Czech Republic

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.

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.

Born in Treviso, Italy, in 1989, Francesco Montagner studied Documentary Direction at the FAMU, in the Czech Republic. In 2014 he directed, shot and produced Animata Resistenza, his debut feature documentary about the life and work of the renowned Italian animator, Simone Massi. The film was presented at the 71. Venice Film Festival and awarded with the Venice Classics Award for the Best Documentary on Cinema. Francesco recently finished his second feature documentary, Brotherhood. He is a teacher at FAMU International in Prague.

Jindřich Andrš (1994) is a director and producer. He studied film at FAMU, Charles University and Edinburgh Napier. In 2017 he received a Special Mention Award at the Ji.hlava IDFF, amongst others, for his short documentary The Last Shift of Tomas Hisem. Based on this short, he finished his first feature film, A New Shift in 2020, with which he participated in Ex.Oriente, dok.incubator and the IDFA Academy. As a producer, he debuted with the short film Pripyat Piano — a film-poem from Chernobyl. Pripyat Piano received a Silver Eye Award in 2019, and premiered at Visions du Réel 2020.

Jakub Julény graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2011, having specialized in Documentary Film Direction, under Professor Dušan Hanák. He has directed the short films HOUSE - Memories of Martin Porubjak and In King Svätopluk’s Shadow. The Commune is his first feature-length film.

Born in Treviso, Italy, in 1989, Francesco Montagner studied Documentary Direction at the FAMU, in the Czech Republic. In 2014 he directed, shot and produced Animata Resistenza, his debut feature documentary about the life and work of the renowned Italian animator, Simone Massi. The film was presented at the 71. Venice Film Festival and awarded with the Venice Classics Award for the Best Documentary on Cinema. Francesco recently finished his second feature documentary, Brotherhood. He is a teacher at FAMU International in Prague.

Barbora Berezňáková is a graduate of the University of Performing Arts in Bratislava, the film directing course at NYFA, and the Animation and Film Department of BBAA, UPV, Valencia. Barbora has worked on TV documentaries and web videos for various NGO productions as a director or editor. Her work also includes video installations, gallery screenings and music videos. She experiments with new ways of storytelling and crosses genres in documentary film.