Sugar

Michael Gaston(Actor)
The versatile and charismatic actor Michael Gaston who is perhaps best known for his role on the critically acclaimed and audience heralded show “Jericho” on CBS, or as Stan Fine in the award winning drama “Far from Heaven,” has four films coming out in the next quarter, each role more diverse than the next. Gaston gets to shine as General Tommy Franks in the highly anticipated Lions Gate film “W” opposite Josh Brolin, for director Oliver Stone being released in October. He will also appear in the Warner Bros. film, “Body of Lies” based on the novel of the same name opposite Leonardo di Caprio for director Ridley Scott also being released in October. Then in November, Gaston will co-star in the Weinstein film “Hurricane Season” a basketball movie set in post Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana opposite Forrest Whitaker for director Tim Story. He also co-starts with fellow NYU Graduate School Alum Marsha Gay Harden, in the independent film “Home” which will get its premiere at the Montreal Film Festival this year. His successes are not limited to the big screen as Gaston also just nailed one of the lead roles in the new David Milch pilot “Last of the Ninth” for HBO. Carl Franklin directs the pilot which is currently filming in New York City. Gaston has recently appeared in films “Champions” for IFC and “Sugar,” to be released by Sony Classics in January. It was made by Sundance darlings Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (“Half Nelson”) and was a big hit there this year. Gaston has amassed a long line of film credits appearing in over 20 films in his career thus far. They include the films above, as well as “Ransom,” Cop Land,” “13 Days,” “The Crucible,” “Double Jeopardy,” and “High Crimes.” In television he starred in the series “Jericho” for CBS and “Blind Justice” for Steven Bochco on ABC. He has had recurring roles on numerous TV shows such as “Prison Break,” “Brotherhood,” “Ed,” “and “Law and Order” and has guest starred on “The Sopranos,” “ER,” “The West Wing,” “Homicide,” “Law and Order: SVU,” “JAG,” “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” “Spin City,” “The Practice,” “Ally McBeal,” and “Malcolm in the Middle” among others. A theater veteran, Gaston starred in the Broadway production of “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg,” with Eddie Izzard and many off-Broadway productions including Henry V in Central Park and and “Music From A Sparkling Planet .” Not limited to acting, Gaston is a talented screenwriter, with a production company called Flatfoot Films. One of his projects includes the screenplay adaptation to the book “A Prayer for the Dying,” with Ewan McGregor attached to star. Gaston is married with two children. An animal lover, Gaston has two dogs, three cats, and a great many chickens on his hay farm in upstate New York.

Paul Mezey (Producer)
Paul Mezey is a New York based independent producer and founder of Journeyman Pictures. Mr. Mezey has produced a number of critically acclaimed films including Maria Full of Grace (HBO Films) which received a 2005 Academy Award Nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role and Half Nelson (THINKFilm) starring Ryan Gosling which received a 2007 Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role. Recently completed projects include Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden’s baseball odyssey Sugar (Sony Pictures Classics/HBO Films) and Azazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Man, both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. Mr. Mezey is currently in post production on Sundance Lab Fellow Sophie Barthes’ feature debut Cold Souls starring Paul Giamatti, Emily Watson, and David Strathairn; and is developing a number of projects including David Riker’s The Girl and Joshua Marston’s upcoming feature The Fortress of Solitude, based on Jonathan Lethem’s National Bestseller. Other films produced by Mr. Mezey include: Angel Rodriguez (HBO Films) and Everyday People (HBO Films) directed by Jim McKay, Spring Forward (IFC Films) directed by Tom Gilroy and starring Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber, Our Song (IFC Films) directed by Jim McKay, The City (La Ciudad) directed by David Riker, Mississippi Blues documentary You See Me Laughin’ directed by Mandy Stein, and The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack directed by Aiyana Elliott, winner of the Artistic Achievement Award for documentary film at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. Mr. Mezey received the IFP/West Motorola Producer's Award at the Independent Spirit Awards in 2001 and was selected by Variety in 2004 as one of the "Ten Producers to Watch".

