CREW BIOS

DYLAN MOHAN GRAY . Director/Producer/Writer/Editor

Born of Punjabi-Irish parentage and trained as a historian, Dylan Mohan Gray has worked in various capacities on feature films in over two dozen countries worldwide, in close collaboration with numerous acclaimed directors including Fatih Akin, Peter Greenaway, Paul Greengrass, Deepa Mehta and Mira Nair.

Dylan completed university studies in History and Film at Dartmouth College (US), as well as at the University of Vienna and the Budapest University of Economics. He holds graduate degrees in History from the Central European University and the University of the State of New York, with a research focus on historiography and geographic dimensions of identity.

He was also a resident in Film at Canada’s renowned Banff Centre for the Arts, and has a special interest in political stories with significant international and historical components, often involving complex ethical conflicts.

Dylan Mohan Gray founded the production company Sparkwater India in 2005. He lives and works in Mumbai (Bombay) and Fire in the Blood is his first feature-length film as writer/director.

CHRISTOPHER HIRD . Executive Producer

Christopher Hird is the founder and managing director of Dartmouth Films (www.dartmouthfilms.com), which he established to concentrate on making independent documentaries, pioneering new ways of funding and distributing them and encouraging new and emerging talent. Recent credits as producer include the Sundance Film Festival selections Black Gold (2006), The End of the Line (2009) and The Flaw (2011). In 2011 The End of the Line won the €50,000 Puma award for social impact. Other productions include: Planeat, released in over 80 theatres in the USA, John Pilger’s The War You Don’t See, Cocaine Unwrapped and the BFI London Festival-premiered How To Re-establish a Vodka Empire. He is a trustee of the Grierson Trust and the Wincott Foundation and has recently been appointed Managing Editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

JAY ODEDRA . Director of Photography

In over two decades as a film professional, Jay has worked on every continent and in some of the most demanding locations on earth. Having trained at the BBC and National Film and Television School (NFTS) in the U.K., he embarked upon a career spanning numerous feature and documentary films, television drama, corporate films and commercials, in a full spectrum of formats alongside some of the leading directors in the world.

He has had a close collaboration with acclaimed Indian-born director Mira Nair, for whom he shot and directed Second Unit on several feature films, most notably The Namesake and Vanity Fair. He was also the Director of Photography on Nair’s 2008 Mumbai-set AIDS drama, Migration.

A native of Kampala, Uganda, whose Gujarati family fled the dictatorship of Idi Amin, Jay is now based in London.

 

CHRISTOPHER SEWARD . Supervising Editor

Editor of landmark, award-winning feature documentaries including Michael Moore’s Sicko (Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature, 2007) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (the highest-grossing documentary of all time and winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2004 Festival de Cannes), Christopher has most recently been a part of the creative teams for First Position, which premiered at 2011 Toronto Film Festival, State of Control, Look at What the Light Did Now, Fat Sick & Nearly Dead, Hey, Boo: Harper Lee and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and Shenandoah.

He won the 2007 American Cinema Editors Award for Best Documentary Editor for Sicko, and in 2004 was nominated for the American Cinema Editors Award for Best Documentary Editor for Fahrenheit 9/11.

ASHUTOSH PHATAK . Composer

One of the leading figures in Indian contemporary music, Ashu (as he is popularly known) has been a much-sought-after composer and producer for the past 15 years. He has composed background scores for numerous feature films including HELP, White Noise, Snip!, Bombay Boys and Whispers, and has released three albums: Sigh of an Angel, The Psychic Plumber and Other Lies and The Petri Dish Project.

Ashu is one of the founding partners of Blue Frog, a landmark venue for live music in Bombay and Delhi founded in 2007, and has scored music for over 5000 television commercials.

KUNAL SHARMA . Sound Design

Kunal is a National Film Award winner for his work in the film 1971 (2007) and received an International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) award for the film Devdas (2002). He also won a Filmfare Award in Sound Design and was nominated for the Screen Award in Sound for Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan (2010).

Kunal’s other feature film projects have included Vishal Bhardwaj’s Blood Brothers (2007), Shaitan (2011), Ribhu Dasgupta’s Michael (2011) and Anurag Kashyap’s films Paanch (2003), Black Friday (2004), No Smoking (2007), Gulaal (2009), That Girl in Yellow Boots (2010) and Gangs of Wasseypur I & II (2012). One or more of the films for which he has designed sound has premiered at the Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Toronto and Sundance film festivals.