Tami Gold launched her career in the Newsreel Film Collective and has since produced and directed more than 20 award-winning documentaries including Another Brother, Out at Work: Lesbians and Gay Men on the Job, and Looking for Love: Teenage Mothers, and narratives such as HBO's Out at Work: America Undercover (with Kelly Anderson) and Emily and Gitta. Her work has won numerous awards, screened at film festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and other venues. A graduate of the Directing Workshop for Women at the American Film Institute, Gold is the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and others. Gold is currently a professor in the Film and Media Studies Department at Hunter College. Kelly Anderson is an award-winning independent producer and director of documentary and narrative films/videos. Her short documentary, Overcoming the Odds premiered at the World Social Forum in Bombay, India. Her other films include the Grand Jury Prize-winning Making a Killing (produced and directed with Tami Gold) and ITVS' one hour drama Shift. Anderson is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the AFI (NEA), ITVS, and the Paul Robeson Fund. Anderson is currently working on a feature-length drama entitled Great Unknowns.

In the winter of 1994, police killings were on our minds because they were so much a part of our environment in New York City. When Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man, was shot at 41 times in his own vestibule, we felt we had to get out there with a camera and talk to people for our own sanity, to understand what was happening. It was like the topic of this film chose us.
We were concerned about the high level of visibility of this topic, and the challenge was to find a unique angle on something that had had a lot of media coverage already. Then we found the mothers as a way in that was different, and decided to focus on their enormous transition from this terrible experience to speaking out for changes in policing, and decided to look at what was it in them that pushed them to do that. We both felt that it was not enough to make a documentary about police brutality alone. We wanted it to deal with these issues, but also to have a human component and an aspect of hope. The three mothers in Every Mother's Son-- Kadiatou Diallo, Iris Baez and Doris Busch-Boskey--have found a resilience in themselves that is remarkable and can provide inspiration to others. We have always been attracted to stories that explore large social and political questions through the intimate personal experiences of people affected by them. Policing was such a dense topic that we decided that focusing on New York City during the Giuliani years, and on the stories of three mothers (though they are part of a larger movement), would allow us to get at the big issues through a very personal lens. Ultimately, we would like the viewer to understand that police brutality is a problem that extends far beyond individual "bad cops," and that many of the problems facing us are systemic in that they have to do with policies that put police officers in situations where abuses are likely to take place. We would like to have Americans who don't live in poor urban areas to have a sense of what people in these communities experience from the police on a daily basis. We know it would be shocking for many people to see how unequal policing is in terms of its effect on citizens. Finally, we hope that this film will motivate viewers to take action where they live in terms of the creation of independent citizen review boards that have enforcement capability, the creation of independent prosecutor positions where they do not exist, and the building of coalitions with organizations that are fighting to reform policing in America.