Guests

Inka Achté graduated in 2012 with an MA in documentary directing from the UK’s National Film and Television School. That same year she completed two award-winning short documentaries: The Wait and Alppikatu 25 - Home to the Homeless. Her debut feature, Boys Who Like Girls (2018), has been selected to more than 30 international festivals, including Sheffield DocFest, Nordisk Panorama, and DocNyc. In addition to filmmaking, Inka has worked in documentary sales, first at Taskovski Films and later at Autlook Filmsales. She is one of the founders of the Helsinki-based Raina Film Festival Distribution.

Abdallah Al-Khatib was born in 1989, in Yarmouk, and studied sociology at the University of Damascus. Prior to the revolution, he was a coordinator of activities and volunteers for the UN. Along with several friends, he created the humanitarian aid association Wataad, which carried out dozens of projects in Syria, particularly in Yarmouk. He participated in several documentary films related to life at the Yarmouk camp, notably as a cameraman for 194. Us, Children of the Camp, which premiered at Visions du Réel in 2017. The German magazine Peace Green identified him as a 2014 “peacemaker”. He received the Per Anger Human Rights Award in Sweden, in 2016. Abdallah currently lives in Germany, where he recently received refugee status.

I am Amina Ghazouani, a young film enthusiast. I am 24, a student at ELTE, and have always loved observing the dreamy world of cinema.

Ramona Aristide is a film critic finishing her MA in Film Studies at UNATC. She collaborates with various publications, such as Films in Frame and Observatorul Cultural, has been on the editorial board of FILM MENU for the past year, and was selected in the Talents Press at Sarajevo Film Festival 2022. Currently based in Bucharest, she is obsessed with Nordic landscapes, Hungarian literature, and animal rights.

Brigitta got her Film and Motion Pictures Editing degree at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in 2014. She continued her master's studies in Norway, at the Norwegian Film School. She has attended several master courses and seminars, such as Norman Hollyn's editing workshop in Prague, Monika Willi's masterclass in Copenhagen, Chris Dickens' masterclass in London, and completed Robert McKee's story seminar in Ireland, in 2016.

She has been working as an editor since 2008. During this time, she has edited numerous works of fiction, animations, and documentaries. Her first feature project won the Gamechanger award at SXSW Film Festival. A short animation, Balcony, won the Jury Prize at the Annecy Festival, and Traub Viktoria's Mermaids and Rhinos received the Hungarian Film Critics Award. Her most recent documentary, Too Close, was screened in the Documentary Competition of the Sarajevo Film Festival. She teaches editing and dramaturgy for animation and motion picture students, and is a member of HSE, the Hungarian Society of Film and Video Editors.

María Belén has a background in international relations and political sciences, with a deep interest in film and performing arts. At the moment, she is pursuing her Master's degree in communication and media studies at ELTE University, with the hope of combining her knowledge on socioeconomic issues and human rights with arts and media representation. She has experience working on international cooperations, and considers documentaries a very powerful tool to bring about awareness on multiple issues, and to promote research, accountability, and social transformation.

Rita Boronyák is a film critic. She graduated in Hungarian and French literature (1985), and Aesthetics (1987) at ELTE in Hungary, and studied French literature and literary theory at the Sorbonne (1984). She worked at the National Széchényi Library, and analyzed French advertising. She graduated from the MÚOSZ School of Journalism in 1995. Since 1998, she has been working in the documentary department of the National Film Archive. From 1998 to 2013, she ran a documentary film club. Between 2007 and 2010, she studied at the ELTE Doctoral School (Film, Media and Cultural Theory). She writes film and festival reviews, and translates from French to English. She has been a member of several Hungarian and international juries (Visegrad Documentary Library, Magyar Filmszemle, Bratislava Film Festival, KAFF Kecskemét, Cinefest Miskolc, FIKE, PÖFF Tallinn, Primanima Budaörs, and Cinélatino Toulouse), and is a member of the Film Critics Section of MÚOSZ.

