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Olivier Sarbil

Olivier Sarbil

Directing

Biography

Olivier Sarbil is a multi-award winning French documentary Director and two-times Emmy® winning Cinematographer based in New York. Over the two past decades, Sarbil has worked extensively in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North America and Asia, on many of the most pressing global conflicts and social issues that the world has faced. Sarbil continues to work as a cinematographer on a number of films that are currently in production, while also developing his own films as a director.

Known For

Frontline
6.7

Since it began in 1983, Frontline has been airing public-affairs documentaries that explore a wide scope of the complex human experience. Frontline's goal is to extend the impact of the documentary beyond its initial broadcast by serving as a catalyst for change.

Frontline

1983
Viktor
N/A

Viktor, who was born deaf, worships the figure of the samurai warrior. When bombs start falling on his countryside home in Kharkiv, his quasi-romantic obsession with war is put to the test.

Viktor

2024
Checkpoint Zoo
N/A

Checkpoint Zoo documents a daring rescue led by a heroic team of zookeepers and volunteers, who risked their lives to save thousands of animals trapped in a zoo behind enemy lines in the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

Checkpoint Zoo

2024
Retrograde
7.1

The story of the last months of the 20-year war in Afghanistan through the intimate relationship between American Green Berets and the Afghan officers they trained.

Retrograde

2022
Escaping Eritrea
4.0

An unprecedented undercover investigation into one of the world’s most repressive regimes — Eritrea. Exclusive secret footage and testimony shed new light on shocking allegations of torture, arbitrary detention and indefinite forced conscription.

Escaping Eritrea

2021
The Riots 2011: One Week in August
6.0

2011 saw the largest wave of disorder in the UK since the 1980s. This revelatory film hears from the people who experienced the riots up close and personal. A decade on, we look back at the summer of 2011 through the eyes of those whose lives have never been the same since. In a series of candid interviews, we hear the story from all angles. Convicted rioters, frontline police, a judge, a government advisor and a grieving father look back at that week in August, and the years that followed, to piece together what really happened and why.

The Riots 2011: One Week in August

2021
Hunting ISIS
N/A

FRONTLINE follows an elite special operations unit at the center of the fight against ISIS in Iraq. Also in this two-part hour: “Battle for Iraq,” a report by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad on the battle against ISIS for control of the city of Mosul.

Hunting ISIS

2017
Mosul
N/A

Described by some military commanders as the deadliest urban combat since World War II, the battle to drive ISIS out of Mosul as the terror group held civilians captive there was brutal and grueling. Shot over the course of the entire nine-month fight, this vivid documentary follows the experiences of four young soldiers in a team of Iraqi Special Forces tasked with leading the battle.

Mosul

2017
On the President's Orders
6.9

The searing story of President Duterte's bloody campaign against drug dealers and addicts in the Philippines, told with unprecedented and intimate access to both sides of the war - the Manila police, and an ordinary family from the slum. Shot in the style of a thriller, this observational film combines the look and feel of a narrative feature film with a real life revelatory journalistic investigation into a campaign of killings. The film uncovers a murky world where crime, drugs and politics meet in a deathly embrace - and reveal that although the police have been publicly ordered to stop extra-judicial killings, the deaths continue.

On the President's Orders

2019