France

Born in Syria, Saeed Al Batal is a citizen journalist, photographer and filmmaker. He has led numerous trainings in photography and news reporting, and has worked as a reporter on current affairs in Syria for agencies, radio stations and institutions worldwide. He is one of the founders of the online gallery, Sam Lenses, and the Humans of Syria project.

Agnès Varda was born in Ixelles, Belgium in 1928. She studied at the École du Louvre and took evening classes in photography at the École de Vaugirard. She became a photographer for Jean Vilar when he founded the Avignon Theater Festival in 1948, then for the Théâtre National Populaire at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. She held her first personal exhibition in 1954 in the courtyard of her home. That same year, Agnès Varda made the move to cinema without any formal training. She founded Ciné Tamaris (a cooperative) to produce and direct her first feature, La Pointe Courte. She directed short films and features, both fiction and documentaries. In 2003, she began her third career as a visual artist at the Venice Biennale.

Mari Gulbiani is a Georgian film director and screenplay writer. She studied philology at Tbilisi State University, and film directing at the Theatre and Film State University. From 2006 until 2010, she fine-tuned her experience at the Parisian film school, ‘Ateliers Varan’. In 2007, she founded the production company, Midifilm. She has worked in the program department of the CineDoc Tbilisi documentary film festival, and for CineDoc Young as a section coordinator.

François-Xavier Drouet politológiát és antropológiát végzett. Rádióriporterként, illetve nyomtatott sajtónál dolgozott mielőtt a kreatív dokumentumfilmes mesterszakba kezdett volna Lussas-ban. Első filmje, a The Initiation bejárta a világot. Társírója volt a Gangster Project című filmnek.