Featured Guests:

Marilyn Haft
Partner, Duval & Stachenfeld LLP
www.dsllp.com 




Qanta A. Ahmed,MD
Author of "In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom"
www.amazon.com
/qanta_ahmed





Marilyn G. Haft joined Duval & Stachenfeld as a partner in 2004 to establish and now co-chair the Entertainment and Media Practice Group of the Firm. She specializes in the business and legal affairs of the multimedia and communication industries, including the film, television and publishing sectors. She represents film and television production and distribution companies as well as individuals in those businesses, with a specialty in structuring financing for those enterprises.  In addition, she maintains impressive credentials and diverse contacts in the entertainment and political fields. Marilyn has been a law partner at a number of firms and was a test case constitutional law litigator at the national level for six years when she litigated in the State and Federal courts across the country including the U.S. Supreme Court.  

She has served as General Counsel and Managing Director of a financial services company that provided short-term funding requirements for major film studios, independent film producers/distributors, cable and record companies.  She was responsible for co- creating the financing structure of the transactions, and conducted due diligence on all contractual and cash flow related matters. Marilyn was also General Counsel to a publicly traded multimedia acquisitions company, where she was responsible for all aspects relating to acquisitions, including intellectual property issues involving patent, copyright, trademark and trade secrets. She is an award-winning independent film producer and has worked at NBC News and ABC News on content and production and as a producer on Peter Jennings’ specials. She was Executive Producer of an American Playhouse feature film, as well as an Emmy award-winning documentary on Preston Sturges for “American Masters” on National Public Television.  She acted as a co-producer of “Grace is Gone,” the John Cusack movie that won the Audience Award and Best Screenplay Award at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Most recently she acted as a co-producer on two films chosen for the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, “Diminished Capacity,” starring Matthew Broderick, Virginia Madsen and Alan Alda, and “ Birds of America,” starring and co-produced by Hillary Swank.

Marilyn served the Carter Administration as Associate Director of the Office of Public Liaison in the White House, Deputy Counsel to Vice President Walter Mondale in the White House and as a U.S. Representative to the United Nations. She was the head of the New York City primary campaign for Carter/Mondale in 1980. She was an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Film and TV, where she taught entertainment law and business to third year graduate students. She is an author of general non-fiction books, including legal works. Marilyn is a graduate of the New York University School of Law where she taught as an adjunct professor, and she is a member of the Bars of New York State, the District of Columbia and the US Supreme Court.

Qanta A. Ahmed, MD is a highly distinguished physician, lecturer and author. Her recent memoir, In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom, is an exploration of a complex world readers will find fascinating and at times repugnant. After being denied a visa to remain in the U.S., British-born Dr. Ahmed, a Muslim woman of Pakistani origin, takes advantage of an opportunity, before 9/11, to practice medicine in Saudi Arabia. She discovers her new environment is defined by schizophrenic contrasts that create an "absurd clamorous clash of modern and medieval.... It never became less arresting to behold." The introduction to her new environment is shocking. Her first patient is an elderly Bedouin woman. Though naked on the operating table, she still is required by custom to have her face concealed with a veil under which numerous hoses snake their way to hissing machines. Everyday life is laced with bizarre situations created by the rabid puritanical orthodoxy that among other requirements forbids women to wear seat belts because it results in their breasts being more defined, and oppresses Saudi men as much as women by its archaic rules. The intimate introduction to this world is unforgettable and written with tremendous eloquence.


Hosted by Steve Murphy.

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Contact: 

Marilyn G. Haft
Partner, Duval & Stachenfeld LLP
www.dsllp.com 

Qanta A. Ahmed, MD
Author of In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom
http://www.amazon.com/qanta_ahmed

Steve Murphy
Executive Producer & Host

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