Attending Filmmakers & Special Guests

Walters will be discussing TRANSCENDING BOUNDARIES: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE CENTRAL ALBERTINE RIFT TRANSFRONTIER PROTECTED AREA NETWORK and INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT IN TANZANIA: HEALTHY PEOPLE, HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT.
 
Todd Walters is the Founder and Executive Director of International Peace Park Expeditions (IPPE) an organization that applies experiential learning within international peace parks to foster an interdisciplinary approach to leadership and collaboration, build a network dedicated to the advancement of peace parks, and support the development of local communities.

Walters holds a Masters in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from the School of International Service at American University, where he focused his research on International Peace Parks and Environmental Peacebuilding. He is a National Outdoor Leadership School certified adventure guide with wilderness first responder (WFR) medical training, and has led expeditions around the globe. He wrote the entry "Experiential Peacebuilding" for the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace.

Webster will be discussing AMAZON GOLD.
 
Donovan Webster is a journalist and author. A former senior editor for Outside magazine, he now writes for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Best Life, Vanity Fair, Men’s Health, Garden & Gun, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. He is also Interim Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, and an instructor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He lives with his family outside Charlottesville, Virginia, United States.

In 1996, he co-founded Physicians Against Landmines/Center for International Rehabilitation (CIR). An international, non-governmental humanitarian organization, CIR sponsors wheelchair and prosthetics programs, plus prosthetics-fabrication training and disability advocacy in post-conflict nations worldwide. In 1997, as part of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, CIR was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2006, working with the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Disabilities, CIR was central to the UN’s Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities, the most-rapidly ratified UN Convention to ever gain approval by the UN General Assembly. He currently serves as CIR’s vice-chairman. In 2001, he became an honorary chief of the Kachin hill tribes of northern Burma.

He wrote “Traveling the Long Road to Freedom, One Step at a Time,” which was published in Smithsonian magazine; this article was recently used in the English language and literature pre-release material (AQA).
In 2006 and 2007, he was co-leader of the expedition Running the Sahara: an on-foot crossing of North Africa from Senegal to the Suez in Egypt. The expedition was filmed and edited into a documentary film, Running the Sahara, narrated by Matt Damon and released in 2007 with the logistics support of Sam Rutherford at www.prepare2go.com. The Running the Sahara project began in Senegal, went through Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Libya, before culminating in Egypt. Runners included Ray Zahab and Kevin Lin.

In July and August 2010, he and photographer Ron Haviv traveled to Madre de Dios state in southeast Peru for Smithsonian magazine. There they documented the environmental destruction of the upper-Amazon basin rainforest by illegal gold mining, a practice that has increased exponentially due to a recent leap in gold prices. A documentary-film team followed their investigation, resulting in the compelling film, “Amazon Gold”.

Weeks will be discussing WHERE THE YELLOWSTONE GOES.
 
Hunter directed and produced award-winning films Where the Yellowstone Goes, Ride the Divide, and 10MPH. In 2013, he's releasing his 5th feature documentary called WALTER and will start filming a documentary about the Clean Water Act based largely around the Potomac River.

Wilson will be discussing TRANSCENDING BOUNDARIES: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE CENTRAL ALBERTINE RIFT TRANSFRONTIER PROTECTED AREA NETWORK.
 
Cory Wilson is Founder and Director of Collaboration at The Collaborative, a social venture dedicated to providing creative solutions to social entrepreneurs, nonprofit organizations and philanthropies, while simultaneously empowering the next generation of creative professionals dedicated to social change. Cory holds a BFA in New Media from the State University of New York, where he focused on the convergence of technology, storytelling, design, communications and art. You can see The Collaborative’s work at http://thecollaborative.net.

Young will be introducing THE LAST OCEAN.
 
Peter Young is an award-winning documentary cameraman and producer. He came to filmmaking the long way, spending the first ten years of his working on the land and sea over which time he developed a strong connection to the great outdoors and people that live and work there.  

Peter established Fisheye Films in Christchurch, New Zealand  in 1997 and has worked as a freelance director and cameraman ever since. He has credits in well over a hundred documentaries, among them; BBC’s Blue Planet Series, a Giant Squid documentary for prime time Discovery, he filmed over fifty episodes of New Zealand’s longest running documentary series, Country Calendar and the final tribute documentary for Sir Edmund Hilary. He produced and shot the award winning series Hunger for the Wild for TVNZ and is now working on his second series of Coasters.  

The Last Ocean is Peter’s first feature documentary. A project he began in 2006, this labour of love has expanded into the formation of a Charitable Trust to promote the protection of the Ross Sea, Antarctica, the world’s most pristine marine ecosystem.

Peter has won many awards for his skills and creativity behind the camera, both shooting and producing, but it's the opportunity to work with great teams and telling great stories that keeps him in the business.