Eva Orner, Academy award-winning film producer & director
Program Titles
Eva Orner, Network, is a hopeful yet harrowing documentary about a media mogul and his family’s dreams of transforming their beloved Afghanistan from a brutal, medieval backwater into a tolerant, modern society.
Established the first free media in Afganistan, TOLO TV.
The documentary has been released in the United States to critical acclaim.
She created this documentary about the country’s efforts to re-create its society at incredible personal risk. She is still dealing with the effects.Orner confronted the Taliban and centuries old social traditions that give men a savage supremacy in this war-torn country, not with a helmet, a flak jacket and a submachine gun, but with a camera in a country where women are regarded as chattles and barely second-class citizens.
She faced the Taliban who use ruthless suppression to prevent women from working, being educated or in fact, even leaving the home.
Orner narrowly escaped death three times during her time in Kabul.
Once, she narrowly avoided a suicide bombing that killed 80 people and maimed many more, she nearly stepped on one of the thousands of land mines that still litter the Afghan capital not to mention enduring a major gun battle that engulfed the TV Network.
She also ruined her health, contracting parasites and pancreatitis that have required repeated hospital stays.“It is pretty exhausting,” Orner says, “trying to get through a checkpoint with men pointing guns at you and screaming at you in a language you don’t understand.
It’s an absolute hellhole, yet it’s also an extraordinary place.
“Works include:
Untold Desires (winner of a number of Best Documentary Awards), Strange Fits of Passion (nominated for the Critics’ Award at the Cannes Film Festival),
Taxi to the Dark Side (winner of the 2008 Academy Award for Best Documentary),
Gonzo, The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson
The Human Behavior Experiments
Blue Heelers
The Games
Book Eva Orner for your Event!