Florence Martin-Kessler

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in October 2013, I entered a conference hall at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge to attend a roundtable that was part of the Nieman Foundation’s 75th anniversary celebration weekend. The topic: “Innovation in Storytelling.” Over the 15 years that I had spent directing documentaries for French public television, I had given a lot of thought about precisely that question: how can we be more creative with form, while staying journalistic in the stories we tell?

In 2011, we embarked on the first of four trips to Juba, the soon-to-be capital of South Sudan. Our mission as filmmakers was to follow the “state builders” — those people in the South Sudanese government and in the United Nations who would be on the front line of implementing, step by step, a road map for the world’s newest state. Again and again, we heard about the “challenges” ahead.

Opinion|‘Great Expectations for Female Lawyers’ https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/opinion/great-expectations-for-female-lawyers.html Op-Docs By Florence Martin-Kessler Nov. 11, 2013 Twelve years after being interviewed by The New York Times Magazine, five women, who all started their law careers at Debevoise & Plimpton, reflect on ambition, leadership and success. On the bright summer morning of Sept. 9, 2001, I picked up the newspaper from my Brooklyn doorstep, just as I did every Sunday.