Norway

Born in Tehran, Firouzeh Khosrovani settled in Italy to pursue her artistic studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. After graduating in 2002 she returned to Iran and acquired her Master’s degree in Journalism. She now lives between Tehran and Rome. Her debut film, Life Train (2004), is a documentary on the ‘play’ therapy provided for the traumatized children of the earthquake in Bam. In 2007, she directed Rough Cut, a film about mutilated plastic mannequins in the shop windows of Tehran, which won thirteen international film festival awards. Her last work, Fest of Duty, follows two adolescent girls as they transition into adulthood, eight years after their official Fest of Duty. The film won the OXFAM award at IDFA in 2014.

Petter Aaberg is born and raised in Oslo, Norway. He graduated from Nordland Collage of Art and Film in 2017. While exploring he has found a voice through the documentary genre and the spontaneous exploration of human interactions.

Cille Hannibal was born and raised in Copenhagen, Denmark. She finished her education as a documentary director at The National Filmschool of Denmark in 2013. She has worked as a television producer and editor on several TV shows on the Danish national television TV2 and DR. Her film The Night We Fell (2018) debuted at CPH:DOX in the NORDIC DOX:AWARD section.

Camilla Nielsson was a Fulbright Scholar at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (NYU), and in the Dept. of Anthropology (NYU), where she studied documentary filmmaking and visual anthropology from 1997–2000. She directed the documentary short trilogy Good Morning Afghanistan (2003), Durga (2004), and The Children of Darfur (2005), about children’s rights, and Mumbai Disconnected (2009), in the Cities on Speed series. She collaborated with Israeli video artist Yael Bartana on the trilogy We Will Be Strong in Our Weakness (Berlinale 2011, Venice Biennale 2011), and Demonstrators (2011), for the exhibition Re:Constructed Landscapes. Nielsson’s first feature documentary Democrats (2014), screened at more than 80 film festivals, and won 20 awards and nominations, including Best Documentary at Tribeca Film Festival 2015, and Best Documentary at Nordic Panorama 2015.

Annabel Verbeke, born in Ypres, Belgium, in 1987, graduated at RITCS Film School in Brussels. Her graduation film, Children of the Sea, won 8 international awards and was selected by more than 20 international film festivals. As a filmmaker, Annabel is looking for beauty in the modest, everyday objects surrounding us. She likes to reveal and unravel fascinating stories which are not always very visible, and find poetry and absurdity in seemingly banal things.

Born in Chile and raised in Sweden, Lars returned to South America to attend the Valparaiso Film School. Lars’ first film was Toxic Playground which won 6 international awards, screened in over 30 international festivals and was broadcast on TV across Europe. Since completing Toxic Playground, Lars has retrained as a speech and language therapist and now lives in the north of Norway. Arica is his second feature documentary, in which Lars and his co-director revisits the theme of their first film, after following the lives of the inhabitants of the Chilean town.

Tone Grøttjord-Glenne has worked on more than 20 documentary films as a director and a producer. She established Sant & Usant Documentary Film in 2005, and led it to become one of the strongest production houses in Norway, one with a clear international vision for its films.

Heddy Honigmann is considered one of world’s best documentary filmmakers. Her films (short & long fictions, short & long documentaries) have travelled around the world receiving major awards and important retrospectives (Toronto, the Museum of Modern Art in NY, Paris, Berlin, Lisboa, Minneapolis, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Ontario, Utrecht, Grasz, Chicago and Berkeley, among others). She has received many lifetime achievement awards, like the Living Legend Award at IDFA (2013), the Dortmund Honorary Award for Documentary Film (2013), the Hot Docs Outstanding Achievement Award (2007), the San Francisco Films Society’s Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award (2007), the J. Van Praag Award from the Humanist Association (2005) in the Netherlands, the award for her Contribution to the Art of Documentary Filmmaking at the Thessaloniki Film Festival (2004), and the Jan Cassies Award for her whole oeuvre from the Dutch National Fund for Cultural Films for Television (2003) in the Netherlands.

Caroline Troedsson is a documentary director and cinematographer based in Sweden. She has recently worked as a cinematographer for Only The Devil Lives Without Hope (2020), Every Face Has a Name (2015) and Becoming Zlatan (2016).

Deeyah Khan is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentary film director. In 2016, she became the first UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for artistic freedom and creativity. Her documentary, Banaz: A Love Story (2012), chronicles the life and death of a young, British Kurdish woman murdered by her family in a so-called honor killing. Khan's second film, Jihad, involved two years of filming with Islamic extremists, convicted terrorists and former jihadis. Khan has also produced a number of critically-acclaimed albums, including Listen to the Banned, a compilation that brought together musicians from around the world who have been subject to persecution, censorship and imprisonment.