V.E.R.Z.I.O Film Festival

Leo de Boer /// Closing in on Tanja /// director /// meet with him in Toldi, 12 November, 6.15PM Leo De Boer was born in 1953 in the Netherlands. He studied History at the University of Amsterdam followed by four years at the Dutch Film Academy. He has worked as film editor at NOS Dutch National Television, and is presently lecturer at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU). He has further done documentary screenplay coaching at the IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) workshop for docu-development. He is the screenwriter and director of several documentaries and feature films. His work includes fiction film The Lover (1995) and documentaries The Russian Folk (1996), Dreaming in October (1999), Under Moscow (2001), The Red Years: Were We Terrorists? (2005), Bikkel (2008)

Mona Nicoară /// Our School /// director and producer /// meet with her in Toldi, 11 November, 6PM Mona Nicoară has been a human rights activist since the 1989 Revolution that overthrew the Ceauşescu regime in her native Romania; she started working in film as an Associate Producer for Edet Belzberg’s Academy Award-nominated Children Underground (2001).

Miruna Coca-Cozma /// Our School /// co-director and co-producer /// meet with her in Toldi, 11 November, 6PM Graduate of the BBC School of Journalism and of the Romanian Theatre and Film Academy; she has worked as a journalist for Antena 1, TVR, RTS - Radio Télévision Suisse, and France 5; her most recent project is Omar Porras: Sorcier de la Scene (2008) for TSR.

Vlad Naumescu /// Visual Lab Vlad Naumescu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His work focuses on memory, religious transmission and Eastern Christianity, on which he published two books and a special journal issue (Ethnos 2012). He teaches visual anthropology and worked as consultant for several documentary film projects. His first feature-length documentary, Birds Way (2009) co-directed with Klára Trencsényi, is an award-winning documentary on Old Believers in the Danube Delta.

Thomas Lahusen /// Visual Lab /// The Interim Country /// director and producer Thomas Lahusen is Distinguished Professor of Russian and Eurasian Cultural History at the University of Toronto, where he teaches Russian/Soviet cultural history, comparative literature, and film. His publications include How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia (1997), and the co-edited volumes Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (1995), Socialist Realism without Shores (1997). His current research focuses on cinema as historical source, which resulted in several documentary films: The Province of Lost Film (2006), The Uprising (2006), and Komsomolsk mon amour (2007).

Costel Bercus /// Chair of REF Board /// Our School /// discussion moderator Costel Bercus is a Romanian Roma, graduated in International Relations and European Studies from the Spiru Haret University in Bucharest. Since 1997, he has been working as a human rights activist with Romani CRISS (Roma Center for Social Interventions and Studies), which is a well-known human rights organization in Romania. In 2000, he was appointed Executive Director of Romani CRISS, which made him exposed to extensive international activities and ultimately led to his appointment in 2005 as Board Member of the Roma Education Fund (REF). The same year, he was asked to take the Chairmanship of the REF Board which he is carrying on still today.

Koen Suidgeest /// Karla's Arrival /// director /// meet with him in Toldi, 10 November, 6PM A graduate of the University of the Creative Arts in England, Koen Suidgeest has dedicated his professional life to working as a director, writer, producer, and photographer, primarily in the field of documentaries. His interest resides in socially engaged projects with a strong focus on human rights. Koen's films explore the power of human adaptation and our ability to design a life of morals and values independent of ones fate. With his documentary Casting (2006) he became the first Dutch filmmaker to be nominated for a Spanish Academy Award (Goya).

Glória Halász /// Iron Curtain - Theatre in the Penitentiary of Vác /// director /// meet with her in Toldi, 9 November, 6.15PM Glória Halász was born in Budapest in 1985. She studied at the Budapest Eötvös Loránd University and at the "Ship Log Book" Workshop of Bárka Theater. Currently she works as a radio program host, television editor, communication expert, critic and theater and film director. Iron Curtain is the first feature length documentary she made together with Dávid Reisinger, her permanent cinematographer since 2006.

Viktor Oszkár Nagy /// Caught Between Two Worlds /// director /// meet with him in Toldi, 12 November, 8.15PM Viktor Oszkár Nagy graduated from the film and television department of the Budapest University of Theatre and Film in 2009. His diploma film, the feature film Fatherland, won the International Film Critics Award at the 40th Hungarian Film Festival and was nominated for the European Film Academy award. Since then he has been involved in films of different genres, participated in the television series Ship Log Book, and directed one episode of the documentary series 3 Weddings. This year, his feature length documentary Caught Between Two Worlds won him the main prize at the Miskolc Cinefest.

Csaba Szekeres /// Vortex /// director /// meet with him in Toldi, 13 November, 4.15PM Csaba Szekeres has been an independent filmmaker since 1993. He was born in 1968 in Mezőkövesd, a small town in Northern Hungary. Between 2005 and 2010 he taught visual arts and script writing at Kodolányi János University His professional carrier as filmmaker started with the creative documentary Provence Leaves in 1993 for HBO. He then worked for the radio and the television, including television program Muse and Literary Journal. Together with his wife Judit Gáspár, in 1997 he launched a documentary series Response to Life in Duna Television on disabled and disadvantaged people. Since 2002, television programs Theme and Net have screened his films he made in collaboration with cinematographer Zoltán Lovasi.

