SB Productions Records

SB Productions is an independent documentary film production company headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. Mary Ann Smothers Bruni together with Frances “Sissy” Farenthold (former Texas state legislator and human rights activist) and Elizabeth “BJ” Warnock Fernea (professor emerita of Middle Eastern Studies at University of Texas at Austin) founded SB Productions in November of 2005 as a vehicle to document the complexity of women’s issues generally in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq.

SB Productions’ 2009 documentary,Quest for Honor, investigated honor killings in Iraqi Kurdistan and was chosen as an Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival and was short-listed for a 2010 Academy Award nomination for Feature Length Documentary. Beginning in 2006, SB Productions traveled to Iraq several times to collect footage for a documentary. Due to political unrest in the region, Bruni and her crew, including Director of Photography Behzad Oliadonighi, co-producer Biruk Tugan, and assistant director Mohammed Saddik Barzani, could only work freely in the northern region of Iraq controlled by the Kurdish Regional Government. With the assistance of Hirau Ibrahim Ahmad, a video and film producer and the wife of the first Kurdish president of Iraq, the crew was able to move freely and continue filming. Dubbed "Zhinan," the project began as an effort to document the lives of women rebuilding Iraq.Quest for Honorwould grow out of this effort. The project originally focused on collecting footage of daily life in Iraqi Kurdistan as well as interviews with women judges, politicians, physicians, and poets. While filming, the project focus turned toward the story of women’s struggles against the practice of “honor killings” in the region. The story ofQuest for Honorcenters on an honor killing in the town of Rania and the efforts of the Women’s Media Center of Sulaymaniyah to support the rights of women in Iraq.

In 2010 and 2011, SB Productions returned to Iraq to continue filming for a second documentary. In 2012, SB Productions also began working on a documentary set in south Texas.

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