Chiara Boschiero is head of educational projects and senior programmer for the Biografilm Festival in Bologna, Italy. She graduated in Film Production at the National Film School of Rome, and received her Master's Degree in Human Rights and Democratization in Latin America (LAT.MA) in Buenos Aires. She has 18 years of experience in the development of international co-production film projects, and is a trainer in cinema and human rights in Italy and Argentina. Before Biografilm Festival, she was the production manager of the International Human Rights Film Festival of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Pamela Cohn is a freelance film & video curator, arts & culture writer, nonfiction story consultant and dramaturge for film & video makers and moving image artists. She works as a professional mentor for such entities as Open City London's Assembly and The British Council / Scottish Documentary Institute’s program, Connecting Stories, for artists making their first or second long-form works. Pamela is the author of Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers (OR Books New York & London, 2020) and produces, writes and hosts The Lucid Dreaming Podcast: Conversations on Cinema, Art & Moving Image in cooperation with Lono Studio, London. She has been a contributing writer for MIT’s Open Doc Lab blog site IMMERSE; Filmmaker Magazine; BOMB Magazine; The Calvert Journal; Senses of Cinema, and works as a freelance writer for film print and web publications, catalogues and artist materials. Pamela created the blog Still in Motion, active from 2007 to 2015. She works as a host, moderator and interlocutor for filmmaker talks, panels and roundtables at an array of international festivals including the True/False Film Fest, Camden International, Sheffield Doc/Fest, DokuFest, Open City London, and IDFA.

With a postgraduate degree in Cultural Project Management from la Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Marion Czarny did part of her studies in the United States (Columbus, Ohio) and Ireland (Dublin). She worked as an editorial assistant for three cinema magazines, and as a programmer for several festivals: Paris Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales de cinéma (Paris), and Ohrid French Film Festival (Macedonia) before joining FIPA in 2008. Head of CAMPUS at FIPADOC, she supervises all editorial content for the young audience, students, and emerging directors. She oversees different education and training programs, such as the Young Europeans Jury, or the pitches regional first films, and curates the New Talent selection (international student films) of the festival. With her work, Marion is constantly involved in empowering youth through the prism of documentaries.

Zsuzsa Debre graduated in 2021 at the University of Theatre and Film Arts as a Documentary Director, in the class of Tamás Almási. She has worked as a reporter for radio, television and newspapers. In 2018 she founded the Ethnic Talents casting agency, which works to promote the visibility of minorities and other groups less represented in media and film, in film and advertising. She currently serves as a communications officer for the Egalipe Network and is the editor of Forbes Events. She has an interactive documentary project in research phase and an educational documentary about the Botanic Garden in Budapest in production phase.

Asia Dér graduated from the DOCnomads MA program as a documentary director, and is pursuing her doctoral degree at the University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest. Her graduation film, Letters from Mom, was nominated for best short film at the Hungarian Film Week, and her first feature (co-directed with Sári Haragonics), Her Mothers, was co-produced with HBO and supported by the Sundance Post-production Fund. Her Mothers was shown at more than 30 international film festivals and won several awards, including Best Film award at the Moscow International Documentary Film Festival DOKer, and the CROSSING EUROPE Film Festival in Linz. She has participated at ZagrebDox Pro, CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator, East Doc Platform, Cannes Docs, and the Docu Rough Cut Boutique. Asia’s currently working on her second feature-length documentary, I Did Not Die (Nem haltam meg), and is a member and teacher at the FREEszfe Association, and a presidium member of the Hungarian Documentary Association.

Réka Dubinyák is a scriptwriter from Budapest. After completing a degree in legal studies, she turned her attention to the film industry. She has written scripts for documentary series (Öregharcos, Együtt az Életért Egyesület: Én, te, ők), public service commercials (NANE- Women For Women Together Against Violence Association: Warning sign of domestic violence, 12 weeks) and TV films/series. She has written and directed her first feature-length documentary, and an online series, “Nofilter”. In the past few years she has focused on scriptwriting. She is currently working on several projects and is developing a short film.

Judit Sára Elek started her documentary film directing MA at University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest but she graduated at the Academy Of Performing Arts, Slovakia, 2022. She will graduate in filmmaking master’s at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary. Her first short documentary, Station (2019) won several prizes in Hungary. She works as assistant director in short fiction films, and in documentaries.

John Erling Utsi is a freelance Sami filmmaker and journalist with an extensive career at SVT-Sápmi.