Rayniel Rufino (Actor)
Rayniel Rufino is a Dominican artist raised in Uptown New York. His interest lies on acting, poetry writing, rap, modeling and activism. Through out his teenage years, Rayniel has tried to pursue his passion in the entertainment business. He was an executive editor and producer of a show called sex sells. He served as a host at WNYE 91.5. And was also the creator of the radio special puppet show. Rayniel has been focued on his acting career working in films such as "Liberty Kid", "9 Digits" and in Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden's "Sugar".

Algenis Pérez Soto (Actor)
Algenis Pérez Soto was born in Quisqueya, Dominican Republic. He has been playing baseball since he was nine. He was chosen for the lead role of Miguel Santos in Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s film Sugar after an extensive casting search that spanned the United States and the Dominican Republic. Sugar is his film debut.

Ryan Fleck & Anna Bodden (Directors)
Writers and directors, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s first dramatic feature film, Half Nelson, premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and went on to win numerous prizes, including three Gotham Awards for Breakthrough Director, Actor, and Best Feature Film. The film also received two Independent Spirit Awards for its lead actors, Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps, and an Academy Award® nomination for Gosling as Best Actor. Fleck and Boden have also collaborated on several short films and documentaries over the past six years, including: Have You Seen This Man? (2002), Gowanus, Brooklyn (2004), and Young Rebels (2005).

The Band’s Visit

Eran Kolirin (Director)
Born in 1973, Eran Kolirin’s first work in film was his screenplay Zur - Hadassim , for which he won the Lipper Prize for best script at the Jerusalem International Film Festival, 1999. In 2004, Eran Kolirin wrote and directed The Long Journey, a film made for television. The Band’s Visit is Eran’s first feature film. Currently, Eran is writing his second feature film entitled Pathways in the Desert.

Women of Brukman

Isaac Isitan (Director)
Isaac Isitan was born in Turkey. He studied law at the University of Istanbul before launching into a film-producing and directing career. In Turkey, he founded the group Cinéma du Peuple and produced and directed many films, including Money, By Any Means Necessary, and The Voodoo.

He was also an ABC-TV correspondent in the Middle East from 1978 to 1980. He has been living in Canada since 1980 as a Canadian citizen, producing and directing documentaries and reports for the Canadian Broadcasting Centre and private broadcasters in Montreal.

Women of Brukman the movie>

Young@ Heart

Stephen Walker (Director)
Stephen Walker has directed 23 films for the British television networks BBC and Channel Four. He has also written two books, most recently Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima, which reached the New York Times Bestseller List, and King of Cannes, a riotous account of his two weeks at the famous film festival.

Bob Cilman (Choir Director)
Bob Cilman created the Young Heart Chorus in 1982. He is also the Executive Director of the Northampton Arts Council, a unique Arts Council that produces original programs and distributes the proceeds to local artists in grants.

He produced the premier of Richard Einhorn’s, “Voices of Light”, and the live soundtrack to the Carl Dreyer silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc”. He has produced numerous shows featuring older American performers including: the late Benny Waters, Emma Kelly, Buster Brown, Frankie Manning, Claude “Fiddler” Williams, Bucky Pizzarelli, Teri Thornton, Jimmy Scott, Hadda Brooks, Jimmy Slyde, Patato Valdes, Chocolate Armenteiros, Essie Mae Brooks, Beverly “Guitar” Watson and many others. He has also brought Richard Move, Shazia Mirza, Varla Jean Merman, David “Fathead” Newman”, Jibaro artists Ecos de Borinquen, and many other performers to the Academy of Music stage in Northampton, MA. He has also set up numerous exchanges between young artists in Western Massachusetts and groups such as the Harlem School of the Arts, the Performing Arts High School of New York, American Ballroom Theater and others. The Arts Council is best known for their annual events which include “Transperformance”, a day long music festival with local musicians re-interpreting music from well known artists, and “The Really Big Show”, an ode to the old Ed Sullivan Show. Cilman was born and raised in Rochester, New York. He dabbled in rock bands since he was 11. His first, the Torn Souls, had a corner on the bar mitzvah party market in Rochester. In his summer camp years he was in a band called BC and the Knights and then after college he formed the Self-Righteous Brothers. He spent a couple of years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and eventually received a bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in American History, but has learned much more from the members of the Young@Heart Chorus. He is married to furniture maker, Polly Cassel and they have two children, Stella and Eva.

