The Producers

David Novack – Director, Producer & Writer
David is a filmmaker with widely-released, critically supported and award-winning documentary films. These include Finding Babel (Special Jury Prize, Moscow Jewish Film Festival), about executed Soviet writer Isaac Babel, and Burning The Future: Coal in America (International Documentary Association’s Award for social documentary film) about rights activists in West Virginia and their struggle for climate justice. David also produced Kimjongilia (Sundance, Best Human Rights Documentary Award) about N. Korean labor camps. A former lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Novack now teaches sound and cinema at Lusófona University for Humanities and Technology in Lisbon, where he conducts research in sound studies for film.

Janice Englehart – Producer & Writer
Janice is a producer, writer, and programmer who spent nearly a decade finding spaces in China where independent art could thrive. While in Guangzhou and Beijing, she programmed Chinese and American artists in art, performance, music, dance, and short film production. Horrified by the unfolding atrocities in the Uyghur Region, she engaged Odessa Films to collaborate on a film that would awaken the world to this tragedy. Her involvement in documentary filmmaking began with her work on Spielberg’s Shoah Project, where her interviews with Holocaust survivors revealed the restorative power and impact of cinematic storytelling. Janice drew on these experiences, her work as a therapist in Taiwan and the United States, and her belief that creative work is the best antidote for addressing any problem in the making of All Static & Noise.

Making The Film

Directors' Statement
All Static & Noise is rooted in testimony, in the voices of Uyghurs and Kazakhs, those affected by perhaps the greatest ongoing human rights tragedy of our time. The loss of my own Jewish family in Europe 80 years ago compels me to give voice to these embattled sisters and brothers through real, brave people and their personal experiences, for how can we turn our backs on those who suffer what our forebears have. I cannot divorce this humanitarian crisis from my family’s history – first stripped of freedoms with endless terror, then ultimately subjected to forced labor and lost in concentration camps and road-side ditches, and all while the world appeased until it was too late for so many. The parallels strike me to my core. The strongest tool at my disposal to take a stand against human rights atrocity is filmmaking, and so I embarked on a journey that I will never forget, and never regret.

We invite the world to stand up to rights abuses everywhere, abroad and at home, and to recognize where our own nations may be complicit and where we have power to demand a better world.

David Novack, Director