Born in Belarus, Ruslan Fedotow began his career as a cinematographer. He graduated from the Academy of Arts and moved to Moscow, and finished a degree at the Moscow School of New Cinema in 2015. He worked as a cinematographer for many documentary films that were screened at festivals like the LA Film Festival, Vision du Réel, and Hotdocs. Since then he has experimented with documentary filmmaking. His documentary Where Are We Headed? premiered at IDFA in 2021, and won awards for best first feature and best cinematography. Ruslan is currently a student at DocNomads. Away is his first-year work film.

Since 2013, she has been involved in the production and programming of several film festivals, exhibitions and cultural events in the Czech Republic and abroad. She studied English Philology and Film Studies at Palacký University in Olomouc. Since 2015, she has been Head of the Industry 4Science section at the Academia Film Olomouc (AFO) international documentary film festival. She currently works in Prague as the manager of the community-driven documentary distribution project KineDok, which is one of the activities of the Documentary Film Institute.

Jan-Christoph Gockel, born in 1982, grew up near Kaiserslautern. He studied theatre, film, and media studies in Frankfurt/Main, and directing at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. He has worked as a freelance director since 2007. His productions usually focus on political issues. Since 2013, Gockel has been intensely engaged with Africa, and the relationship between Europe and former colonies, the effects of colonialism, and economic dependency have become the themes of Congo-Müller, Heart of Darkness, The Mission: Danton’s Death and Coltan Fever. His works have been nominated for the Nestroy Theatre Award (2010, 2016, 2017), which he won in 2017 for The Mission: Danton’s Death. The Revolution Devours Its Children! is his first feature-length film.

Zsolt Gyenge works as Associate Professor at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (Budapest, Hungary), where he teaches courses in film analysis, avant-garde cinema, film theory, film history, and visual communication theory. His field of research includes interpretation theories (phenomenology, hermeneutics), moving image installations (video art) and Romanian Cinema. He is the author of the book Image, Moving Image, Interpretation: A Theory of Phenomenological Film Analysis (published in Hungarian). He is active as a freelance film critic for more than 20 years, and currently is the editor of the scholarly journal on design culture, Disegno.

Fanni Hatházi is a director and producer. She graduated with an MA in documentary directing from the University of Film and Theatre Arts. In the last ten years she has worked as a field producer and reporter for various TV news and entertainment programs. She’s also researching how the emergence of Netflix and other streaming services has changed the documentary market, as she strongly believes that understanding these new models of distribution is crucial in reaching future audiences.

Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing has worked as a freelance filmmaker in Myanmar since 2006, acting as director, producer, editor, and sound recordist after attending film schools in both Myanmar and Germany. Her short, Burmese Butterfly played festivals in over 20 countries, and Period@Period won for best short at the Wathan Film Festival. Midwives is her feature documentary debut.

Dmytro Hreshko was born in a small village in Transcarpathia, in western Ukraine. He has been studying and shooting documentaries since 2019. He completed summer courses in directing at "Skalka 2019", a film school in Uzhgorod, and graduated from the Kharkiv Academy of Visual Arts’ (AVA) documentary film course, under the curators Lyubov Durakova and Alisa Kovalenko. The following year he attended the Indie Lab 2020 School of Documentary Film in Kyiv, curated by Dmytro Tyazhlov and Ella Shtyka. He is active as an organizer for the Transcarpathian Film Commission concerning the development of cinematography in Transcarpathia, and as a co-founder and program coordinator of the Carpathian Mountain International Film Festival (CMIFF) in Uzhgorod.

Erika Kapronczai graduated from the University of Pécs with a degree in aesthetics, then from the University of Theatre and Film Arts with a degree in film directing. She is co-founder and creative producer of the international audiovisual dream collection DREAMPIRE. In addition to directing short feature films (Well under the Sun; THREESOME), she also produces documentaries and portraits (CEU20; DREAMPIRE; Sajdik; INFORG PORTRAITS; KIM; F - The Man with the Antenna). She is currently working on her first feature film and is supporting first feature projects as a creative producer.

Michaela Kolláriková works as a Coordinator of the educational section at the One World International Film Festival organized by People in Need Slovakia. During her studies of the Theory of interactive media, thanks to various projects and internships in cultural institutions and non-profit organizations, she discovered her enthusiasm for social issues, volunteering and the civil sector. One World offers her to work in the creative industry and focus on social issues, human rights and non-formal education at the same time.  

