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, a 2009 Gotham Award nomination 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.

My Neighbor My Killer is one of the rare documentaries to be accepted as an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival. The only non-competition film in the festival's history to have been honored with two screenings, it played to overflow audiences and powerful reviews. It has also been honored with invitations to screening across the globe, with a partial list including the Human Rights Watch International Film Festivals in London and New York, SILVERDOCS film festival in the Washington, D.C. area, the Hamptons International Film Festival, the Ojai International Film Festival, the Chicago International Film Festival, the second edition of the Galle International Film Festival in Sri Lanka, the inaugural DMZ Korean International Documentary Festival (DMZ Docs), the Festival des Libertés in Belgium and the Tri-Continental Film Festival in South Africa.

Journalist Philip Gourevitch, author of "We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Stories from Rwanda," has said of Aghion's work that it "captures quite precisely much of what is most compelling and unsettling about Rwanda's quest for justice after genocide."

Two of her previous films on the subject, Gacaca, Living Together Again in Rwanda? and In Rwanda We Say... The family that does not speak dies, are hour-long works which aired on the Sundance Channel and ARTE among other networks around the world. Both films have been used by peace-building organizations as a tool in understanding "heart and mind" issues in societies recovering from strife. They have also been screened in Rwanda—by NGOs as part of their training, and most remarkably, to tens of thousands of confessed genocide killers before their release from prison.

(The two hour-long titles are the first installments in the Gacaca Trilogy. Its final chapter, The Notebooks of Memory, has also just been completed.)

Earlier in 2009, Aghion released the feature documentary, Ice People, which explores the physical, emotional and spiritual adventure of doing science in Antarctica, the earth's most challenging environment. Described by Variety as "staggeringly beautiful," Ice People conveys the vast beauty, the claustrophobia, the excitement, and the stillness of an experience set to nature's rhythm. When it opened in New York, the film was a critic's pick in Time Out New York and New York Magazine, which called Ice People "immersive, mesmerizing," The New York Times wrote that it was "instantly compelling. Ice People sticks in the mind."

Aghion's first film, "Se Le Movio el Pisò" was the winner of the Havana Film Festival's 1996 Coral Award for Best Non-Latin American Documentary on Latin America. That film explored how slum dwellers in Nicaragua's capital had survived a series of natural and political 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 film, she worked in a variety of capacities including videographer, production and post-production 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.

Ice People is editor Nadia Ben Rachid's third collaboration with filmmaker Anne Aghion, following their work on Emmy-winner "In Rwanda we say... The family that does not speak dies," (2005) and the UNESCO Fellini Prize-winner, "Gacaca, Living Together Again in Rwanda?" (2003)

With the rare talent to work equally well with documentaries and features, Paris-based Ben Rachid has amassed dozens of film, television and commercial credits since 1997. She has edited all the films by the world-renowned director Abderrahmane Sissako, the latest of which is the 2006 feature, "Bamako," which played at major showcases around the world, including the Cannes and New York film festivals. Following its stellar box office performance in France, the film was distributed to critical acclaim worldwide, including in the U.S. via New Yorker Films. In 1999, her work on Sissako's "Life on Earth" earned Ben Rachid the Editor's Award at FESPACO (Ouagadougou Pan African Festival for Film and Television). The film premiered at Cannes and went on to collect numerous awards at festivals around the world, including the Golden Spire at the San Francisco International Film Festival.

Ben Rachid also works regularly with noted French director Yamina Benguigui, including on her 2002 feature "Inch'Allah Dimanche"; the documentary "The Perfumed Garden," which won Best Documentary for that year at the African and Caribbean Film Festival (Vues d'Afrique) in Montreal; and a segment of the acclaimed 1998 documentary "Mémoires d'immigrés."

Among numerous other projects, she edited Michka Saäl's 2005 "Beckett's Prisoners" for the National Film Board of Canada; the 1999 documentary "Woubi Cheri" for award-winning documentarians Philip Brooks and Laurent Bocahut; which garnered Best Documentary awards at the New Festival in New York, the Turin Festival in Italy, and the Transgender Festival in London; and Rachid Bouchareb's first feature,"My Family Honor."

