German Camera Productions
German Camera Productions has been making documentaries about social and environmental issues since 1998. We are passionate about documentary films and their potential to change the world for the better. German Camera specializes in telling compelling stories from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.
The Filmmakers
Brent E. Huffman - President/Owner
Brent E. Huffman is an award-winning director, producer, writer, and cinematographer of documentaries and television programs. His work ranges from documentaries aired on Netflix, VICE, The Discovery Channel, The National Geographic Channel, NBC, CNN, PBS, MTV, and Al Jazeera, to Sundance Film Festival premieres, to ethnographic films made for the China Exploration and Research Society.
He has also directed, produced, shot, and edited documentaries for online outlets like The New York Times, TIME, VICE NEWS, Salon, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, and PBS Arts.
Huffman has been making social issue documentaries and environmental films for nearly three decades in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
These films have gone on to win numerous awards including multiple Primetime Emmys, Chinese Academy Award, Silver Plaque from the Chicago International Film Festival, IAFOR Documentary Film Award, MacArthur Foundation Grant, Best Film at CinemAmbiente International Environmental Film Festival, Grand Prize and Audience Award at Arkhaios Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Festival, Best Conservation Film-Jackson Hole, ten Cine Golden Eagle Awards, and a Grand Jury Award at the American Film Institute’s SILVERDOCS.
Huffman was also an editor of Julia Reichert’s and Steven Bognar’s Primetime Emmy winning PBS documentary series A Lion in the House now on Netflix.
Huffman’s documentary Saving Mes Aynak, about the fight to save a 5,000-year-old ancient city in Afghanistan threatened by a Chinese copper mine, has won over 35 major awards and has been broadcast on television in over seventy five countries. It can currently be seen on Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, OVID, and on special edition DVD from Icarus Films.
Huffman is currently directing The Future is Written in Stone about Yemeni women fighting to save the threatened cultural heritage of Yemen during the war. The documentary is supported by the Pulitzer Center and Buffet Institute for Global Affairs.
Huffman’s Strands of Resistance, about a Uyghur underground railroad in Pakistan, premiered on VICE NEWS TONIGHT on Showtime and won Best Documentary Feature at the Rory Peck Awards at the British Film Institute in 2023.
Huffman produced Finding Yingying, a Kartemquin Film about a Chinese family searching for their missing daughter in the U.S. Finding Yingying won the Breakthrough Voice Award at SXSW and the Chinese Academy Award for Best Foreign Documentary in 2020. Finding Yingying is distributed by MTV Films/Paramount+ in the US. Finding Yingying was nominated for an Emmy in the Best Investigative Documentary category in 2021.
Brent Huffman is also the Director of Documentary Journalism and a Professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University where he has taught documentary production and theory since 2009.
Xiaoli Zhou
Xiaoli Zhou is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and instructor at University of Chicago Laboratory Schools with a strong journalism background. As a native Chinese and a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Zhou specializes in international reporting and making documentaries about Asian cultures.
Zhou’s work has aired on The Discovery Channel, PBS and Al Jazeera, among others. Her documentaries have screened at various film festivals around the world. For the past few years, she has been honored by the Foreign Press Association, American Women in Radio and Television, Asian American Journalists Association and Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Zhou’s film The Women’s Kingdom received a silver medal in the documentary category of 2006 Student Academy Awards and won the Best Editing Award from San Francisco Women’s Film Festival. The documentary short Utopia 3: The World’s Largest Shopping Mall produced by Zhou has premiered in the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
Most recently, Zhou has co-produced and co-directed The Colony about the Chinese in Africa with her husband Brent E. Huffman for Al Jazeera.
Zhou also translated former Vice President Al Gore’s global warming presentation, featured in the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, for a Chinese audience.
Hannie Lee
Hannie Lee is a filmmaker currently based in South Korea. A graduate of School of Communication, Northwestern University, Hannie has helped the film "Saving Mes Aynak" get translated into multiple languages and screened internationally, including in North Korea. Trained in cinematography, editing, and designing, Hannie has produced visual work for VICE, Family Matters Chicago, Block Museum of Art, and more, and continues to work on independent projects to address social issues around the world.