Ágnes Sós /// Invisible Strings - The Talented Pusker Sisters /// director /// meet with her in Toldi, 12 November, 2PM Ágnes Sós was born in Budapest. An internationally renowned documentary filmmaker, she has also been involved in the various areas of filmmaking as director, cinematographer, script writer, producer, interviewer of her own films. From 1990 she worked for the Hungarian Televison for eleven years as editor and director. She has been making documentaries since 1991, first for the television, as director and producer, making altogether 15 longer and 15 shorter documentaries over the past 20 years. She has won several festival awards both in Hungary and abroad. Her latest Invisible Strings produced by HBO won the Hungarian Critics Award at the 2011 Hungarian Film Festival and several invitations to film festivals abroad.

Klára Trencsényi /// Corvin Variations /// director /// meet with her in Toldi, 12 November, 4.30PM Klára Trencsényi was born in 1975 in Budapest. She has been making documentaries since 2004; as a cinematographer she worked on The Angelmakers (2005), The Secret Years (2009), and directed several documentaries including A Chance (2007), 3 Weddings - Elena and Leo (2009), Birds Way (2009). She is committed to authorial documentary cinema, and organized the first Hungarian creative documentary workshop in Budapest in 2010. She is presently working on two feature length creative documentaries as cinematographer and director.

Jan Tenhaven /// Autumn Gold /// director /// meet with him in Toldi, 12 November, 6PM Jan Tenhaven has studied Social Sciences at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and took journalism classes at Freie Universität Berlin. He had begun his journalistic career as an assistant with Kilimann-Filmproduktion in Essen and as a freelance writer for the daily newspaper WAZ and the weekly paper DIE ZEIT and later worked as a reporter and editorial staff member for various German television stations such as MDR, WDR, VOX and SAT1. From 1998 to 2001, he was a television correspondent and bureau chief of APM Media in London and a director for London International Television (LITV). Currently he works in the Arts & Science department at MDR television in Leipzig as well as for Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion in Berlin. He also gives lectures at the Electronic Media School in Potsdam-Babelsberg. Autumn Gold is his first feature length documentary.

Kostadin Bonev /// Europolis /// director is a Bulgarian documentary filmmaker who created a number of feature films and documentaries and has won many prestigious awards, among them Grand Prix "Centaur" in 1995 for Letters to the Nether World, Prix Europa Willy Brandt Prize for The Patience of the Stone, the Special Prize of the Jury in Munich for the same film, the Special Prize of the Film Concern Mosfilm for A War Correspondent, and Golden Rhyton Grand Prix for Europolis, the Town of the Delta. Kostadin Bonev has received also a number of Bulgarian awards including the Golden Rhyton, and the prize of Bulgarian Film Makers. Bonev is also a winner of the award of the Golden Chest international film festival, which is organized in the second biggest Bulgarian city - Plovdiv. Several of the films by Kostadin Bonev were inspired by Christian art. The director spent his childhood in the Bulgarian town of Triavna, which is known for its ancient traditions in icon painting and woodcarving. The documentaries The Spirit of the Temple and Magic of Bulgarian Iconostases are both focusing on the art of these Bulgarian craftsmen.

Nenad Puhovski /// Lora - testimonies /// director /// meet with him in Toldi, 10 November, 6.15PM Nenad Puhovski was born in Zagreb, he studied sociology and philosophy at the University of Zagreb, and graduated in film directing at the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Art. He directed more than 250 productions in theater, film and television, many of which have been screened and awarded worldwide. In 1997, Puhovski founded FACTUM, which soon became the largest independent documentary film production in Croatia and produced over 60 documentary films which were screened and awarded all around the globe. In 2004, he founded ZagrebDox, an annual international documentary film festival which today is one of the largest in the region. In 2009, Puhovski received the EDN (European Documentary Network) award for his contribution to the “development of the European documentary culture”. He was also decorated by the President of Croatia and Mayor of Zagreb. Nenad taught documentary filmmaking in many schools in Europe, Asia, North & South America, Middle East and Africa. He is a member of the European Film Academy, and an honorary member of CILECT.

Ohad Itach /// Loving Sophia /// director /// meet with him in Toldi, 10 November, 8PM Ohad Itach is a director, producer, and broadcast supervisor. The most recent major events he supervised and broadcast include: War in Gaza (2009), Bodies Swap with Hezbollah (2008), Second Lebanon War (2006), Gaza Disengagement (2005), Double Suicide Booming in Tel-Aviv Central Bus Station (2003), Dolphinarium Terror Attack in Tel-Aviv (2001). Loving Sophia is his first documentary feature which won awards at Bosnia & Herzegovina Mediterranean Film Festival, and DocAviv Film Festival in 2010.

Zsófi Kabarcz /// Wonderful Gladiators /// director /// meet with her in Toldi, 10 November, 8.15PM Former editor and correspondent for television, film director Zsófi Kabarcz has been working in the field of media and film for eight years. With Panna Boros she founded New Angle Film in 2007 with the purpose of producing innovative, socially engaged films. She has made several shorts and video clips, and in 2011 she directed her first feature length documentary film on the Baltazár Theater, winning her the best director’s award at the 42nd Hungarian Film Week. She enjoys life a great deal.

Guests