The Filmmakers

Donna Musil - Writer, director, producer

Donna Musil has spent a lifetime fighting windmills and trying to understand the human condition. She began her professional career as a lawyer organizing unions for the AFL-CIO. She quit to write a feature film about the injustices in the American labor law system, which NY Women in Film & TV said represented “some of the best work being done by developing women screenwriters.“

Her first documentary feature, BRATS: Our Journey Home, explored the life & legacies of children who grew up on military bases around the world. Narrated and featuring music by Kris Kristofferson, BRATS was broadcast on Armed Forces Network Television in 178 countries. It was also featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and CNN’s This Week at War, in almost two dozen film festivals around the country, and won numerous awards, including Best Documentary, Best First Time Director, and the GI Film Festival’s Founder’s Choice Award.

For the past seven years, Musil has been following the Beldon family for Our Own Private Battlefield, the first documentary about the inter-generational effect of combat PTSD on military families, and how the Beldons, a Marine family, are using art to help heal the wounds of the Vietnam War. Battlefield is in the final stages of production.

In Strangled, Musil returns to the legal field. Ironically, the murders began the year she graduated from Columbus High School and went to the University of Georgia in Athens, where she earned a JD in Law and BA in Journalism. Musil partnered with writer/producer Meg Cormier and cinematographer Aidan McCarthy in 2016 to explore the controversial conviction of alleged serial killer Carlton Gary for a series of brutal rapes and murders that terrified Columbus, Georgia, in the late 1970s. What began as a simple murder investigation has evolved into an inquisition of our entire criminal justice system. Musil believes Strangled is why she went to law school. The film merges many of her life experiences, skills, and passions, and she hopes it will generate serious discussions about broad systemic change.

An avid basketball fan, Musil currently lives in Denver with her husband, Chris, and grew up in Europe, Asia, San Francisco, and the American South. She is the Executive Director of Brats Without Borders, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit she founded in 1999, which also provides outreach to Military Brats & Third Culture Kids (TCKs) of all ages via art camps, clubs, educational workshops, and museum exhibits.

Musil has written numerous screenplays, videos, and book/magazine articles, including Ananse, a children’s animated film based on African folktales (in development with Visionex/Ghana), Cypress Gardens, about a modern-day union campaign, and contributed a chapter to Writing Out of Limbo: International Childhoods, Global Nomads and Third Culture Kids, a book of TCK memoirs published in London. She also contributes regularly to Culturs, a global, multi-cultural lifestyle magazine for Global Nomads, Third Culture Kids and racially-, ethnically-, and culturally-blended people.

Musil has won a variety of writers fellowships over the years from La Napoule (France), Artist Residency Thailand (Chiang Mai), Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (Taos), Ragdale (Chicago); Djerassi (San Francisco), Centrum Arts (Port Townsend), and the Hambidge Center (Georgia).

Meg Cormier - writer, producer

Meg Cormier is a writer, producer, and former forensic scientist, who grew up a Navy BRAT in Iceland, Japan, Hawaii and England. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Italian Literature from Barnard College/Columbia University, then a Master of Forensic Sciences from George Washington University.

Cormier spent fifteen years in Washington, D.C. doing investigative work in the federal law enforcement and intelligence communities, before rekindling her passion for social justice and storytelling when her family moved to Colorado.

She joined Musil at Blind Turtle in 2016. She also served on the Board of Directors of Hide in Plain Sight, a nonprofit that aims to break the cycle of poverty by providing scholarships and emergency funds to homeless and at-risk teens across Colorado.

Over the course of making Strangled, Cormier also discovered uncomfortable truths about the field in which she was trained - forensic science - and hopes the film will shed light on some of these issues and foment systemic change.

Back in Washington, D.C., Strangled is Cormier’s first film… but definitely not her first set of bodies!

AIDAN SEAN MCCARTHY - DIRECTOR OF CINEMATOGRAPHY

Aidan Sëan McCarthy has been shooting films since grade school in Chicago. A graduate of Denver University film school, McCarthy is currently the Director of Cinematography on Strangled, and Cinematographer and Lead Editor at Hidden Woods Media, a Telly award winning branded content production house in Denver.

McCarthy and Musil first worked together on Our Own Private Battlefield, a Blind Turtle documentary feature about the inter-generational effects of combat PTSD on military families. He has shot and edited a variety of work for Ford trucks, lululemon, PBS, Frontier Airlines, and many others. He was also DP on the award-winning 2016 short documentary Freefalling, directed by Katie Cook.

CARLOS SIMON - COMPOSER

Carlos Simon is an award winning composer, born and raised in Atlanta, and an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University in the Performing Arts Department. He is also an ASCAP “Composer to Watch,“ 2018 Sundance Composer Fellow, and winner of the prestigious Marvin Hamlisch Film Scoring Award.

Simon’s string quartet, Elegy, honoring the lives of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown & Eric Garner, was recently performed at the Kennedy Center. His music ranges from film scores to concert ensembles with jazz , gospel, and neo-romantic influences. His latest album, My Ancestor’s Gift, an Apple Music “Album to Watch,” uses music, spoken word & historic recordings to depict the evolution of black Americans.

Simon earned his doctorate from the University of Michigan, and served on the music faculty at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges.

In Strangled, Simon continues his musical exploration of being black in America caught in the criminal justice system. He uses his personal observations and experiences growing up in the South to mold the musical tone and tenor of Strangled’s tale of broken bodies and systems.