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Photo credits:
Charlotte Mangin
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Class of 2006
Tuesday, July 25, 2006 at 9 P.M.
WIDE ANGLE cameras are on location in Morocco as history is made. In May 2006, an imam academy in the city of Rabat holds a graduation ceremony. But the class of 2006 is no ordinary group of students. Side by side with the male graduates are 50 women pioneers, among the first contemporary group of women to be officially trained as religious leaders in the Arab world. Empowered to do everything that male imams do -- except lead Friday prayer in a mosque -- the women will fan out across Morocco to work as spiritual guides in mosques, schools, hospitals, and prisons, even hosting their own television and radio talk shows.
 Watch a preview video
Director Gini Reticker has been producing and directing independent films for more than a decade. In 2005, Reticker received an Emmy Award and a Sigma Delta Chi Award for directing WIDE ANGLE's "Ladies First," on the role of women in rebuilding Rwanda. In 2001, Reticker produced the Academy Award-nominated short documentary ASYLUM, the story of a woman who fled Ghana and became enmeshed in the U.S. immigration system. Reticker co-directed, IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN, an IFC documentary that premiered at Sundance in January 2004, chronicling the contributions of women in independent film. Her other films include A DECADE UNDER THE INFLUENCE (IFC), NEW SCHOOL ORDER (PBS), and THE HEART OF THE MATTER, which won the 1994 Sundance Freedom of Expression Award and aired on POV.
Producer Charlotte Mangin was formerly a staff producer/associate producer for National Geographic Television & Film, where she worked on documentaries about illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border, public health issues in Nepal, Colombia's drug wars, and hurricane devastation in Florida, among others. As coordinating producer for WIDE ANGLE, shepherding the production of international documentary programs from development through broadcast, she has worked on stories ranging from economic collapse in Zimbabwe to political turmoil in Haiti to the collapse of a fishing community in Scotland. She is currently producing and editing her first independent film, on the lives of street children in Tangier, Morocco.
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