Grants & Awards

About the Film:

States follows personal stories in marginalized non-states around the world, from the standoff in Western Sahara to the first Independence Day in Southern Sudan. These and other non-states proliferating throughout the post-colonial world lack the diplomatic expertise necessary to gain recognition in the international political theater. They do not have diplomats because they are not states, and they cannot become states (in part) because they have no diplomats. In response to this, a cadre of state-less diplomats, called The Independent Diplomat, offers its services to those seeking the right to exist.

As the characters navigate the rituals and customs of global politics, sovereignty will be explored as a contingent concept and an abstract idea with vast material consequences for the lives of the world’s least powerful. Through the distinct struggles of multiple non-states, each charting their own path toward recognition, the film looks at how the organization of peoples is the central political problem of our time, fundamental to war, famine, climate change, poverty and human rights.

About the Filmmakers:

David Soll (Director) directed the feature documentary Puppet, which premiered at the 2010 DocNYC festival. In 2008, Soll was a Co-Creative Director on the Obama for America media team, producing and editing national television ads. He has directed, produced and edited advertising for numerous Democratic candidates and progressive causes around the country. He has worked as an editor for MGM and ABC, an online and effects editor for Sony Pictures Entertainment, and he has collaborated on experimental films with choreographers and theater artists including Victoria Marks, Dan Hurlin, and Alexia Rasmussen. In collaboration with Dixon/Davis Media Group, his advertising work has been recognized with numerous Telly and Polly awards, as well as two Cannes Lions grand prix. He was the recipient of a MacDowell fellowship in 2009 and an IFP Lab fellowship in 2010. Soll graduated summa cum laude from New York University where he studied political philosophy.

Producer Daria Vaisman’s writing has appeared in The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, and The New Republic, among others. She recently received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the MacDowell Colony. While living in Tbilisi, Georgia, from 2004 to 2007, Daria briefly worked for the country’s former prime minister, was an analyst at Transparency International, and later associate country director at Eurasia Foundation.  She now monitors post-Soviet ”breakaway” states for Freedom House. She received a master’s in international affairs from Columbia University and a certificate from Columbia’s Harriman Institute. Her first book, a narrative non-fiction account of US foreign policy in the former Soviet Union, will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2011.