The Filmmakers

IF YOU CAN EVER GET BACK is directed by Emma Findlen LeBlanc, Taylor Lee Nagel, and Philip Sands. After more than a decade of friendship and collaboration, in 2015 we founded Raw Milk Films, an independent production company dedicated to urgent and provocative stories of human dignity, defiance, and struggle. Committed to a flexible and egalitarian filmmaking process, together we share all production roles and responsibilities. All three of us were New America Fellows between 2016 and 2019. Support from New America, made the production of IF YOU CAN EVER GET BACK possible.

Co-Director & Producer

Emma’s first film was MA FI EKHWE HON (“THERE ARE NO BROTHERS HERE”), an Arabic-language narrative short set in a Syrian prison, based on the testimonies of detained Syrian protesters and the regime interrogators who tortured them.  Written and directed by Emma, THERE ARE NO BROTHERS HERE screened at several festivals and won best narrative short at Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival.  A recovering anthropologist with a doctorate from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, Emma is also a student at Yale Law School.  Previously, she worked as a senior researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine and as a journalist in Syria and Iraq for publications including GQ, Slate, Le Monde, The New York Times Globalization and Human Rights blog, and The National, and she has exhibited her photographs in the US, the UK, and the Middle East.  

Co-Director & Producer

Philip comes to documentary film from a background as a journalist and photographer. A Middle East reporter based in Syria and Iraq for twelve years, his writing and photography have appeared in GQ, Esquire, Le Monde, The Independent, and The National, as well as specialist regional publications. He is currently writing a book, “The End of Spring,” which tells the story of the assassination of Meshal Tamo, a Syrian opposition leader, during the first months of the Syrian revolution, as a way of examining how a peaceful, popular democratic uprising became a sectarian civil war.

Co-Director & Producer

Taylor’s most recent project is LADY LIBERTY, an independently produced pilot about an aspiring comedian learning to embrace her queer identity.  Taylor directed and produced LADY LIBERTY, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2019 and has screened at festivals across the US as well as internationally.  Taylor’s previous projects include a documentary web series, RUN CARLOS RUN, which chronicled a Mexican immigrant’s journey across America, and she produced THERE ARE NO BROTHERS HERE, and other short films.  Before leaving to found Raw Milk Films, Taylor worked for several years as an associate producer and creative executive at Locomotive, an N.Y.C.-based production and finance company.