In Conversation With Kirsten Johnson. IDFA Industry Talk 21 November 2016

IDFA Podcast

Kirsten Johnson is an award-winning New York-based documentary filmmaker and cinematographer who started working on local fiction and documentary film projects in West Africa before graduating from the FEMIS (the French National Film School) in Paris. Asylum, a short documentary she shot in Ghana, was nominated for an Oscar in 2004. Since then, she has shot some of the most powerful documentaries in recent years, including A Place at the Table, the Oscar-nominated The Invisible War and most recently Laura Poitras's Citizenfour, which won Best Documentary at last year's Oscars. Traveling the globe with leading documentary filmmakers for 25 years, the many subjects she has covered range from Bosnian genocide to impoverished Nigerian maternity wards to Edward Snowden. She made her directorial debut with Cameraperson, drawing on footage she has shot over the course of her career and earning her the Sheffield Doc/Fest's Grand Jury Award. Cameraperson is screening in IDFA's special focus program Assembling Reality this year.