Sharon STONE

Executive Producer

Gayle Ferraro is a documentary filmmaker whose work has taken her from the villages of Bangladesh to the ghats of Varanasi, from the brothels of Burma to the streets of Dhaka during a revolution. She studied human rights law at Oxford and holds a Master's degree from Harvard Kennedy School — an education she put directly in service of the stories she chose to tell.

Her debut film Sixteen Decisions (2000) followed Selina, a sixteen-year-old mother of two in Bangladesh whose $60 Grameen Bank loan was quietly changing her life — and documented Muhammad Yunus's microcredit movement before the world knew his name. Anonymously Yours (2002), filmed clandestinely in Burma, exposed the sex trafficking of young girls — both films airing together as a Gayle Ferraro night on the Sundance Channel. Ganges: River to Heaven (2003), reviewed by Variety as "at once lyrical and smell-the-stench gritty," premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival and screened at AFI Fest. To Catch a Dollar: Muhammad Yunus Banks on America premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010, supported by a Sundance Documentary Program / Skoll Foundation Stories of Change grant.

July 36 grew from a twenty-five year friendship with Muhammad Yunus — a relationship that began when Ferraro first traveled to Bangladesh in 1997 with one of the earliest digital cameras and the conviction that his work mattered. When Bangladesh's student revolution succeeded in August 2024, she was already there. She filmed through illness, through personal loss, and through nineteen months of history being made — capturing what no outside filmmaker could: the intimate human story behind the uprising that changed a nation.

She is also completing Welcome Sorry You're Here, a documentary about substance overdose grief made from inside a support group — a film that grew from profound personal loss.

July 36 is her fifth feature documentary.