Máté Kőrösi was born in 1992, in Budapest. After graduating from the Film Studies department at Eötvös Loránd University, he studied documentary film directing at the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest. He shot several short fiction films during his studies at ELTE, among them Szuper (2015), which was screened at various short film festivals in Hungary. He spent the last years finishing his first feature-length documentary film Divas, co-produced by HBO Europe and Makabor Studio.

Yuliia Kovalenko is a film critic and programmer at Kyiv’s Docudays UA IHRDFF. She was a lecturer at the Department of Cultural Studies and Arts History of Odessa National Polytechnic University, and at the Department of Fine Arts of Odessa State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture. In 2017, she received a PhD in Cultural Studies. From 2015 to 2017, she was a program director at independent movie theatre “Inotheatre”, in Odessa, where she held a special program on Ukrainian art cinema, “We Are Here”. As a film critic, she has been published in Ukrainian and international journals (Korydor, LB.ua, Filmar.online, Cineticle, La Furia Umana, etc.). Between 2016 and 2018 she was co-editor of Cineticle Magazine, devoted to art cinema. In 2019 she joined the program department at Docudays UA. In 2022, she co-founded the sloїk film atelier (sloik-film-atelier.com) – an independent Ukrainian film curators union, giving space for underrepresented voices and promoting them internationally. She runs her own blog about art cinema, kinotabs.com, and is a member of the Ukrainian Film Critics Union and the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine.

Maria Kurinna is a human rights expert, with a background in diplomacy and a strong record of international advocacy experience, advocacy campaigns promoting rights of women and girls in Ukraine, child rights, rights of IDPs and CAP in the context of Russian aggression. Maria has experience in advocating at the UN HRC, UN OHCHR, Committee on the Rights of the Child, CEDAW,CoE, European Parliament. Currently, Maria is international advocacy chief of the Human Rights Centre ZMINA. ZMINA has been focused on monitoring human rights violations in the temporarily occupied Crimea and currently is documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity as a member of https://www.5am.in.ua/en Maria is passionate about promoting human rights and bring to account perpetrators to more justice.

Vera Lacková is a Roma director and film producer. Born in Slovakia and based in Vienna, Austria, she is the founder of the Czech-Slovakian production company, Media Voice. Her background working with Roma people, sharing their stories and movements, enables her to bring a unique insider perspective on important and timely ethnic and political Roma themes for the community. A participant of the 2019 IDFA Academy, her feature-length documentary debut film, How I Became a Partisan, attempts to uncover the fate of forgotten Roma partisans. Her own search for and exposure of stories of Romani partisans is primarily based on the life of her great-grandfather, Ján Lacko. The film premiered at goEast Film Festival in Wiesbaden, in 2021. There she received the Federal Foreign Office for Cultural Diversity Award. The project was developed at the Ex Oriente film workshop, pitched at the 2020 East Doc Platform, and is part of the East Silver Caravan distribution program, supported by the Institute of Documentary Film.

Anna Ladinig is the director of IFFI - International Film Festival Innsbruck since 2019. IFFI focuses on topics and regions that are underrepresented in global film networks. Anna graduated in Slavonic Studies at the University of Innsbruck and is currently working on her dissertation on Central Asian cinema. Since 2022 she is co-spokesperson of FÖFF, the Austrian Association of Film Festivals.

Carla Lehner (she/her) is a Vienna-based curator and cultural producer. In her academic career in the Netherlands, she has been particularly engaged with queer feminist network practices. She is currently the artistic director of This Human World International Human Rights Film Festival in Vienna.

Danna Levy was born in 1991, and was raised in Ramat Gan. She graduated with a BA in film and scriptwriting from Sapir College. She resided and volunteered in Sderot throughout her studies. These experiences taught her about the city and its inhabitants. Her acquaintance with Yael provided the urge to document, which, in an almost natural manner, altered their relationship into a documentary film. Unwell Mind is her graduation film.

