Production Team
Holly Million, Director and Producer
Holly Million is a filmmaker, nonprofit leader, teacher, speaker, writer, and blogger whose personal passion is empowering people to change their world for the better. Holly is the executive director of the BioBricks Foundation, a public-benefit organization whose mission is to ensure that the engineering of biology is conducted in an open and ethical manner to benefit all people and the planet. Her experience with the BBF convinces her we must be eternally vigilant about preventing the Military-Industrial Complex from using new scientific knowledge for destructive uses. The public has largely been left out of the dialogue on how to apply technology, and Holly intends for A Permanent Mark to become a powerful tool to change the dialogue by engaging the public directly in it.
Holly has over 20 years’ experience in nonprofit management and fundraising for organizations and films. In addition to securing funding for A Story of Healing, which won a 1997 Academy Award, Holly has raised money for documentary and dramatic films that have aired on PBS, HBO, and other broadcast outlets. As a director, Holly created Changing Room, a dramatic film that had its television debut on PBS in 2005. Holly is the producer of With You, a feature-length documentary that tells the story of United Flight 93 passenger Mark Bingham and his mother Alice Hoagland. Holly also produced It Came From Kuchar, a documentary about underground filmmaker George Kuchar directed by Jennifer Kroot, and she was a fundraising consultant on Blind Spot: Murder by Women, a film by Oscar-winning filmmakers Allie Light and Irving Saraf, as well as Everyday Heroes, a film by Oscar-nominated director Rick Goldsmith. Holly has an MA in education from Stanford University and a BA in English from Harvard University. A seasoned international traveler who has been to Nepal, China, Thailand, South Korea, and Vietnam, Holly met her husband, A Permanent Mark DP Chris Million, on a trip to Mongolia in 1996.
Chris Million, Director of Photography
Chris has worked for over 20 years in the film, television, and video-production field, traveling the world and achieving many awards for his work. He won a 2004 Emmy for his work on Return to the Valley, a historical documentary produced for PBS station KTEH. Chris is the director of photography of With You, a feature-length documentary that tells the story of United Flight 93 passenger Mark Bingham and his mother Alice Hoagland. He is the director and producer of Jack London: Twentieth Century Man, the first-ever feature-length documentary about one of America’s greatest writers. Chris has shot and/or produced over 150 segments for the Emmy-winning PBS educational show Real Science! in locations from Alaska to the Everglades. He was also Director of Photography and Director on many episodes of the long-running PBS interview show Malone, working with everyone from film critic Roger Ebert to former President Jimmy Carter. Chris’s work has been presented with the Emmy, CINE Golden Eagle, and Telly Award, as well as numerous educational awards like the NEMH Gold Apple and NETA Award of Merit. Chris holds a BS in Film and Television from Syracuse University.
Scott Gracheff, Production Consultant
Scott Gracheff is an Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on diverse voices seldom heard in the mainstream media. As a staff PBS producer / director, he created numerous documentaries for PBS audiences for over ten years. This includes two documentaries that aired along with The War, Ken Burn’s landmark series about WWII. Soldados explores the experience of Latino WWII soldiers, while Nisei Soldiers tells the story of the war through the eyes of Japanese American soldiers. Soldados went on to earn a 2008 Emmy Award Nomination. Previous work for PBS includes Dave Tatsuno, Movies and Memories, a documentary that uncovers the story of a man who smuggled his 8mm film camera into a Japanese internment camp and secretly filmed his family’s 3-year life behind barbed wire. The film won a 2006 San Francisco Press Club Documentary Award. In 2003, he directed Return To The Valley, which examines the Japanese American experience after WWII. The documentary won a 2004 Emmy Award. Currently, Scott is an independent filmmaker based in NYC and in addition being the director/producer of With You, he is also a producer on The Fire This Time, a documentary that examines a 2006 incident in which a group of African-American women were physically attacked, defended themselves and were consequently given unprecedented harsh prison sentences.
Advisors and Consultants
Raymond Telles’ twenty-five-year career in film and television includes the production of documentaries and news magazine segments. He has produced and directed for Public Television, Turning Point and Nightline–ABC, Dateline–NBC. Among the more than 30 documentaries Telles has produced and directed are: Continent on the Move for the PBS series Americas; The Fight in the Fields, a feature documentary on Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers’ movement which was in documentary competition at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival and aired on PBS. MFA-Film, UCLA. Member of WGA and NATAS. Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley.
Dr. Hien Duc Do is a professor of sociology at San Jose State University. Dr. Do received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Sociology. His primary research interests are Vietnamese Americans, race relations, the development of Asian-American Communities, and the impact of religion on immigration. He is the author of The Vietnamese Americans (Greenwood Press, 1999), an associate producer of Vietnam: At the Crossroads (PBS, 1994) a documentary film on Vietnam, numerous articles, and is currently working on a manuscript with colleagues at the University of San Francisco on the impact of religion on immigration. He is the past President of the Association of Asian American Studies (2000–2002).
