The Producers

Rachel Anderson, a Sundance award wining cinematographer, has filmed around the world in several conflict zones including Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, South Sudan, and Nepal for CNN “Hero’s”, PBS Frontline, Human Rights Watch, and independent feature documentaries First To Fall and E-TEAM.

After participating in a Fulbright sponsored Journalism program based in Cairo, Rachel graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Journalism school where she filmed and co-produced a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award winning doc Breaking Down Barriers. Rachel officially made the move to Cairo, Egypt in 2010.

During the 2011 Egyptian revolution Rachel worked as a videographer and field producer for PBS Frontline documentaries: Gigi’s Revolution, and The Brothers. Her footage from the uprising is also included in multiple long form documentaries including BBC’s This World, Egypt – Children of the Revolution, PBS’s Before the Spring: After the Fall, independent films Zero-Silence and Uprising, and most recently Frontline’s 2013 follow-up documentary, Egypt in Crisis.

Rachel’s directorial debut feature documentary First To Fall was borne of a 7-month journey spanning the Libyan war. She felt the need to understand the young fighters and the Libyan people whose backyards became an active frontline. This motivation became the backbone of First To Fall. The film had its World Premier screening at the International Documentary Film Festival (IDFA) in late 2013, and will be showing during the spring season of 2014 in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, and FIGRA Festival in France.

Rachel is currently based out of Brooklyn, NY.

Making The Film

In February of 2011, just days after the Libyan Revolution began, I drove across the border from Egypt and set up camp in Benghazi. There I met Tarek and Hamid, two Libyan Canadian expatriates who, having never so much as touched a gun in their lives, abandoned their relatively comfortable lives in Canada to join the violent fight to liberate their motherland from Gaddafi's tyranny. I followed them from their temporary homes to the soccer fields, to hookah spots, and finally to the frontline battlefields. I watched them grow from boys into hardened soldiers. I witnessed firsthand how armed conflicts irrevocably transform generations. For Tarek and Hamid, transformations occurred not on the battlefield, but in the downtime between their headlong rushes into danger. That is why, when everyone else turned off their cameras, I turned mine on. On the surface, my film chronicles a specific moment of the Arab Spring: Libya’s eight-month revolution for independence. I was there from the very start and stuck through until the rebels’ gunfire celebrations in the streets of Tripoli. But I did not stick around to see Gaddafi brought to justice. I stuck around for Tarek and Hamid—to understand what drove them and how war changed them.