Cam is an award winning filmmaker with a demonstrated history of working on documentary, commercial and outdoor lifestyle focused films. He has spent the majority of his career building his portfolio as a director, and has found success in conservation/natural history storytelling. Cam has had the pleasure of working with some of the most influential names in conservation and his latest documentary won "Best Canadian Documentary" at the BC Environmental Film Fest. Through this work he has also cut his teeth as a cinematographer and editor. Cam’s inspiration as a filmmaker comes from the environment he is in and this often comes through in his work- nature is the true artist!

Erin Macpherson is a documentary filmmaker from South Africa, with an Honours in documentary filmmaking. By the end of 2022, they will graduate from the DocNomads Masters Programme. Their films often explore humanitarian socio-political issues, such as queer rights, climate change, and mental health advocacy, to name a few.

Little Bus Production, based in Budapest, Hungary, was founded by Krisztina Meggyes and Balázs Lévai in 2017. Their recent fiction, Nyugati Nyaralás (dir.: Dániel Tiszeker & Balázs Lévai), became 2022’s most-watched Hungarian film in cinemas. Krisztina Meggyes is a film director and producer. She received her master’s degree in Documentary Directing at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest. She is currently studying in the doctorate programme; her research field is social impact and ethics in documentary films. Her current projects include: feature-length documentaries funded by the Hungarian National Film Institute, such as My Father's Daughter (dir.: Lea Podhradská), Hatchery (dir: Máté Fuchs); and international co-productions Under the Dance Floor (dir.: Sára Timár), a Hungarian-French co-production currently in development, and 2158 Stories (dir.: Ida Marie Gedbjerg Sørensen) a Danish-Hungarian co-production in production. She participated in several international training and industry programmes, like IDFAcademy, DokLeipzig Co-Pro Market, and Documentary Campus Masterschool.

My name is Blanka Mucsi, and I am a young journalist and first-year student at Budapest Metropolitan University's Master’s program in television production arts. I previously studied Communication and Media Studies. I’m really happy to be a member of the Student Jury, because the topics at Verzió, such as global social problems, inequality, human rights, and climate injustice interest me on a daily basis, both in my private life and in my work. I believe that documentaries are the perfect tool to fight for a better world, because they have the power to make an impact through their visual world and their topics. In the future, I would like to make documentaries and bring the most important social problems closer to people, not only through writing, but also through films.

I'm Márk Nagy, a student of theoretical studies in ELTE’s Film Studies Master's program, where I have been working on the analysis and criticism of documentaries for a long time. I think documentary film is extremely important because it is a medium and art form that has real stakes in amplifying voices and stories that we would otherwise not hear in these turbulent times. In this light, I think it is very important to examine and evaluate these works with a critical attitude commensurate with their stakes. Verzió provides an excellent platform for this. It is a great honor to be on the Verzió student jury this year after previously serving as a moderator at the festival after-screenings.

Anna Nemes is a painter. Her first feature documentary, Beauty of the Beast, premiered in June 2022, at Sheffield DocFest. Her second film, Gentle, was in competition at Sundance Film Festival in 2022.

Frederik Nicolai is an award-winning documentary film producer, based in Belgium. He started his career by executive producing fiction series, feature and short films in Belgium and the Netherlands, then he dedicated himself to documentaries. His documentaries tell stories that fight taboos and stigmas, create new insights, and point-of-views, and provide a broader and more critical world view. Besides producing, Frederik is also scriptwriter, coach for young filmmakers and lecturer and board member of DocNomads.

Since 1st November 2017 – Executive Director of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union. Deputy Head of the Commission under the President of Ukraine on pardons (since August 2019) Member of the Supervisory Board of National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine (since December 2017). Member of the Legal Reform Commission under the President of Ukraine (since August 2019). Member of the Consultative Council on protection rights and freedoms of defenders of Ukraine (since April 2021). For over 10 years, led the diplomatic institution –Information Office of the Council of Europe in Ukraine. For 15 years, he had been involved in project coordination and management by the Council of Europe in Ukraine. Was an executive director of the “Ukrainian Legal Aid Foundation” – organisation which developed the legal aid provision standards in Ukraine. The author and co-author of a number of publications on the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights, manuals and guides on the issues of rights for information, in particular, access to public information, as well as the publications on the free legal aid. Worked at the philological faculty of Kyiv State University named after Taras Shevchenko (deputy dean of the philological faculty on the work with foreign students) and at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine at the department of information.

