Herb Di Gioia is a key figure in the tradition of observational cinema. The films that he made with David Hancock in the early 1970s laid the foundations for a different kind of observational documentary than one identified with the more well known work of David and Judith MacDougall.

Following Hancock’s untimely death, Di Gioia channeled most of his energies into teaching. He was a central figure in Britain’s National Film and Television School, training anthropologists in filmmaking techniques and fostering ethnographic sensibilities among filmmaking students — most notably Molly Dineen.

After filmmaker Norman Miller received a grant from the National Science Foundation to do a series of films in five different ecological zones throughout the world, Di Gioia and Hancock were chosen to film in Afghanistan. It was here that they spent three to four months shooting, resulting in the Afghan Series in the Faces of Change collection.