The Battle HymnsTeam

Kerry Candaele

Producer/Writer/Director, was born in Vancouver, and grew up in Lompoc, a small working-class town on California’s central coast.

He has produced and directed several documentaries, including Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, and Iraq For Sale. He has also collaborated with his brother Kelly on the documentary, A League of Their Own, about his mother’s experience in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, later turned into a blockbuster hit by Columbia Pictures. His latest film is Following The NInth: In The Footsteps of Beethoven’s Final Symphony, which follows the impact of the Ninth across the globe. A work in progress, For The Love of Music, captures the experience of thirty young conductors who have come to the middle of Maine to both learn their craft, and to learn about themselves via the muse of music.

He attended Columbia University, where he ws a Richard Hofstader Fellow in American history. He has also worked all over the world for the Democracy Council www.democracycouncil.org , an NGO dedicated to peaceful reform in developing nations. He is the author of two books on United States history, and has written for both scholarly and popular publications.

Kerry lives in Venice, California, with his wife and three daughters.

Kelly Candaele

Kelly Candaele has produced and directed a number of documentary films. His documentary film A League of Their Own, about his mother’s years as a professional baseball player in the 1940s, was awarded an Emmy. He wrote the story for the Columbia Pictures feature film about the league which stared Tom Hanks and Madonna. He also produced and wrote an award-winning documentary on the life of assassinated Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, which was narrated by Paul Newman. In May of 2008 Mr. Candaele’s documentary film–which explores the aftermath of the Northern Ireland peace agreement–premiered at Paramount studios in Los Angeles. The film is titled When Hope & History Rhymed, and is being shown throughout Ireland and the United States.

His most recent documentary film–Second Chances: Union Made–looks at how former gang members have turned their lives around by joining building trades unions to help re-build the city of Los Angeles. It premiered at Paramount Studios in April, 2008.

Kelly is on the Executive Board of Kids in Sports, and is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He was on the Executive Board of the Coalition for Clean Air from 1997 to 2001.

Chris Bottoms
Chris Bottoms has several decades of film and video production experience in New York, Los Angeles, and across the globe. After attending The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, Chris has shot numerous feature films, commercials, music videos and documentaries, and trained under the legendary cinematographers Matt Mahurin, Crescenzo Notarile, and Matthew LeBatique. He is a member of The International Cinematographers Guild.

Nick Higgins
Highlights of Nick’s work include National Geographic’s Born Genius, an ITVS Independent Lens Award for The McCombie Way, CARE International’s feature documentary I Am Powerful, filmed in Vietnam and Mali, Discovery Channel’s Firehouse USA and many other films. In addition to documentaries, Nick has also co-directed and shot a series of HD TV commercials for The Heavyweights advertising agency under Double Dog Films. Nick grew up in Scotland, Saudi Arabia, and has lived all over the world.

Rohan Chitrikar
Rohan grauduated from College of the Atlantic in 2004 with a B.A. inHuman Ecology and from Boston University in 2006 with an MFA in Cinematography. He has worked on a number of short-films, documentaries, and TV shows as Director of Photography. He is also a founder of Kalpana International Pictures (KIP). Rohan, born in Nepal, strongly believes that storytelling in the form of social cinema brings hope and progress to developing nations. His work may be viewed on line at www.rohanchitrakar.com