Peter Podolský is a fourth-year student at the Atelier of Documentary Directing, at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. He previously studied product design. He is active in theatre and photography in Prague, where he currently lives.

Auteur-director Hanna Polak (1967, Katowice, Poland) has Oscar and Emmy nominations under her belt for Children of Leningradsky, and a Producer Guild of America nomination for Something Better To Come, amongst many other awards and accolades. Her emotional bond with her protagonists allows her to deliver visceral, poetic films that celebrate the power of the human spirit, and portray the beauty of humanity in the most adverse circumstances.

Bálint Révész is a director and producer from Hungary. He graduated from the University of Brighton in 2012, and founded his own production company, Gallivant Film, in the UK. His first feature documentary, Granny Project, was made over the course of seven years. The film received the MDR Prize at DOK Leipzig, Best Documentary and Editing from the Hungarian Film Critics Association, Next Generation Award at Taiwan IDFF, Doc Alliance nomination, and was featured at Hot Docs, CPH:DOX, among others. Another News Story, a film he produced about journalists documenting the refugee crisis across seven countries, was in competition at KVIFF, ZFF, and IDFA in 2017. He is currently working on KIX - The Story of a Street Kid (to be completed in 2023), as a director. It is being financed by ARTE France, CNC, and HBO Max, among others.

Claudia has a Bachelor of Science degree in Communication, with an emphasis on Educational Communication, and completed professional studies in television, film, scriptwriting, and editing, in both Colombia and Italy. She specializes in the design and development of audiovisual projects, as well as the acquisition and sale of audiovisual content internationally. She has worked in the selection of projects and as jury of markets, festivals and national funds worldwide. Claudia has about 12 years of experience in international relations and content distribution, mainly in documentary and animation works. She also advises projects in the area of distribution, financing, co-production, and internationalization, conducts workshops worldwide in these areas. She coordinates the AFROLATAM Documentary Laboratories (Miradas Doc, Tenerife, Spain), and the Valencia Platform (DOCsValencia, Spain). She was part of the team of international tutors of the INCAA Documentary Incubator (Argentina).

Matt Sarnecki is a journalist, producer, and film director at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. He earned a BA in political science and history at Columbia University. He spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Romania before moving to Prague, Czech Republic, where he held a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts. In 2011 he moved to San Francisco, and earned a master’s degree in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2013 he has lived in Bucharest, Romania. His documentary Killing Pavel, about the murder of investigative journalist Pavel Sheremet, won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Medal in 2017, and the DIG Award (Italy) in 2018.

Kristina Savutsina was born in 1989, in Riga, into a Belarusian family. From 1993 to 2014 she lived in Belarus. In 2011, she graduated with a degree in cultural studies, in Minsk. Since 2015 she has been studying film and fine arts at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. In her work, Kristina deals with regulatory politics and its concrete manifestations in Belarus. She lives and works in Hamburg.

Since 1990, Michael has produced over 45 documentaries, TV doc series and feature films, among them internationally successful and highly-awarded films, such as Luna Papa (Bakhtiar Khoudojnazarov), Bella Martha (Sandra Nettelbeck), The Venice Syndrome (Andreas Pichler), Everyday Rebellion (The Riahi Brothers) and A Good American (Friedrich Moser, Executive Producer Oliver Stone). He wrote the scripts for several documentaries (i.e. Food Design, Hot Spot, BEER!, ÒRAIN – Beethoven), and directed TV documentaries such as the Vienna episode of the TV-series Food Markets. In the Belly of the Cities, which has been sold worldwide. From 2009–2020 Michael worked as a tutor and adviser for the European MEDIA training program for script development SOURCES 2.

Since 2018 he has concentrated almost exclusively on his work as a director and writer for his own documentaries (i.e. most recently ÒRAIN – Beethoven for WDR, ARTE, BBC etc.). He is currently preparing to shoot his feature documentary, Forbidden Music (CAN, ITA, AUT). His awards include the Theodor Koerner Award for Literature (1987) and the Austrian Film Award for Best Documentary (2013). Michael lives in Vienna, and is a member of the European Film Academy and the Austrian Film Academy.

