The team
Victoria Kupchinetsky
DIRECTOR | PRODUCER
Victoria is an award-winning TV journalist and filmmaker. Her 34 min documentary, The Lakota Daughters, about women and girls on Pine Ridge Native American Reservation in SD, won the national 2021 Gracie Award for Outstanding Original Online Programming/Documentary. The Lakota Daughters has also won the Jury Prize at the 2021 Loyola Feminist Film Festival and the Audience Choice Best Documentary Short Award at the 2021 Kansas City International Film Festival. Victoria’s other directing and producing credits include documentaries about the first US climate refugees in Louisiana, Guantanamo prison, Mormon feminists in Utah’s polygamist communities. Victoria’s career as a story teller spans from working on several international co-productions at Sesame Workshop to collecting and recording testimonies of Holocaust survivors at Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. Victoria is a National Press Foundation Fellow. She is a first generation immigrant from St. Petersburg, Russia.
Joe Bender
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Joe most recently lensed and produced The Truth About Killer Robots (HBO), which premiered at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, and The Candidates, which premiered at DOC NYC.
He produced the Sundance award-winning Our New President (2018) and was named among DOC NYC's 40 under 40 (2018). Other recent work as Director of Photography appears in documentary films and series for HBO, National Geographic, PBS and TED, among others. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Matvey Kulakov
EDITOR
Matvey Kulakov is an award-winning editor, composer, and sound designer. Our New President, Matvey’s first feature as editor, premiered at Sundance 2018, where it won The Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award for Editing. Matvey has worked on several feature documentaries, including The Truth About Killer Robots (2018 - HBOMax/ TIFF premiere), The Conspiracy (2022) (DTLA Film Festival 2023 - best editing), and How to Rob Banks For Dummies (post-production - 2024). The Lakota Daughters (2020), a 40-minute short directed by Victoria Kupchinetsky that Matvey edited, played dozens of festivals and received the national 2021 Gracie Award for “outstanding storytelling”.
Peter Hutchison
PRODUCER
Peter Hutchison is an award-winning filmmaker, NY Times Bestselling author, educator & activist. He directed & produced Requiem for the American Dream: Noam Chomsky and the Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power (Netflix). A NY Times Critics Pick and #1 selling doc on iTunes, the book version of the film was a NY Times Bestseller (Seven Stories Press).
His most recent film, the award-winning Healing From Hate: Battle for the Soul of a Nation (Freestyle Digital Media/ Journeyman Pictures/ Media Education Foundation) is now in wide release. The film examines the root causes of hate group activity through the bold work of former Skinheads & neo-Nazis, now engaged in de-radicalizing violent extremists, and transforming attitudes of intolerance. His numerous documentary features include What Would Jesus Buy? (Sundance Channel Feature), SPLIT: A Divided America (IFC Choice Indie), its follow-up SPLIT: A Deeper Divide (The Documentary Channel), and Awake Zion (Film Buff).
Maxim Pozdorovkin
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Maxim Pozdorovkin is an award-winning director and producer based in New York City. He is the director of six feature-length documentaries and numerous short films. His most recent feature, The Truth About Killer Robots premiered at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival and was broadcast on HBO. Our New President, premiered at Sundance 2018 where it won a Special Jury Award for Best Editing. Other films include: Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (Emmy winner), The Notorious Mr. Bout, Clinica de Migrantes(HBO). Maxim holds a PhD from Harvard University and was an artist fellow at Harvard's Society of Fellows. His next film How to Rob Banks for Dummies, the story of video artist Joe Gibbons, is currently in post-production.
Misha Gutkin
PRODUCER
Misha is a TV journalist and producer. His reporting credits include
major international and national news events, high-level summits, Olympic Games, protests and demonstrations. His beat is in-depth political and cultural interviews with prominent newsmakers such as Noam Chomsky, Laurie Anderson, Chuck Schumer, Paolo Taviani, Anna Netrebko. After immigrating to the US from Russia in the 1980s, he was instrumental in developing the first-ever independent Russian-language media in America for newly arrived Russian immigrants. Misha is a Revson Foundation Fellow and a New York Times Ethnic Media Fellow.