Michael Glawogger was born in Graz, Austria, and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Vienna Film Academy. He started as an assistant camera operator, and later worked as a cinematographer, screenwriter, and director. He made numerous internationally-acclaimed shorts, documentaries, and feature films. He had recently devoted himself to literary writing. Michael Glawogger died in Monrovia, Liberia, in April of 2014 while shooting Untitled.

Matthias Krepp studied Comparative Literature and History, and joined Michael Haneke's directing class at the Vienna Film Academy in 2012. During his studies he directed several short films in collaboration with Angelika Spangel and Magdalena Gruber. Sand and Blood is his first feature-length documentary film.

Stefanie Brockhaus is an independent filmmaker from Munich. She graduated from London College of Communications, University of the Arts with a BA in Film and Television in 2002, and the Munich University of Television and Film in 2016. She has worked on numerous awarded documentaries as a producer and director.

Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018) was a French journalist, writer, and film director best known for Shoah (1985), a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary on the Holocaust. As a teenager he joined the French Resistance and fought against the Nazis. After WWII, he studied philosophy at the University of Tübingen, later taught at the Free University, and began writing for Le Monde on the persistence of Nazism. Lanzmann directed several films on the Holocaust and Israel, using firsthand interviews to construct his narratives. His distinctions include the Resistance Medal with rosette, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, and Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit. Lanzmann is one of the few French intellectuals and artists of international stature whose body of work left its mark on millions of viewers all over the world. His memoirs, The Patagonian Hare was published in 2009.