France

Love Is Not an Orange

Otilia Babara is a documentary filmmaker from Moldova, currently based in Brussels. She holds a degree in documentary filmmaking from the DocNomads European Master program (Belgium, Hungary, Portugal), and is a 2013 Berlinale Talents fellow. She directed and produced the short films Irene (2015), selected for several international film festivals, and Women on Canvas (2009), awarded at the Astra and Cronograf Film Festivals. She is drawn to those who usually go unnoticed. Her films expose big wounds hidden in small details. She's fascinated by the untold stories of women.

The Other Profile

After studying Political Science, Armel Hostiou studied cinema at La Fémis film school in Paris in the camera department. His graduation film SoLoS, that he directed, has travelled and won several awards nationally and internationally. He has since dedicated himself to directing, first of short films but also installations and music videos. His first feature film Rives premiered in ACID Cannes and was distributed in France in 2012. His second feature, shot in New York, Une Histoire Américaine, premiered at Lincoln Center in New York at RDV with French Cinema and was distributed in France in 2015. His first documentary La Pyramide Invisible premiered at Cinema du Réel in 2019. His last feature The Other Profile premiered at the main competition of CPH:DOX and will be released in theatres in France by Météore Films in June 2023. He is also working on a script for his next fiction feature film.

Silent House

Born in Tehran, Iran, Farnaz Jurabchian works as an independent filmmaker based between Tehran and Toronto. She received her BA in French Literature from Tehran University, and worked as writer and translator for art magazines in Iran. She later immigrated to Canada and studied cinema at Concordia University in Montreal. Most of her films revolve around the notion of homeland and characters that each represent a part of society. Her debut mid-length documentary, Overruled, about unauthorized Afghan tennis players was premiered at Hot Docs 2016 and won 5 international prizes. Her autobiographical documentary Silent House had its world premiere at IDFA 2022, and was nominated for the IDFA Award for Best First Feature. With her brother Mohammadreza Jurabchian, Farnaz started an independent film company, F&M Productions, where they work as co-directors and producers.

Mohammad Reza Jurabchian works as an independent filmmaker and cinematographer based in Tehran. He received his BA in photography from Azad University. He was among the best photographers of the year in the 10th Iranian National Biennial of Photography and had several group exhibitions in and outside Iran. He made several short films and documentaries which have been selected for a number of international film festivals. Jurabchian's films are heavily indebted to photography. He tries to depict his relationship with the world around him and his lived experience. He and his sister, Farnaz Jurabchian, started an independent film company, F&M Productions, where they work as co-directors and producers. They directed Overruled and Silent House together.

Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudović Reels

Mila Turajlić is an award-winning director born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Her films have screened at numerous festivals and been released theatrically in Europe and North America. Her film The Other Side of Everything (2017), HBO Europe’s first co-production with Serbia, won 32 awards, including the IDFA Award for Best Documentary Film. Mila’s debut feature doc, Cinema Komunisto (2011) played at over 100 festivals and won 16 awards, including the FOCAL Award for Creative Use of Archival Footage. In her work with archives, Mila delves into questions about the representation of history at the intersection of personal memories and political narratives, seeking to reactivate forgotten histories. Her research-based artistic practice ranges from video installations commissioned by MoMA New York, to live documentary performances. In 2020, Mila was invited to join the AMPAS (Oscars) Documentary Branch. Her most recent project, the documentary diptych Ciné-Guerrillas and Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudović Reels, an archival road trip through the cinematic birth of the Third World, premiered in autumn 2022.

A Life Like Any Other

Born in 1988, Faustine Cros graduated from INSAS (Belgium) in editing. In her work, she plays with hybrid forms of documentary, auto-fiction, and experimental film, mixing her own images with family archives. Her graduation film, La Détesteuse was selected and awarded at many international festivals. A Life Like Any Other is her first film produced by Julie Freres at Dérives.

Mighty Afrin: In the Time of Floods

The films of Angelos Rallis push the boundaries between raw reality and fiction. He draws inspiration from his own life experiences and revolve around unconventional family constructs, post-traumatic behaviour, loss and fate. His visual and artistic approach resides somewhere between contemplative cinema, theatre and creative documentary with fictional aesthetics. The long takes and extended durations permit the director to depict the characters, framed by their immediate environment, in detail. His work induces a sense of slowness so that the viewer has time to understand and connect with the characters and to become immersed in the events unfolding before them.

Against the Tide

Sarvnik Kaur is a documentary filmmaker who strives to tell stories that hide the tension and conflict just beneath the surface of the “normal” and “mundane.”’ Her first feature documentary, A Ballad of Maladies, explores the tradition of political resistance in Kashmir through the work of those poets, musicians, and artists who have turned their art into weapons of resistance during periods of heightened state repression and violence in the region. The film was banned from broadcast on the national network, but it won India’s 64th National Film Award for Best First Non-Feature Film in 2017, Best Film at the 11th biennial Film South Asia, and Best Documentary at the 10th IDSFF Kerala. She has spent three years with the Kolis of Bombay, developing her documentary Against the Tide. She is a recipient of multiple grants from the Sundance Film Fund, Catapult Film Fund, IDFA Bertha, San Francisco Film Fund, AlterCine Foundation, and HotDocs Crosscurrents International. She has also been a fellow at Hot Docs Accelerator Lab, IDFA Academy, and the Chicken & Egg Eggcelerator Labs.

Last Call

From an early age, Noah Cohen was driven by a desire to make films. At the age of 21, he entered the CinéFabrique to work in production. There, he practiced directing both fiction and documentaries. He hopes to continue in this direction.

A Golden Life

Boubacar Sangaré is a filmmaker, author, and director from Burkina Faso. He directed four short films and co-directed a feature documentary for television. A Golden Life is his first feature documentary for cinema. He is currently developing several other projects, including a road movie documentary, Djéliya, Memory of Manding (selected for La Fabrique des Cinémas du Monde, in Cannes Film Festival 2022, Miradas Doc, and Hot Docs Forum), and two feature-length fiction films: Le nom qu’on te donne and Les dieux délinquants.

We Will Not Fade Away

Born in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, in 1987, Alisa Kovalenko studied documentary filmmaking at the Karpenko-Kary University in Kyiv, and at the Wajda School in Warsaw, Poland. Her first feature-length documentary Alisa in Warland premiered at IDFA in 2015. Home Games screened at over 100 festivals and won numerous awards. She is the programmer for the international documentary competition of the Molodist film festival in Kyiv. After the launch of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Alisa left the editing room of We Will Not Fade Away, and joined a volunteer unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU), where she fought on the frontline in the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions. She fought in the trenches for four months before returning to finish We Will Not Fade Away, which premiered at Berlinale Generation 2023. Meanwhile, as the war in Ukraine continued, Alisa presented a project supported by Chicken & Egg Pictures and Netflix, based on footage filmed during her time in combat, at the IDFA Forum 2022.

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