Sirens
Logline
On the outskirts of Beirut, five young women navigate friendship, identity and the pressure to conform in their pursuit of becoming thrash metal rock stars.
Rita Baghdadi
Director, Producer, Cinematographer
Rita Baghdadi is an award winning Moroccan-American documentary filmmaker whose character-driven work has been supported by Tribeca, Sundance, Film Independent, ITVS, Points North Institute and the International Documentary Association. In 2017 Rita’s documentary CITY RISING won three local Emmy awards including Best Social Issue Film. Her film MY COUNTRY NO MORE won Best Feature at the 2018 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival and was picked up for broadcast on Independent Lens in 2019. Rita also lensed the feature documentary SERVED LIKE A GIRL which premiered at the SXSW Film Festival and received a nationwide theatrical release. The Hollywood Reporter recognized her camerawork as intimate. Rita is co-founder of the production company Endless Eye, a documentary Advisor for Sundance Co//ab and a member of Free the Bid, Brown Girls Doc Mafia and Film Fatales. When she is not filming, Rita is an active mentor dedicated to empowering women and girls through film training. Currently, she is in early production on SIRENS, a feature documentary about the first female metal band in the Middle East.
Camilla Hall
Producer
Camilla Hall’s documentary directing debut COPWATCH was nominated for Best Documentary at Tribeca and the Stockholm Film Festival in 2017. The film was shot in Baltimore, New York, St. Louis and Oakland and was sold to Amazon Prime with a U.S. theatrical release. In 2019, she directed THE POPPY & THE SUNFLOWER, a short branded documentary commissioned by Tribeca Studios and 23&Me. This year, she also produced CIRCUS OF BOOKS, which premiered at Tribeca and sold as a Netflix Original executive produced by Ryan Murphy. In 2018, she directed the documentary/narrative hybrid short AN EVERYDAY PROBLEM, which premiered at The United States of Women in Los Angeles. In 2017, alongside directing COPWATCH, she produced FREEDOM FOR THE WOLF, a political, investigative documentary - shot in six countries around the world - that premiered at Sheffield Doc Fest and showed at IDFA, it won the Slamdance Audience Award in 2018. She is currently producing SIRENS, directed by Rita Baghdadi. She recently completed teaching a four-part course at the American Film Institute. She is an active member of Film Fatales, Free The Bid and Women in Film and is an alumni of the Sundance Women In Film Financing Initiative. Prior to starting in documentary, Hall worked for Bloomberg News as a foreign correspondent and then joined the Financial Times, where she was based in Abu Dhabi and then New York.
Taylor Katrina
Editor
Katrina Taylor is a Los Angeles based film editor who is drawn to cinematic, character driven storytelling with an emphasis on emotional accuracy and social relevance. Most recently Katrina served as Editor for the feature documentary WILDLAND which opened the fall season of PBS' Independent Lens as well as an editor for season two of THE CONFESSION TAPES produced by A24. She is currently co-editing a feature documentary with Executive Producers Wavelength Productions and Chicago Media Project. Previous roles include Editor for the film AWAVENA (2018 Sundance Film Festival, World Economic Forum, Venice Biennale), Additional Editor on the Netflix original series REMASTERED: THE TWO KILLINGS OF SAM COOKE and Editor for the feature documentary BOONE (SXSW, Berlinale). She was a contributing Editor at the Sundance Institute Edit and Story Labs and her work has been supported by Impact Partners, the Sundance Institute, Catapult Film Fund, Filmmaker Fund, IFP, Film Independent, Chicken and Egg, NYSCA and The Ford Foundation.