Merits studied philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. She worked for years as a journalist for national radio both in Belgium and Holland and wrote for newspapers in both countries as well. Eighteen years ago, she decided to make film documentaries, because she felt that some of her radio documentaries needed visuals.  For her first documentary film, Kallis Paul (2007), about the youth of her Estonian father,  she was awarded the Theodor Luts Prize.  For The Story of the Baltic University (2015) she received the medal of the Baltic Assembly.  She received honorable mention at Estdocs for Coming Home Soon – The Refugee Children of Geislingen (2018).  The Paradox of Seabrook Farms – Shattered Dreams, Restored Hopes (2024) is her sixth film.

Merits makes films about people whose lives are completely disrupted by war, but people who still need to go on, without any help or support.  She seamlessly weaves stories into fascinating patterns to shed light on the situation of refugees. Though most of the films are about Baltic refugees, Paradox of Seabrook Farms is also about Japanese American, African American, and Polish communities.

Her films are screened at festivals, conferences, in museums, on public television in the Baltic Countries, at universities and communities all around the world. 

Mas was born in Poston, Arizona, in one of the 10 war-time internment camps set up by the US government to detain American citizens of Japanese ancestry. He grew up in Seabrook, New Jersey, with many kids whose parents, like his, had been interned. At age 20, he dropped out of Rutgers and had a seminal experience working in 1963-64 with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Atlanta, Georgia. He began his direct connection with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in 1965 in a summer program as a community organizer in rural South Jersey in the initial efforts with the support of the state of New Jersey, to establish local antipoverty boards. His extended stint as national AFSC staff began in 1972 as the first staff for the Third World Coalition (TWC), an institutional effort to address some of the programmatic concerns of people of color connected with the organization. Beginning in 1974, and for the next 31 years, he was the National Representative for Native American Affairs for AFSC, working within the Community Relations Division. He currently serves on the boards of Asian Americans United (AAU) and the Folk Arts - Cultural Treasures (FACTS) Charter School, and is the president of the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center (SECC). Mas is also the 2024 recipient of the Paul Robeson Lifetime Achievement Award.

Helle, a Univ of Pa MA graduate, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, former Sr Director in Global Regulatory and Medical Writing (MW) at J&J (retired) has clinical research experience spanning more than 48 years in the pharmaceutical industry at Hoechst Roussel Pharma, Novo Nordisk, and Janssen R&D of J&J.  During that time, she was directly involved in numerous regulatory applications for marketing approvals and in all aspects of product life-cycle development, ranging from early to full development and post-marketing Medical Affairs. She established Linguistic Services like Machine Translation and related global partnerships in MW and Regulatory in India and China; worked on the first J&J team to submit electronically to FDA; led document management implementation and transparency activities internally while serving as a Team Lead in the TransCelerate Transparency/Plain Language group, later in PhUSE as a team member; and on teams at Janssen that produced several European Policy 070 submissions. She was the representative in the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) E3 Q&A Working Group; member of the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) Protocol Group and Glossary Team, 8 years as Lead; Drug Information (DIA) MW Community Lead, Core Team member, Education Coordinator for several years; member of the Multiregional Clinical Trial (MRCT) Center at Harvard Clinical Research Glossary Team.  Dedicated her career to cross-industry groups designing solutions to common problems in clinical trials, including clear reports and transparent results in plain language and well-defined scientific terms shared in multiple languages. Understandable medical knowledge makes a difference in patients’ lives. 

Richard Zielinski is a sometime poet, fitful folksy singer-songwriter, avid birder, tai chi/chi gong student and retired jack-of-various-trades. He can often be found birding around South Jersey where he lives. He is the author of the illustrated poem, The Mean Old Man Who Didn’t Like Children, and the chapbook, Scything and Other Poems.