CWC Docs: Stonebreakers

Originally from Rome, Valerio Ciriaci co-founded the New York production house Awen Films in 2013. Through Awen Films, he has directed independent documentaries, news and editorial videos, and other projects. Filmography highlights include If Only I Were That Warrior (Globo d’Oro 2016), Mister Wonderland (‘Il Cinemino’ prize at Festival dei Popoli), and Stonebreakers (Honorable Mention and Audience Award at Festival dei Popoli), which received its US premiere at IFFBoston in April 2023.

Isaak Liptzin was born in San Francisco and grew up in Italy until graduating high school, when he moved to New York to attend photography classes at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. As a photographer, he has worked with WNYC Radio, Centro Primo Levi, Peace Child India, and Transition Magazine. As a film and video producer, he covered the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns for Italian national broadcaster Rai and worked for Endeavor Content on the Netflix Originals series First Team: Juventus. With Awen Films, which he co-founded in 2013, Isaak has worked as producer and cinematographer on commissioned projects and collaborated with director Valerio Ciriaci on independent documentary features including If Only I Were That Warrior, Mister Wonderland, and Stonebreakers.

Stephanie Malia Hom is Associate Professor of Transnational Italian Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She writes and lectures on modern Italy and the Mediterranean, mobility studies, colonialism and imperialism, migration and detention, and tourism history and practice. She is the author of Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell University Press, 2019) and The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2015). She also co-edited Italian Mobilities (Routledge, 2016) with Ruth Ben-Ghiat.