Anne Aghion

As a filmmaker, Anne Aghion has been drawn to places as far-ranging as rural Rwanda, the ice fields of Antarctica and the slums of Managua. She has been praised by critics both as a director of unique and poetic vision, and a documentarian who conveys a strong sense of the people and places she covers. Her work has also earned her, among other honors, a UNESCO Fellini Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, an Emmy, and the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival's Nestor Almendros Award for courage in Filmmaking. Her new feature documentary "My Neighbor My Killer" caps nearly ten years of filming in post-genocide Rwanda, where a daring experiment in reconciliation and justice-the Gacaca Law (pronounced ga-CHA-cha)-has been put in place. There, over time, Aghion charted the emotional impact of a system of local open-air courts that adjudicates genocide crimes, and returns killers to their homes in exchange for confessions. 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 film, she worked in a variety of capacities including videographer, production and postproduction manager with filmmakers such as Richard Leacock & Valérie Lalonde, and Judith Abitbol, and for documentaries aired on major cable networks such as Canal+ and ARTE. Aghion was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and has received repeat grants from the Soros Documentary Fund, the Sundance Documentary Fund, and the United States Institute of Peace. She also received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Compton Foundation, and the Peter S. Reed Foundation. In addition, she was able to generate funding for the Gacaca Trilogy from the Austrian Development Agency, the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swiss Development Cooperation, and Oxfam Novib thanks to the significant impact of "Gacaca." Anne Aghion holds a Bachelor of Arts Magna Cum Laude in Arab Language and Literature from Barnard College at Columbia University in New York, and following her studies, spent two years living in Cairo.