].
In April 2005, she was nominated to a prestigious one-year Guggenheim Fellowship in order to pursue her filmmaking work as freely and independently as possible. Her most recent films, In Rwanda we say... The family that does not speak dies and Gacaca, Living Together Again In Rwanda?, have received accolades around the world. For Gacaca, which the film trade Variety called “an impressive docu,” Aghion received the Fellini Prize from UNESCO.
Journalist and Rwanda expert Philip Gourevitch, author of We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Stories from Rwanda, commented that “The film captures quite precisely much of what is most compelling and unsettling about Rwanda’s quest for justice after genocide.”
Broadcast on French television yielded “Special Picks” from eight of the country’s top national publications, along with reviews calling it “remarkable,” and “riveting,” and praising Aghion’s “open, human approach.”
When both films aired on Sundance Channel in April 2004 to mark the Tenth Commemorations of the genocide, the Washington Post called In Rwanda we say… “astonishing,” and the Connecticut Post wrote these were “two of the best documentaries you are likely to see this year,”
Her first film, Se le moviò el piso (The Earth Moved Under Him) – A Portrait of Managua is the winner of the Havana Film Festival’s 1996 Coral Award for Best Non-Latin American Documentary on Latin America. The film explores how slum dwellers in Nicaragua’s capital survived series of natural, political and economic disasters.
For most of her life, Aghion has been a dual resident of New York and Paris. She spent the first eight years of her career in both editorial and administrative capacities at The New York Times Paris bureau, and at the International Herald Tribune.
Moving into the film/television industry, she worked in a variety of capacities including videographer, production and post-production manager with filmmakers such as Richard Leacock and Valérie Lalonde, and for documentaries aired on major cable networks such as Canal+ and ARTE.
In addition, Aghion was the Director of International Production and Development for Pixibox, Europe’s top digital animation house. She holds a degree in Arab Language and Literature from Barnard College at Columbia University in New York, and following her studies, spent two years living in Cairo.
- Complied from the Barnard News Center and AnneAghionFilms.com |
