Three people with a deep interest and a shared passion have come together on this project. Between them, they have years of experience in the Middle East, in Central Asia and in Greece.

The Filmmakers

Bill Megalos is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose series of mini-dramas on family planning won the World Health Organization’s Global Award for Media Excellence in Beijing in 1985. He has managed to combine a career as a director, producer, and cinematographer with teaching at the university level, as well as leading workshops around the world. He has photographed over 30 full-length documentaries for PBS, the BBC and Channel 4 (UK) and has filmed in over 50 countries. Megalos has been on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Pepperdine University, USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, and the Maine Media Workshops. He was a founder and Director of Programming at The Recovery Network, a cable television, internet, and radio network, where he created six television series and produced 120 hours of programming. He traveled with Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Laureate for four years, filming the feature documentary, “To Catch A Dollar: Muhammad Yunus Banks on America.” In 2015, he made two trips to Lesvos with the International Rescue committee filming the refugee crisis there. The short film he made with Mandy Patinkin went viral and brought continued attention to the crisis. You can view it at: https://www.facebook.com/InternationalRescueCommittee/videos/10153802905983024/?theater

Michel Bolsey has a long history of involvement in the Middle East and Greece. He was as a schoolteacher in a Lebanese village during the 70s and continued as a journalist operating out of Lebanon for National Geographic, Smithsonian, Aramco Magazine and others. He founded and hosted the award-winning Pacifica Radio program Middle East in Focus, devoted to news, politics, and culture from that region. MEIF was one of the first news programs in the United States to bring Palestinians and Israelis together around a microphone. Bolsey continued to host MEIF for ten years, and 37 years later the program still airs on the Pacifica network. In the course of his reporting career, Bolsey has been a regular visitor to Greece, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Israel, Palestine and Egypt. He also brings to the project a variety of IT skills, the result of a 30-year day job in IT support, networking, web development and data programming. Bolsey is bilingual in French and English, fluent in Levantine Arabic and speaks conversational Greek.

Zaphiris Epaminondas, GSC is one of the premier cinematographers in Greece and a founding member of the Greek Society of Cinematographers. Originally from Thessaloniki, he graduated from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. After working in Hollywood for several years, he returned to Greece, where he has become the top director of photography for commercials, having filmed over 500 spots in 20 countries for international brands including Ford, Toyota, Hyundai, BMW, BP, Becks, Amstel, HSBC, Vodafone, Siemens, and Coca-Cola.

Epaminondas has shown mastery in every area of motion pictures, from feature films, television series, documentaries to industrial films and commercials. Much of his work has been in the Middle East and he has probably shot more projects in Saudi Arabia than any international DP.

In 2015, he covered the refugee crisis in Lesvos two times with the International Rescue Committee, traveling with its Executive Director, David Miliband.