March • 2023
It was great working with Francesca, she has been professional and able to deliver what she had promised. Hoping to work with her again in the future.
Turin, Metropolitan City of Turin, Italy
1 review$400 - $2000 / Day
Request QuoteFrancesca is a documentary filmmaker and her documentaries have been produced by Al Jazeera English, Arte, Canale 9. She works also as filmmaker, DoP and PD for BBC, Channel4 News, ARD, NHK, Al Jazeera Arabic, Radio-Canada Info, Scottish Documentary Institute, Rai Cinema, Yahoo, Discovery Channel. She's a Canon Ambassador. A visual journalist with a cross-media background, she has been focusing on social issues, conflicts, gender and migration for 10 years, covering stories about female rebel guerrillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Baghdad Marxist feminist activists, Central American migrants fleeing the organized crime and the recent war in Ukraine.
March • 2023
It was great working with Francesca, she has been professional and able to deliver what she had promised. Hoping to work with her again in the future.
A small group of women and their children struggle to illegally pass the border between Mexico and the United States. Dariella (24) and Mirna (43), are two Honduran women who decided to escape the extortions from Honduran organized crime and look for a better life in the USA. With their kids and other relatives, they join the ‘Migrant Caravan’ in November 2018 to reach Tijuana, Mexico, where they attempt to cross the border. After failing a few attempts, they are rejected by the American Border Patrol and forced to live for a few weeks in a shelter. Exhausted, Dariella and Mirna decide to pay a coyote (smuggler) and cross illegally into the States. In San Diego they are arrested and registered by the USBP (US Border Patrol). Before being released, the Immigration office issues them with ankle monitors, with the duty of wearing those while waiting the results of the asylum requests. The women travel to Louisville, Kentucky, where they are hosted by a sponsor, Ms Vonnette, a wealthy Republican voter and senior Army officer, who wishes to help migrants. After a few days living together in Vonnette’s house, Dariella and her son leave and rent a small apartment where they can live with other young Honduran relatives. Mirna and her family remains with Ms Vonnette, who help her to fulfill the multiple immigration requirements for the asylum request. Dariella can’t work regularly due to the ankle bracelet and she’s often excluded even from the black market. She sends money to her mother in Honduras when she can, but she doesn’t manage to earn enough to pay the attorney. The different choices and social contexts will put distance between the two women, affecting their future and the fulfillment of their dreams.
April 2020. Alzano Lombardo, province of Bergamo. Epicenter of the Covid-19 epidemic. The numbers show that here the incidence of the virus is second only to that of Wuhan. A trip alongside the volunteers of the Italian Red Cross, in their home intervention shifts, and in the hospitals of the area to collect the testimonies of doctors and nurses who constantly work in emergencies. No voice overs, but siren sounds alternating with suspended silences, voices muffled by masks or scared. During the house-to-house, door-to-door interventions, the choice of relatives is consummated: accept that the family member, presumed infected, is taken to the hospital without certainty of being able to see him again or try to fight the virus at home? Behind the cold statistics a united humanity struggling daily to continue life.
A young Italian doctor thrust into a COVID-19 ICU ward grapples with isolation and uncertainty with no end in sight. To cope with the onslaught of coronavirus cases, Italy rushed 10,000 resident doctors into service during the first wave of the global pandemic. Dr Alessandro Galli, 31, is one of them. The young Italian resident volunteered to serve on the front lines of the coronavirus epicentre in Europe, a daunting task. At the renowned Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo, Galli joins other physicians looking after COVID-19 patients in critical condition in the intensive care unit. His daily encounters with death and isolation force him to question his actions and the need for control and balance during this time of unprecedented uncertainty.
A volunteer medical battalion in Ukraine provides first aid assistance and evacuates civilians and wounded soldiers from the front lines. “There are so many injured people, injured physically and mentally. There is simply no chance for us to stop,” says 27-year-old Yana Zinkevych, the founder of Hospitallers, a battalion of volunteer medics in Ukraine. Yana taught herself tactical first aid when she ditched medical school and joined a unit of volunteer fighters in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. It was then, while fighting against Russian forces in 2014, that she realised her mission was to help injured comrades. Today, her battalion is made up of several hundred men and women who provide first aid assistance to wounded soldiers and civilians on Ukraine’s front lines. Yana runs combat first aid courses, trains volunteers in the use of firearms and organises transport to the front lines. “I organise things, I share my experience, I’m good at it but this is not exactly what I would like to do,” says the commander of the Hospitallers Medical Battalion when recounting how she no longer is able to go to the front lines because she is in a wheelchair, paralysed from the waist down. As the war in Ukraine rages on, our film follows an unstoppable woman and her team of medics as they work tirelessly to protect the injured from the horrors of the war.
Since October 2019 the youth of Bagdad have been protesting in the streets. The government’s response has been brutal suppression with thousands injured and a death toll in the hundreds.
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