History of the Young@Heart Chorus
When the Young@ Heart (Y@H) began in 1982 the members all lived in an elderly housing project in Northampton, Massachusetts, called the Walter Salvo House. Bob Cilman, the director of meals at the Salvo was approached by Judith Sharpe, a piano player, to form a chorus. The first group included elders who had lived through both World Wars. One of the members had fought in the Battle of the Somme (1916) as a 16 year old and another, Anna Main, lost her husband in the First World War. Anna was a stand-up comic who at the age of 88 told jokes that only she could get away with. She sang with Y@H until she was 100.
Read the complete history>

Michael Tollin

Mike Tollin has produced more than a dozen feature films, several award-winning Documentaries, and hundreds of hours of television, and currently has three prime-time television series in production. His films include Wild Hogs, a comedy for Touchstone Pictures starring John Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and Bill Macy about a group of middle-aged, wannabe bikers, which grossed nearly $250 million at the box office. Other films produced by Tollin include Coach Carter, Dreamer, Hardball, Varsity Blues, Summer Catch, Big Fat Liar, along with the Tollin-directed Radio and documentary Hank Aaron: Chasing The Dream, which won a Peabody Award and was nominated for an Academy Award.
In television, Tollin has won three Emmy Awards. He is Executive Producer of Smallville, currently in its eighth season, and One Tree Hill, now in its sixth season. Tollin also produced The Bronx is Burning, an eight-hour mini-series for ESPN about the 1977 Yankees, which premiered in July 2007. Tollin previously produced seven seasons of Arli$$ for HBO; ABC’s I’m With Her and The Days; What I Like About You for the WB, and several Nickelodeon series, including All That, Kenan & Kel, The Amanda Show, and “Sports Theatre with Shaquille O'Neal”. Tollin is on the Board of Common Sense Media and Children Now, two groups that focus on kids and media; and the Chasing the Dream Foundation, which awards scholarships to underprivileged youth.

Jaime Piña

Jaime Piña entered the Film Industry in 1974 in his native country Dominican Republic with the Paramount Picture venture to produce movies in the country through Cinema Dominicana,based out of La Romana,R.D. Piña has worked in Key Positions in some 15 Feature films filmed in the Dominican Rep., U.S.A.,Mexico,Puerto Rico, and Italy.

• “90 Miles”, Producer, 2007, director
• Joe Montagna “Sacred Waters”, Producer 2005-06 “The Lost City”, Production Supervisor 2004,director- Andy Garcia
• “In Search of a Dream”,co-director,1997
• “Para Vivir o Morir”,1ST.A.D.1996,director-R. Villalona
• “Bitter Sugar”, Producer 1994,director- Leon Ichaso
• “Jimmy’s Clan”,U.P.M. 1989,dir. Giorgio Cristallini
• “Serpent and The Rainbow”,UPM,187,director- Wes Craven
• ‘Wages of Fear”,Asistant Director,1978,director William Freidkin
• “Guaguasi”,Asociate Producer,1977,director Jorge Ulla
• “Pantaleon y las Visitadoras”,U.P.M.,1975,director- Mario Vargas LLosa

In between Feature Film Production, Piña has produced some 300 T.V. Commercials, 50 Music Videos, 20 documentaries. For the past ten years he resides in Miami,FL., and is considered an authority in Filming in the D.R. and Mexico. Currently he is working with director Leon Ichaso in the independent film :”Paraiso”, development phase to be shot in Dominican Republic and Miami in 2008.

Wiktor Grodecki

Was born on 25 February 1960 in Warsaw, Poland. He graduated from the Directing Department of the Polish Academy for Film, Drama and TV in Lodz in 1983 (the class of Wojciech Jerzy Has). The same year his feature documentary about Roman Polanski “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” had been invited to FILMEX in Los Angeles by Gary Essert. Grodecki had been granted a passport to travel by the Polish communist authorities but they refused to let him take his film… He decided to smuggle it out and, once in the U.S. – he resolved not to return to Poland and received political asylum.

