Hungary

Ilona Gaal is a sociologist and journalist who has worked in hospice care for 10 years beside patients as a volunteer and communication specialist. Terminal Phase is her first documentary.

Eszter Hajdú is a film director, scriptwriter and producer based in Portugal and Hungary. She regularly lectures at universities, and holds workshops and masterclasses for film students and human rights activists. Her films cover social and political taboos.

György Dobray (born in 1942, in Budapest, Hungary) graduated from the Department of Cinematography of the Film Academy in 1965. He produced documentary, educational and literary films for the Hungarian Television, and fiction films for the Hungarian Film Production Company. He is currently working on documentary and TV films, as well as a fiction film. He received the Hungarian Balázs Béla Award in 2010.

Director Judit Oláh completed her MA in film studies at Eötvös Loránd University in 2014. Parallel with her academic studies in film theory and history, she attended the faculty of filmmaking. During her studies, she worked on several films in different positions. With the support of the Hungarian National Film Fund, she made her first short film Beauty Queen in 2015, which was screened at several festivals. Since then, apart from working on television documentaries and live-action shorts, she has been working on her first feature-length documentary, Return to Epipo. Judit is a Nipkow fellow. She participated in the Archidoc, Eurodoc and Dok Incubator workshops, and the Midpoint 2019 short-film script development training program. She is a script-consultant trainee at Midpoint Feature Launch 2020.

András Surányi has directed feature films, documentaries, TV films and radio productions. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and an external member of the European Film Academy. His films participated successfully in several international festivals.

István Gábor Takács studied to be a psychologist and has worked as a human rights activist, video filmmaker, trainer and contributor at the Law Reporter Foundation. He led the video program of the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union between 2007 and 2015, and worked for five years in the needle exchange program of the Drug Prevention Foundation. He is the author of several articles on harm reduction, and the cinematographer, film editor and co-director of over 700 online videos.

Mihály Schwechtje is an award-winning filmmaker, theatre director and university lecturer. His recent works address the problems of modern socitey, his protagonists are victims of the social structure. His fist feature fiction film focuses on the issue of bullying in school and on the internet. He is currently developing his second feature fiction, which has been selected to the Nipkow Program in Berlin. He lectures at the University of Theatre and Film Arts Budapest in Hungary.

Csaba Szekeres is a director, screenwriter and the creator of several documentary films. He focuses on films with a personal touch that explore the border between documentaries and feature films, while placing an emphasis on storytelling.

Réka Szabó studied mathematics and informatics, while pursuing contemporary dance. She is the artistic director of The Symptoms, a contemporary dance-theatre company in Hungary. After making two experimental shorts, The Euphoria of Being is her first feature-length documentary.

Mária Takács is a freelance film-maker. Since graduating from the University of Theatre and Film Arts, she has worked as a director for Hungarian Television, and as a video journalist for Népszabadság online and origo.hu. She has also made a number of videos for civil society organizations.