Dana Ziyasheva was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 1972. She wrote, pitched and published her first story about the adventures of pigeons in a children’s newspaper at the age of 12. She dreamed of becoming a writer or a filmmaker. But in the Soviet Union of her childhood, opportunities for a middle-class girl from the empire’s outskirts to make a career in cinema were virtually inexistent. Instead, Dana became a TV journalist graduating from Kazakh State University. She travelled to the drying Aral Sea, to Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, covered an 8-point earthquake in Eastern Kazakhstan, always hungry for extraordinary stories and spectacular scenery.

In 1993, she used her fellowship at the Central European University in Prague, Czech Republic to foray into Western Europe. No one, not even the Kazakh government, could believe it when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in Paris offered her a position as the first-ever international civil servant from Kazakhstan. Dana spent the next 20 years working for the UN in Paris, in Iraq, China and Costa Rica. She established community radio stations, libraries, a public service channel and tele-centers in the African bush, deserts and mountains of East Asia and islands off the Panamanian coasts.

In between missions, negotiating with governments and contributing to implementation of international conventions and UN Plans of Action, she was involved in audiovisual projects on Central China TV and China Film Group.

In 2012, Dana wrote "The Dragon Angel", a screenplay for a feature film set in China in the genre of magical realism, that won the "Best Film Project to Invest In" award at the Shanghai International Film Festival.

Yet another change of continent later, her first feature film, “Defenders of Life”, takes place in rainforests on the border between Costa Rica and Panama. It was born out of an unlikely friendship between Dana and Carmen, a matriarch from the Ngäbe indigenous tribe. Married at the age of 12, Carmen never learned to read nor write; what she did learn though was how to survive and dominate. Dana was so mesmerized by the beauty of decline and permanent drama of the Ngäbes, that she decided to turn it into a movie… backed by a three-man crew. In the next two months, she worked as a driver, make-up artist, set designer, costume supervisor, her own assistant and occasionally, film director. She then edited the movie and supervised color-correction and sound mix. Although the movie was only pre-viewed in Costa Rica, the word of mouth and its relevance to all indigenous groups in Central America are quickly turning it into a cultural and social phenomena.

The Ngäbe tale is here for you to see and think.