Ksenya Shymanska, head of the Human Rights Department of NGO Docudays. She has worked in the human rights civil sector for 15 years after beginning her path as a volunteer monitoring peaceful gatherings for the OZON Civil Observation Group of the Center for Civil Liberties NGO. She later joined national and international advocacy projects, helped document human rights violations, participated in international solidarity projects and international educational human rights schools. She has organised national and international conferences in the civil sector, the National Ukrainian Human Rights NotConference, the Volunteer Award Euromaidan SOS. Between 2018 and 2021, she was a member of the board of the Center for Civil Liberties NGO. In 2019, she joined the NGO Docudays team, in which she is responsible for developing the Rights Now! human rights programme of the Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary film Festival, for implementing human rights campaigns (currently it is the Nationwide Ukrainian Campaign of NGO Docudays Together for Safe Childbirth!, and previously it was the Nationwide Ukrainian Docudays UA Campaign Against Cyberbullying), for the human rights component of the Docudays UA Travelling International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival and of the DOCU/CLUB Network, and for organising human rights events on the platform of the Docuspace Online Cinema. And she was also a member of the international jury of Sofia Documental Film Festival (2022). 

Olena Siyatovska is an artist and emerging filmmaker. She received a MA in English Philology and Art History from the National University of Oles Honchar, in Ukraine, and studied New Media Arts at the University of Fine Arts, Poznan, Poland. Her artistic practice focuses mainly on social relations, human rights, and identity in the digital dimension. She has participated in exhibitions and residencies in Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Germany, and the US. Siyatovska has received the Polish Ministry of Culture of Poland, “Gaude Polonia” scholarship twice. She is currently using this to create a documentary about Ukrainian women who have fled the war. I Am Michelle is her directing debut.

Zuzana Slobodova works as a Communication coordinator in People in Need Slovakia, where she coordinates the campaigns and online communication of the One World International Film Festival. She studied marketing management at Comenius University in Bratislava. Besides One World, she is a part of the production team at the Festival of contemporary art Biela noc and in her spare time, she is engaged in road cycling in the women's club Jazdím Čiernu Stredu. 

Born in 1964, Jannik Splidsboel studied film and art in Copenhagen and Rome, before graduating from EAVE. He has worked as a producer since the early 1990s, for RAI and ZDF, among others, on art, culture, youth, and more. Since 2004, he has been active as a documentary film director, with a dozen long and short films to his credit. His films have been praised internationally, including at the Berlinale and IDFA. He both wrote and directed Misfits, about LGBTQ young people in the American Bible Belt. The film was nominated for the Danish film critic award, Bodil. He has been a dramaturgical and artistic consultant since 2008, and teaches creative writing, pitch, development, and production.

Tue Steen Müller has worked with documentary films for more than 20 years at the Danish Film Board, as press officer, festival representative and film consultant/commissioner. He is the co-founder of Balticum Film and TV Festival, Filmkontakt Nord, Documentary of the EU, and EDN (European Documentary Network). From 1996 until 2005 he was the first director of EDN (European Documentary Network). Since 2006, he has been a freelance consultant and teacher in workshops like Ex Oriente, DocsBarcelona, Archidoc, Documentary Campus, Storydoc, Baltic Sea Forum, Black Sea DocStories, Caucadoc, CinéDOC Tbilisi, Docudays Kiev, Dealing With the Past Sarajevo FF, as well as programme consultant for the festivals Magnificent7 in Belgrade, DocsBarcelona, Message2Man in St. Petersburg, and DOKLeipzig. He teaches at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano, Italy, and writes reviews at www.filmkommentaren.dk. In 2004 he received the Danish Roos Prize for his contribution to Danish and European documentary culture. In 2006 he received an award for promoting Portuguese documentaries, and in 2014 he received the EDN Award “for an outstanding contribution to the development of European documentary culture”. In 2016 he was honoured with The Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits in Lithuania. In 2019, he received a Big Stamp at the 15th edition of ZagrebDox. He received the highest state decoration, the Order of the Three Stars, Fourth Class, for his significant contribution to the development and promotion of Latvian documentary cinema outside Latvia in 2021. The following year he received an honorary award at DocsBarcelona’s 25th edition, for having served as organiser and programmer since the start of the festival.

