MATT GONZALEZ Chief Attorney at the San Francisco Public Defender's Office, a position he has held for more than a decade. He represented José Inez García Zárate as co-counsel in state court.
FRANCISCO UGARTE manages the Immigration Defense Unit at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, which formed in 2017 and is now California’s largest detained deportation defense provider. He represented José Inez García Zárate in state court as co-counsel.
JOSÉ INES GARCÍA ZÁRATE was born and raised in Guanajuato Mexico, but as a teenager, decided to leave his home because of crushing poverty. He moved to Phoenix, Arizona to find work, and lived in Tacoma, Washington, Portland, Oregon, and briefly in San Francisco, California. He has spent more than seventeen years incarcerated in a federal prison for the crime of illegal reentry, a felony which criminalizes the act of walking across the border without permission.
JEFF ADACHI (Director/Producer) was a social justice advocate and filmmaker, writing and directing two PBS award winning films, “The Slanted Screen: Asian Men in Film & Television” and “You Don’t Know Jack Soo” and the acclaimed short film “Racial Facial,” a short film about the history of racism in the United States. Jeff's previous film "Defender" was selected to premiere at a sold-out screening at the SF International Film Festival and won the Best Documentary film award at the Independent Television Festival in Vermont in 2017.
Jeff served as the elected Public Defender of the City and County of San Francisco from 2002-2019 and worked as a deputy public defender and Chief Attorney in San Francisco for 15 years prior to his election. His office provided legal representation to over 20,000 people each year, mostly of color. Through his legal work and activism, Jeff was a strong advocate for the civil rights of all Americans.
CHIHIRO WIMBUSH (Director/Producer/Editor) is an Emmy-nominated, documentary filmmaker. Chihiro was co-director (with Amir Soltani) and cinematographer on the documentary feature, Dogtown Redemption, about homeless shopping cart recyclers in West Oakland, California. The film premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival where it won an Audience Award, and was broadcast on Independent Lens, before being nominated for an Emmy Award. He also edited the award-winning and nationally broadcast Changing Season about a year on the Masumoto family peach farm in the Central Valley. Ricochet is his third collaboration with Jeff Adachi after serving as editor on Jeff's previous two films The Ride and Defender. His new film, RELEASE, currently in development, was selected for the IF/Then Shorts x Redford Center's Nature Connection Pitch at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.
JIM CHOI (Cinematography) is an award-winning director, cinematographer, and sound recordist. Chronicling the breadth of the Asian American experience from the struggles of migration to the trials of assimilation. Choi has been keenly aware that the only way to manifest community is to share the stories of our experiences in authentic ways.
He co-directed and shot Defender, and The Ride which featured the late Jeff Adachi, San Francisco’s public defender.
JENNY CHU (Cinematography) was born in England and is of Chinese/Malaysian descent. She obtained her undergraduate degree in documentary photography at U.C. Berkeley and has photographed extensively in China, Africa and Latin America. In 2009, she received a master’s degree from U.C. Berkeley's Journalism School where she focused on documentary film and long form television. During that time, she produced stories about the underserved minority population in the Bay Area, California, as well as a master’s thesis project in W. Africa—a women’s health story from Sierra Leone. She hopes to give voice to the impoverished and less fortunate people both at home and in the developing world, to tell socially relevant and impactful stories, and to continue indulging in the creative process of filming. vimeo.com/jennychu
MATTHEW EMERSON BROWN (Composer) creates solo ambient music under the moniker DISINTERESTED. His music was used throughout Jeff Adachi's Defender triology. He is a producer, engineer, mixer, composer and musician based out of Seattle, WA. His recording clients include Lucinda Williams, Bill Frisell and The Walkabouts and as a performer his bands (Trespassers William, The Soft Hills, Wait Wait, Hannah Ramone) have been signed to labels such as Bella Union and Nettwerk and have done tours worldwide. His music has been been featured in TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The OC and he has composed or co-composed the scores for many independent films. http://emerson77.com/
HIATUS is CYRUS SHAHRAD, (Composer) a British-Iranian music producer living in London. Since the early 2000s he has been releasing records that fuse electronic music with Middle Eastern influences: from the samples of old Iranian records that run through his debut Ghost Notes (2011), collected while working as a journalist in Tehran, to his latest album Distancer (2021), which for the first time sees him working with Iranian musicians. www.cyrusshahrad.com/hiatus-music/
DANIEL TESSER (Title and Publicity Design; Associate Producer) is a graphic designer and filmmaker. He created titles for the 2015 documentary, Dreaming Against the World, made by Academy Award-nominated directors Tim Sternberg and Francisco Bello, and created the music video for Bury Me from the Eric Anders and Mark O'bitz 2020 album of songs based on the George Suanders novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. danieltesser.com
ZACHARY J. STICKNEY (Associate Producer) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Utah. Prior to his academic studies, Zach served as a public health volunteer with the United States Peace Corps in Namibia, was the Associate Producer for the Emmy-nominated PBS Independent Lens documentary Dogtown Redemption, and assisted United for Iran with the Irancubator—a civic tech incubator to promote social good in Iran. These projects inform much of Zach's current studies, which are primarily focused on algorithmic decision making in governing bodies.