Guests

Director and photographer Zaradasht Ahmed is a Kurdish/Norwegian filmmaker. He was born and raised in Northern Iraq. His previous work includes the award-winning documentary ”Road to Diyarbakir”, and he has many years of experience working with documentary filmmaking in the Middle East, North-Africa, and Asia, as well as training local people in documentation. His latest film on the topic of illegal immigration to Europe (for SVT Swedish Television) – ”Fata Morgana” – has been screened at several prestigious Film festivals.

Zane Balčus is currently a director of Riga Film Museum in Latvia, where she curates exhibitions, film programmes, organize academic conferences, and other activities. She is a co-author of the book „Inscenējumu realitāte. Latvijas aktierkino vēsture“ (Reality of Fiction. History of Latvian Fiction Film, Riga, 2011), has contributed to the special edition on Latvian cinema in the online journal Kinokultura.com (2011), as well as writes articles on film for various publications.

László Bihari has designed online campaign videos for non-profit organizations for the past nine years. He is one of the founders of the creative team, ZPOK. This is their first documentary film production.

Niina Brandt is one of the two owners of Double Back Documentaries Ltd. She has directed and produced, shot and edited short films and several made to order works for the company’s clients since its launch in 2008, including TV channels and broadcasting companies. Niina Brandt also produces photographs and films about the Finnish Lapland where the special nature of the region becomes part of the works of art. My Secret Forest is her first hour long documentary film as a director. My Secret Forest documentary film won ”Best national documentary film 2017” audience award in DocPoint Documentary Film Festival Helsinki, Finland.

Rehad Desai completed a history degree at the University of Zimbabwe, where he lived for three years. In 1996 Rehad entered the television and film industry as a Producer/Director and has since focused most of his energy on documentary productions, many of which have received critical acclaim . In 1997 he completed his Masters Degree in Social History at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2000 he completed a postgraduate degree in television and film producing through AVEA, and in 2009 he completed a course in European Documentary Production through Eurodoc. He currently runs Uhuru Productions, a film and TV company producing documentaries and dramas, and has served as the Festival Director of the Tri Continental Film Festival for the last 10 years, and the Conference Director of the People to People International Documentary Conference.

Stefanie Diekmann is a professor of media studies and chair of the Media and Theater Studies Department at Hildesheim University. She previously taught as a professor of media and theater studies at Munich University, and as a visiting professor at (among others) FU Berlin, University of Berne, The University of Texas at Austin, and University College Cork. Her research focuses on intermedia relations with an emphasis on film and photography. Her other topics include: film and photo theory, media discourses in fiction film, and the audiovisual aesthetics of the interview. She is also a columnist for the film magazine Cargo and an occasional film critic for the Berlin weekly, "Der Freitag". Her recent publications include: "Backstage - Konstellationen von Theater und Kino" (Berlin 2013), "Six Feet Under" (Berlin, Zurich 2013), "Die andere Szene" (ed., Berlin 2014), and the upcoming, "Die Attraktion des Apparativen" (es., with Volker Wortmann, Munich 2018).

Firas Fayyad is an award-winning Syrian filmmaker. He has directed, edited and produced several films, both documentary and fiction. He has participated in international film festivals and received recognition for his work about contemporary Syrian issues and the political transformation in the Arab world. His latest film, Last Men in Aleppo, won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2017 Sundance FilmFestival; the prize for Most Innovative Documentary at the second annual Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards; the IDA Courage Under Fire Award and received two nominations from Cinema Eye Honors.

Born in Moscow, Maria worked in journalism, advertising and films big and small. For a few years she was the program director of the Texture Film Festival in Perm, Russia, and the editor-in-chief of the Russian magazines Action! and The Booker's Bulletin. Together with Max Tuula, she founded the Estonian production company Marx Film. The list of the documentaries she produced includes the international anthology 15 Young by Young (the Russian segment) (2012), I Don't Love You by Aleksander Rastorguev and Pavel Kostomarov (2012, Kinotavr IFF, Warsaw IFF, Listapad Minsk IFF) The Term by Rastorguev / Kostomarov / Pivovarov (2014, Karlovy Vary IFF, DOK Leipzig, CPH:DOX, IDFA, Full Frame FF), The Trial: The State of Russia vs Oleg Sentsov (2017, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, One World Prague, Sheffield Doc/Fest and others). She also works as the producer of documentaries for the Moscow Office of Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe.

Kristýna received her Master’s degree in Sociology at Charles University in Prague. Since 2012, she has been head of the accompanying programme and guest service of ZlatýVoči, the International Film Festival of Film Theory Students. Since 2013, she has been a member of the programme department of Film Festival Sokolov. Since 2015, she’s been a coordinator of the alternative distribution platform KineDok which screens creative documentaries from Central and Eastern Europe across 8 countries for the third year now, focusing on non-traditional venues and site-specific events. KineDok is a project of Institute of Documentary Film which supports Central and Eastern European documentary films from development to distribution since 2001.

