Filmmakers

In 2013 Cooke released his directorial debut HOW TO MAKE MONEY SELLING DRUGS produced by Adrian Grenier (from HBO’s Entourage) featuring Eminem, 50 Cent, Susan Sarandon, Woody Harrelson and others.

DRUGS was bought and distributed by Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Film where it debuted at #1 on iTunes and Amazon. Drugs won the audience award at the Champs-Elysees and Newport Film Festivals and the Best Writing Award from the International Documentary Association.

Cooke’s credits on DRUGS also include: writer, narrator, cinematographer, editor, motion graphics designer and art director.


In 2007 Cooke produced and edited his first feature film. DELIVER US FROM EVIL, written + directed by Amy Berg, was honored with the Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary film, made over 100 critics “best of” lists and Rotten Tomatoes top 10 best reviewed films of all time.

In 2010 Cooke produced and edited HBO’s critically acclaimed TEENAGE PAPARAZZO directed by Adrian Grenier featuring Matt Damon, Whoopie Goldberg and Lewis Black.

Cooke and Emmy Award Winning Producer Steve DeVore’s production company SATURDAY ENTERTAINMENT are currently in development on feature fiction films and docu-television series.

(Updated February 2014)

Tom Bentley-Fisher is an award winning theatre director, teacher and writer. He has worked throughout Canada, the United States and Europe for over thirty years. He has directed over one hundred productions, taught at numerous universities and theatre schools, and served as the artistic director of five professional theatres. During Tom’s tenure as an artistic director in Canada he gained a strong reputation for developing and producing original plays. He is the founder and producer of several theatre festivals, including the Saskatoon International Fringe. In Canada he is best known for his twelve- year tenure as artistic director of Twenty-fifth Street Theatre. Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, credited his leadership of this theatre as having engineered “one of the most dramatic come-backs in Canadian theatre history.”
From 2002 to 2009 Tom lived in San Francisco where he concentrated on writing, conducting his own acting studio, and working as a dramaturge and director for many Bay Area theatres, including Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre where he produced the annual Global Age Project, the theatre’s new play development program. During this time, Tom’s fiction was published in literary magazines both in the U.S. and Canada. His first collection of short stories was published by Thistledown Press. He has been the finalist for several literary awards, has written three produced plays, and is currently completing a novel plus a book based on the acting technique he developed during his time teaching in California.

Since becoming the artistic director of Tant per Tant, Tom divides his time between California, Canada and Barcelona, where in 2009 he spent five months creating and directing a critically acclaimed all-female version of The Iliad for Q-ars Teatre, produced for the prestigious Grec 09 International Festival of Barcelona and remounted in the summer of 2010 for the Festival de Teatro Clásico de Mérida. Tom continues to direct and teach master classes in North America and Europe. For detailed information about Tom’s career you can visit his webpage at tombentley.net. He is currently preparing a multi-lingual production of Burning Vision, a multi-lingual production incorporating original music, dance, and film for the 2015 Grec International Festival.

(Updated February 2014)

See Tom Bentley-Fisher’s Resumé

Tom believes that being an artist is a great privilege, and that artists must be amongst the healthiest people in our society. He has been practicing the Latihan since the mid 1970’s.

Born in New York, Ra’up McGee’s earliest memories were going to the movies with his father, and he was continually exposed to a wide range of cinema while growing up.

After completing his undergraduate work in film at the University of California, San Diego, where he graduated with honors; Ra’up went on to earn his MFA graduate degree in film at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Working his way up in the film industry, which included crewing on films for Barry Levinson and John Frankenheimer, Ra’up then produced, directed, and edited his award-winning documentary Ramadhan in Indonesia for PBS, which also aired on National Geographic television.

Next was the documentary Harold Hitchcock: Life in Light, which focused on the Royal Academy painter revealing himself as he paints and reflects on his process, past, and family. This film was shown on PBS and earned Ra’up his second Cine Golden Eagle Award.

Autumn, his first feature film which he produced, directed, wrote, and edited, starred Irene Jacob and had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. It played in festivals throughout the world, and received the Best Director and Best Cinematography awards at the Newport Beach film festival, and Best Foreign Film at the Santa Cruz film festival. The film also had a theatrical release in the US.

Most recently, Ra’up completed the documentary Church & Dodge, which follows six years of drama, hope, and courage during the redevelopment of an African-American community struggling to lift itself out of decades of racial and economic problems near Chicago.

A Telly award winning director and Academy Nicholl Semifinalist writer, Ra’up has several diverse projects in development which focus on telling entertaining and cultural stories across the globe.

(Updated February 2014)

Bio: Pilar Walsh, a SAG-AFTRA actress, singer, dancer, writer, filmmaker, producer and mother of four, has worked for many years in TV, film, and stage. Some highlights in the past few years were playing Liza Minnelli on MAD-TV, performing opposite Ken Page in Man of La Mancha with Broadway Austin, working on the Indie film Dog Barks opposite Michael Costello and dancing and singing in Bernstein’s MASS, Cabaret, Pippin and The Musical of Musicals in Hawaii. She worked with Alec Baldwin and Annette Bening on Running With Scissors and Kathy Najimi on Hope Floats and a half-dozen independent films along the way. She performed her own Cabaret Show in Seattle and Los Angeles, “Mostly Sondheim and a Little Lloyd- Weber” and still dances having worked 3 times on the Howie Mandel TV show Mobbed and most recently as an actor on a short film Sober in Los Angeles. She self-published a book of poetry Essentials: workds, rhymes and a story or two, and has her poems published in two poetry anthologies, Circle Dance and The God’s Eye.

In 2008, she moved to the other side of the camera with a documentary film The Eternal Rhythm – a Global Revelation of Drum, Dance and Song still in progress, and to promote her screenplay, she wrote, produced and co-directed a “showcase reel” of How I Survived the Sixties a hopefully, soon to be feature film. She is a recipient of the Actors Fund Teaching Artist Institute Certification. She lived in New York in 2012, performing at Symphony Space/Bar Thalia her own Cabaret set and at the Women’s Worldwide Initiative Anniversary Event as a guest artist. She moved to Wilmington, NC, and since coming to a place the locals affectionately call Wilmywood, she made a short film, I Was a Teenage Cough Syrup Junkie, was cast in the play ‘Night Mother for the Cape Fear Playhouse, published her book How I Survived the Sixties and completed writing a screenplay, Trolley to Lumina, which she hopes to also produce. She is currently residing in Los Angeles. In 2014, she will be hosting the California Regional Congress Friday Night Film Fest and is working closely with Michael Menduno on the Susila Dharma Production for the World Congress in Puebla along with finishing up her BA for Performing Arts with St. Marys College in Moraga’s LEAP (liberal education for arts professionals) program created exclusively for ex- and current professional dancers. She also attempts to spend as much time with her grown children (when they are in town) and grandchildren with whom she is very proud.

Pilar Walsh is a long time Subud member, a resident of Los Angeles and after working on stage, films and TV shows for most of her life, in 2008, she decided to go to college for the first time and discovered, when having to put together a documentary as a senior project, she fell in love with filmmaking. She is hoping to complete in the next year the doc, The Eternal Rhythm- a Global revelation of Drum, Dance and Song and is working to bring to life 3 screenplays, “How I Survived the Sixties” already a book and 9:13 sizzle reel, “Trolley to Lumina” a feature film with lots of great dancing and music from the 20’s, and “Hannah” a short story written by Pilar adapted to a screenplay. Recently, she has made trailers for these screenplays/films and a short film “I Was A Teenage Cough Syrup Junkie” working with college kids in North Carolina last year.