Ben Rachid's commercial work includes the trailer for The Michael Jackson Tour, for legendary producer Tarek Ben Ammar. Among her credits as assistant editor are Roman Polanski's "Bitter Moon," "Frantic" and "Pirates"; Claude Berri's "Germinal" and "Uranus"; Roland Joffe's "City of Joy"; Jacques Perrin's "The Children of Lumière"; and Agneska Holland's "The Conspiracy."

Cameraman James Kakwerere has been working with Anne Aghion since she first embarked on her Gacaca Trilogy in 2000. Since 1998, he has worked at ORINFOR, the Office Rwandais d'Information, an umbrella group that oversees Rwanda's news and media organizations, as a cameraman and photo editor. Kakwerere first met Aghion while she was researching her first film on the Gacaca and working on HIV-AIDS programming for USAID and Rwanda Television. As a native Rwandan and the only person behind the camera who spoke Kinyarwanda, he has contributed significantly to MY NEIGHBOR MY KILLER and Aghion's three earlier films about the quest for justice in Rwanda.

When Kakwerere first began filming "GACACA, LIVING TOGETHER AGAIN IN RWANDA?" he had been trained for television and had to learn how to create the longer, in-depth shots used in film. During the Gacaca Trilogy he learned how to film with his ears as well as his eyes and integrate sound with the visual imagery. With the skills he accumulated working on the Trilogy, he was selected to film several major events in Rwanda, including a visit by the President of the World Bank. In addition to his work on MY NEIGHBOR MY KILLER, Kakwerere is now the lead cameraman at Rwanda Television.

Since 1990, Richard Fleming has traveled to the farthest reaches of the globe. In addition to camping in the frozen deserts of Antarctica, he has accompanied Kofi Annan around the world, flown missions over Kandahar with the U.S. Army Reserve, followed Imelda Marcos on the presidential campaign trail in the Philippines, and sweltered on the decks of a nuclear aircraft carrier plying the waters of the Persian Gulf.

Among his numerous credits are the documentaries 'From Kansas to Kandahar,' by noted director Cal Skaggs for the PBS series 'America at a Crossroads,' Show of Force's "Carrier Project," and 'Kofi Annan : Center of the Storm,' by renowned filmmaker David Grubin, both for PBS; 'Sumo East and West,' by Ferne Pearlstein, and 'Iron Butterfly, The Story of Imelda Marcos,' by Ramona Diaz, both for ITVS. Other credits include "Les Illuminations de Madame Narval,' by Charles Najman, for the Franco-German television channel Arte, and work as both a writer and recordist on Alex Wolfe's 'Santo Domingo Blues.' His dramatic credits include the multiple award-winning theatrical feature 'La Ciudad,' by David Riker. He rejoins director Aghion on Ice People, following his work on Emmy-winner 'In Rwanda we say... The family that does not speak dies.'

Fleming is also an accomplished writer, photographer, and amateur musicologist. His blog, A Brooklynite on the Ice, features the filmmakers' adventures during the four-month shoot in Antarctica. His first book, Walking to Guantanamo, already garnering glowing critical praise, chronicles Fleming's year-long walk across the island of Cuba. Walking to Guantánamo is available from Commons books.

A native Rwandan, ASSUMPTA MUGIRANEZA moved to France to train in clinical psychology and political science, but following the 1994 genocide, shifted to social and cognitive psychology. Her research and writings since, have focused on the hate language of genocide. While teaching in Paris, she began working with AGHION as the principal translator for the director's award-winning series of films. Her work made clear there was a need to help bridge the linguistic and cultural gap between ordinary Rwandans and filmmakers and other researchers. She returned to Rwanda full time in 2007, and the following year organized an international conference in Kigali on "Speaking, Thinking and Writing the History of the Genocide." Last year, she created a pilot program for national screenings and community discussions of AGHION's feature film, "My Neighbor My Killer," and has been working to found the IRIBA CENTER FOR MULTIMEDIA HERITAGE.

Jean Pierre Sagahutu has worked as Anne Aghion's Kinyarwanda interpreter since her visit to Rwanda in 2000. Over the years, his ability to put people at ease has been crucial for making people comfortable in front of the camera. When Anne and Jean-Pierre met, he had very little exposure to film and was mainly working with foreign print journalists and photographers reporting on the aftermath of the genocide. Since then, he has become the go-to interpreter in Rwanda for many documentary and narrative filmmakers.