Gusztáv Hámos is an artist, curator, author and publisher. His artistic work includes film, video, photography and installations that have been exhibited at Documenta, Venice Biennale, and the Ludwig Múzeum Budapest. His films and videos have been shown, among others, at Tate Modern London, ZKM Karlsruhe, Triennale of Photography Hamburg, 63 Mostra Internazionale d’arte cinematografica di Venezia, and YBCA San Francisco. His work is included in the collections of the MOMA New York, Centre Pompidou Paris, NBK Berlin, ZKM Karlsruhe, Art Collection NRW, Ludwig Múzeum Budapest, C3 Budapest, and Saint Gervai SIV Genève.

Loránd Balázs Imre is a co-founder of SpeakEasy Project, and founder of SpeakEasy Project Berlin. He has worked on a number of documentary films since 2012, and is the director and producer of the Erasmus EuroMedia Awarded documentary series, LEAVE/STAY.

Alexander Kvatashidze was born in 1977 in Tbilisi, Georgia. In 1996 he graduated from Nikoladze Art College with a qualification as a sculptor. In 2001 he earned his BA degree in Art and Humanities at Tbilisi State University. In 2005-2006, Kvatashidze studied at the film department of California State University in San Jose. Since 2006 Alexander has worked as a director, DoP or producer on various projects, most of which were documentaries. He founded Lokokina Studio in 2009.

Filip Antoni Malinowski was born in 1982, in Poznan, Poland. He studied film- and media science as well as fine arts in Vienna. Resettlement is his first feature-length documentary. Malinowski lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

Kata Olah began work as an editor, host, and director for a variety of television productions in the mid 1990's. For 10 years, she produced television series and short films. It was only in 2010 that she began to focus on directing. In that year, she completed a documentary for HBO entitled Romacops. Since then, she has directed several mid-length documentaries and popular science miniseries. Her first short fiction, En Passant, has won a number of international awards.

Gergely Pápai studied documentary filmmaking at the Cultural and Visual Anthropology faculty of the University of Miskolc. He is a co-founder of Zpok Medialab. His work focuses mainly on human rights and environmental issues. He has worked on several documentary films as a cameraman and an editor. This documentary, Iza, is his directorial debut and his first festival-nominated film.

András Péterffy (1946) filmdirector, producer, chief of Dunataj Foundation curatorium. He has produced hundreds of shorts, features, documentary- fiction- and experimental films. Awarded with Bela Balazs Prize, Coup-de-Coeur,  Scythian Golder Deer, Green Raven Prize Associate professor of visual culture at Pazmany Peter Catholic  University Budapest.

Sarah Pucill has been making 16mm short films since completing her MA at the Slade School of Art in 1990. Her publicly-funded films have screened worldwide in galleries, and have won awards at international festivals. Her first feature-length film in black and white, Magic Mirror (2013), premiered at Tate Modern, toured internationally with LUX and was exhibited with photographs from the film at The Nunnery Gallery 2015. Her sequel to Magic Mirror, Confessions to the Mirror (2016), also shot on 16mm, premiered at London Film Festival and has since screened at international film festivals and museum galleries including the Alchemy Film Festival, Creteil Film Festival, National Portrait Gallery, and White Cube Gallery London. She has a doctorate and is Reader at University of Westminster. A forthcoming chapter on her recent films on Cahun will be published by Palgrave Macmillian, edited by V. Smith and N. Hamlin next year. Her work is collected and distributed through leading international distributors including LUX, The British Film Institute (BFI), and Light Cone Paris.

Svitlana Shymko is an independent director from Ukraine, and a graduate of the DocNomads international MA program in documentary film directing. Her short films have been shown and received awards at numerous international film festivals. Shymko is working on developing political, social, and feminist topics in documentary cinema.

Shorena Tevzadze graduated from Shota Rustaveli Theater and Georgian State Film University with a MA in Film Direction, and Ilia state University with an MA in the Art of Dramaturgy. She also studied at UCLA. She has participated in international film festivals and workshops including: TIFF, Berlinale, Sarajevo FF, Lisbon docs, and Eurasiadoc. Didube, the Last Stop is her first feature-length documentary. It premiered in Visions du Reel and won the award for best film in Cinedoc, Tbilisi (in the Focus Caucasus section).

Thomas Tode is a freelance filmmaker, curator and author based in Hamburg. Since 1994 he has lectured at various universities and curated projects for the Kinemathek Hamburg as well as the film festival Cinepolis. He has published books on Johan van der Keuken, Chris Marker, Dziga Vertov, photofilm, essay-film, Bauhaus and film, and Battleship Potemkin.

Marcell Torok was born in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary, in 1990, and has been making films since 2008. After graduating from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design's Media Design faculty in 2015, he began film directing studies at the University of Theater and Film Arts (SZFE), Budapest. In his opinion, the most important thing in making movies is that the crew, as a group of creative people, love watching other people's stories and wanting to share these on the screen.

Maya Zinshtein is an award-winning Israeli filmmaker and journalist. She emigrated from Russia as a child and now lives in Tel Aviv. She holds a BA in Cinema and French studies and an MA in Security and Diplomacy, both from Tel Aviv University. She directed and produced the award-winning feature-length documentary Forever Pure about the Beitar Jerusalem F.C and also produced numerous other documentaries, including Thieves by Law (by Alexander Gentelev, ARTE/ZDF), the inside story of Russian Mafia. Zinshtein’s background is in investigative journalism. Working for the prestigious Israeli paper Haaretz, she covered many of the ills of Israeli society and directed investigative stories for television channels.