Diana Toucedo, is a Spanish filmmaker and editor based in Barcelona and Amsterdam. She stands at the intersection of film and research. Her work has been selected for film festivals, such as the Berlinale, IDFA, San Sebastian International Film Festival, Nara International Film Festival, Sao Paulo International Film Festival, FIDBA, Pesaro, DocLisboa, Visions du Réel, and others, and museums, like CCCB and the Centre Pompidou. Diana has edited more than 25 feature films to date, which have premiered and won awards at IDFA, Rotterdam, Cannes Semaine de la Critique, Moscow International FF, etc. She has also edited series for Netflix, HBO and Movistar. Diana currently combines her profession with teaching at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), and is core-teacher in the Master of Film at the Netherlands Film Academy. She is also pursuing a PhD in Practice-based Communication, exploring how moving images address identities, memories, historical crystallizations and social tensions.

Klára Trencsényi is an award-winning freelance director and cinematographer committed to creative documentaries. She graduated from the Hungarian Film Academy in Budapest as DOP. Her last feature documentary, Train to Adulthood, won – among other prizes – the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig. She leads courses on documentary filmmaking at CEU.

Caroline Troedsson is a documentary DoP and director based in Sweden. She’s been in filmmaking since 2007, and has made independent documentaries for the last 8 years. Her first feature as director, Patriotic Highway, was screened at Verzió Film Festival in 2020, among other places, and received a special mention at Al Jazeera Balkans Documentary Film Festival. She works regularly as DoP with director Magnus Gertten, for example on Only the Devil Lives Without Hope, and most recently Nelly & Nadine, which premiered at Berlinale, and has been recognized worldwide.

Julianna Ugrin graduated from university in 2005, after which she began working in film at Flora Film International. In 2009 she was selected to the EURODOC producer’s workshop. Since March 2009 she has worked at Havas Films as a producer and production manager. She established Éclipse Film, an independent film production company in 2011, and has developed projects at various international workshops and pitching forums. Films she produced were screened, nominated and awarded at festivals like Sundance, IDFA, DOK Leipzig, or Sarajevo IFF. Since 2013 she has taught at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in documentary MA studies, where she is also a DLA student. Ugrin is part of Emerging Producers 2014, and is an EAVE graduate. She is organizer of DunaDOCK Master Class & Pitching series, and a member of the Hungarian Film Academy and of EDN. Holy Dilemma is her first feature documentary as a director.

Ábel Visky grew up in Cluj, Romania. He studied directing at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania until 2010. In 2011, he continued in film and directing, under the mentorship of János Szász and Attila Janisch at the University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest. He is currently enrolled there as a PhD student. His first feature documentary, Tales From the Prison Cell (2020), is a creative documentary about the relationship between male detainees and the children waiting for them at home.

He graduated with a master's degree in Film Studies and Television and Radio Studies at Palacký University in Olomouc and studied Directing and Screenwriting at the Tomas Bata University Film School in Zlín. In the years 2017-2018 he completed an international course of production studies at FAMU International and participated in the production of several student documentaries. He continued his cooperation with FAMU and still works as an external producer for projects of foreign students. He worked as an event and production manager in several cinemas and arthouse film clubs and since 2019 he has been working as an industry curator of the 4Science program at the Academia Film Olomouc festival.

Bernadette Wegenstein is an Austrian-born linguist, author and critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker living in Baltimore. Her work brings together feminist thought and an interest in human-centric storytelling. She holds a PhD in linguistics and is currently a professor of media studies at John Hopkins University. She’s directed four documentaries, including The Conductor, See You Soon Again, and The Good Breast.

Dorottya Zurbó graduated from the DocNomads Joint Master Program, for which she was awarded a full Erasmus Mundus scholarship in Lisbon, Budapest and Brussels. Her short documentary, Distance (2017), premiered at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. Her first feature-length documentary, The Next Guardian (2017, co-director), premiered at IDFA in the First Appearance Competition. Easy Lessons (2018) is her directorial debut. The film received the Hungarian Critics Award for Best Documentary in 2019, and the Movies that Matter Award at ZagrebDox for the best film promoting human rights. She teaches for the Docnomads Joint Master program.