Crew bios

Gabrielle Brady - Director, Writer and Producer

An Australian filmmaker who works in documentary and hybrid forms. She trained as a director at the International Film and TV School in Cuba (EICTV) and stayed three years, living and shooting there. The ten years after that took her between Cuba, Mongolia, Indonesia, the Central Australian desert and Europe. Her short Island was commissioned for the Guardian's documentary series and premiered at Sheffield in 2017. Island of the Hungry Ghosts is her first feature.

Poh Lin Lee - Narrative Practice Consultant

An Australian social worker with 12 years of narrative therapy behind her, with individuals, families and whole communities in several countries. Her interest is in new ways of answering trauma, injustice and the kind of power that shrinks people's lives, worked out together with the people she supports rather than handed to them. She teaches on the international faculty of the Dulwich Centre and on the Master of Narrative Therapy and Community Work at the University of Melbourne. For three years from 2011 she was a counsellor with the Christmas Island Torture and Trauma Service, the job at the heart of the film.

Michael Latham - Cinematographer

Studied at the VCA school of Film and Television and has shot both documentary and fiction since. His first feature documentary, Ukraine Is Not A Brothel, was also his first with director Kitty Green: it premiered in Venice, got 7 AACTA nominations and won Best Documentary. Next came The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul, winner of the Sundance short documentary prize, and later the Netflix original Casting JonBenet, another Sundance premiere. He also shot Luci Schroder's Sundance short Slapper and Rodd Rathjen's Cannes short Tau Seru. Both won best Australian short awards.

Katharina Fiedler - Editor

Cutting films since 2007, with work shown at the Berlinale, IDFA, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and plenty of other festivals. Her graduation film A Letter From Germany (dir. Sebastian Mez) travelled widely and won the Prix George Foundation at Visions du Réel in 2011. Metamorphosen, again with Mez, premiered at the Berlinale in 2013 and was up for the First Steps Award. My Name Is Salt (dir. Farida Pacha) took IDFA's First Appearance award and more than 30 other prizes, and earned her a Deutscher Kamerapreis nomination for editing. She's a Berlinale Talents alumna and lives in Berlin.

Leo Dolgan - Sound Designer

Studied sound engineering in Huesca, Spain, then sound for cinema at EICTV in Cuba. He's been responsible for sound on more than 15 features, among them Island of the Hungry Ghosts, Mi Querida Cofradía and One. After six years working abroad he settled in Barcelona. There he mixes, does sound post and teaches: he runs sound at the post house Moonlight Barcelona and teaches at the Catalonia Film School and Barcelona Activa. On the island he was one of a crew of three.

Aaron Cupples - Composer

A composer and record producer, born in Australia and based in London. He's worked with Blanck Mass, Spiritualized and The Drones, and releases music as Civil Civic. This is his first feature score. Almost all of it was played on oversized wire instruments that were stretched, tuned by hand, bowed and set vibrating with electromagnets. What comes out is a low, humming resonance for a film about isolation, migration and detention on a very old island.

Alexander Wadouh - Lead Producer

In the film business since 1999. He graduated in film production from the DFFB in 2006 and worked on international art-house features at Berlin's Essential Film, as well as for the French sales company Coproduction Office. Also in 2006 he set up Chromosom Film to develop and produce German and international projects. Its films have won German Film Prizes, a European Film Award and a Bronze Lion, and have played at festivals and in cinemas around the world.

Samm Haillay - UK Producer

Lead producer at Third Films, with eight features to his name, including coproductions with Sweden, Germany and Australia. He's a member of BAFTA, EAVE and ACE. In 2010 he sat on the Berlinale short film jury that hands out the Golden Bear. He leads groups for EAVE, Feature Expanded and the Venice College Cinema and runs training for Creative England, Film London and FACT. He's been a patron or board member at several festivals and also works as a film academic.

Alex Kelly - Australian Producer

An artist and filmmaker based in Mparntwe (Alice Springs), Central Australia. For ten years she worked with the social change arts company Big hART, as Creative Producer on Ngapartji Ngapartji and as National Producer from 2012 to 2014. On the documentary side she produced The Island and Nothing Rhymes with Ngapartji, co-produced The Namatjira Project, was production manager on Coniston: Telling it True and directed Queen of the Desert. She was Global Impact and Distribution Producer on This Changes Everything by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, and joined Maya Newell's KIDS (working title) as impact producer. A Churchill Fellowship in 2013 took her to the UK, Canada and the US to look at how documentaries drive social change. She's a 2016 Sidney Myer Creative Fellow.

Gizem Acarla - German Producer

A Turkish filmmaker and producer living in Cologne. While doing her master's in Film and TV in Istanbul she worked as a production manager and freelance producer on commercials, music videos and shorts. In 2014 she moved to Germany for postgraduate study at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. She then worked at Heimatfilm and took part in three international coproductions, one of which premiered at Cannes in 2015. That same year she founded her own company, Various Films.