Grodecki stayed in the States where he continued to work as a film and theatre director and editor. Among other works he directed a feature film “Him” loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” produced by Albert Milgrom and staged two plays by St.I.Witkiewicz – “They” and “Madman and the Nun” in Minneapolis, MN. In 1992 Wiktor Grodecki returned to Europe as a Supervising Director on “Night Train To Venice” starring Hugh Grant and Malcolm McDowell and between 1994 and 1997 he worked on his “Europe in transition” trilogy as a director/producer – “Not Angels But Angels” (1994), “Body Without Soul” (1996) and “Mandragora” (1998) – Audience Choice Award at Palm Springs Nortel Int’l Film Festival 1998(all films released in the U.S. and U.K.) “Mandragora” was the first feature film depicting the fate of runaway kids in the Czech Republic – Grodecki had received a letter of recognition from President Vaclav Havel as well as several prizes at international film festivals. After directing a romantic comedy for German TV Channel Pro7 “Ich wunsch dir Liebe” (English title “Wish List”)- written by Stewart Wade and starring Marianne Sagebrecht, Matthew Carriere, Catherine Flemming, Hark Bohm and Hardy Kruger Jr. – Grodecki developed his biggest project to date – “Insatiability” (Nienasycenie) based on the novel by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz – an epic, ironic tale about the collapse of Western Civilization as seen through the eyes of a confused young boy, growing up in today’s Europe… The film have been shot on sound stages in Vilnius, Lithuania and post-produced at the Barrandov Film Studios in the Czech Republic. It has been premiered at Berlin International Film Festival in 2004 and the same year Wiktor Grodecki has been awarded Screen Actors Guild Indie Award for Best Director in Los Angeles for “Insatiability”. The film has been released in the U.S. on March 21st 2006. Between 1998 and 2006 Grodecki also worked as film producer on many US projects being developed and shot in Eastern Europe , representing Lithuanian Film Studios in Vilnius, developing Riga Studios in Latvia and cooperating with Film Studios in Yalta, Ukraine, Barrandov in Prague and Babelsberg in Berlin. He developed projects for Promark Group (Executive Producer David Bixler), Capital Arts (Executive Producer Mike Elliott) and Baltic Film (Executive Producer Gary Tuck), among others.

Wiktor Grodecki is currently preparing a new film based on his screenplay “The Soul Of The Murdered Kingdom” - an ironic tale about Napoleon troops trying to re-introduce slavery on the island of Saint Domingue on behest of Thomas Jefferson... It will be shot in the Dominican Republic as a US-Dominican-Spanish – Polish co-production.

Nefertiti A. Strong

Nefertiti Strong is a force of nature. After starting her career in entertainment as a recording artist signed to Universal/Polygram and staring actress in Mario Van Peeble's Panther (1995), she set her sights on directing. With an eye for the camera, Nefertiti sought to join music with film by making musical documentaries with some of rap's superstars. Through Image Entertainment, she released two DVDs in 2002, Ice T: Sex Money and Guns and Juvenile and the UTP Live from New Orleans. Given her unique position as former recording artist, she was able to capture these rappers raw. In 2004, she directed and produced yet another DVD for Juvenile, through Ventura Distribution, called Juvenile Live from STL. That same year, she partnered with Nelly to bring Nelly and the St. Lunatics to DVD on Universal. Nefertiti brought her talents to such other productions as the 2001 Fashion Week with a commercial for BCBG, a Yanku Denim commercial in 2004, shooting Special Features for the proclaimed film "What the Bleep Do We Know?" in 2004 and filming a commercial for the GLADD Right to Marriage Campaign. She also produced a Sundance-selected short in 2004 entitled, "Phase 5" which also played at the Outfest Film Festival. Currently, Nefertiti is in preproduction for the new Patriot Pictures feature film, "Crenshaw." She is also the Producer and Partner of Monos En La Montana, the production company of the Dominican Republic's darling actor, Juan Fernandez; and President of her own company, Catch A Dream Entertainment, Inc., which is currently selling the film, Constellation by Jordan Walker Pearlman, and Fast Forward Girls, written by herself and Jennifer De Clue. In 2008, Nefertiti directed her first feature film for the Nu-Lite Cinema Black Christian Films division entitled, "Takin' A Leap Of Faith." Presently, Nefertiti and her producing team are currently in post-production of a controversial documentary based on California's Proposition 8.