Ellen Bruno
2021Ellen completed a masters degree in documentary film at Stanford University. She is a recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, a Goldie Award for Outstanding Artist, an Alpert Award for the Arts,an Anonymous Was A Woman Award for the Arts, a Shenkin Fellowship from Yale University School of Art, and was an Artist-in- Residence at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Ellen serves on the Board of the Buddhist Film Festival, the Pacific Pioneer Fund, and Ethical Traveler.Org. She is a strategic planning consultant with the Creative Capital Foundation’s Professional Development Workshops, working throughout the country to provide artists a cohesive structure to organize, plan and sustain creative careers.
Sacrifice: The Story of Child Prostitutes in Burma
Ellen Bruno
Each year thousands of young girls are recruited from rural Burmese villages to work in the sex industry in neighboring Thailand. Held for years in debt bondage in illegal Thai brothels, they suffer extreme abuse by pimps, clients, and the police. The trafficking of Burmese girls has soared in recent years as a direct result of political repression in Burma. Human rights abuses, war and ethnic discrimination has displaced hundreds of thousands of families, leaving families with no means of livelihood. An offer of employment in Thailand is a rare chance for many families to escape extreme poverty. Sacrifice examines the social, cultural, and economic forces at work in the trafficking of Burmese girls into prostitution in Thailand. It is the story of the valuation and sale of human beings, and the efforts of teenage girls to survive a personal crisis born of economic and political repression.
Sacrifice: The Story of Child Prostitutes in Burma
Leper Life Beyond Stigma
Ellen Bruno
Leper provides a rare and intimate glimpse into a contemporary society of lepers in a remote village in Nepal. Villages speak openly and emotionally about their relationship to their sickness, to the "healthy" community outside the village boundaries, and the myriad stigmas and misunderstandings which surround a disease that has marked their bodies and their lives.
Leper Life Beyond Stigma
