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Little Yellow Boots

John Webster is a writer and director born in 1967, in Helsinki, to English teachers who later moved to Finland. John graduated from the University of Art and Design in Helsinki in 1996 with an MA in documentary filmmaking. Since 1990 he has directed independent documentaries that have won numerous awards nationally and internationally. He has run his own production company, JW Documentaries, since 1993.

Watani: My Homeland

Marcel Mettelsiefen is a director, cameraman, photographer and producer. His films on the civil war in Syria, such as Syria: Children on the Frontline (2014), Children on the Frontline: The Escape (2016) and Watani: My Homeland (2016), earned him critical praise and recognition. Mettelsiefen won two BAFTA and two Emmy awards, and was nominated for an Academy Award in the category Best Documentary Short Subject for Watani: My Homeland.

The Waldheim Waltz

Ruth Beckermann studied journalism and art history in Vienna, Tel Aviv and New York, and earned her doctorate in 1977 at the University of Vienna. She contributed as a journalist to several Austrian and Swiss magazines. In 1978 she cofounded the distribution company, Filmladen, in which she was active for seven years. Since 1985 she works as a writer and filmmaker. Her film The Dreamed Ones was screened widely and won several awards. Her latest film, The Waldheim Waltz, won, among other prizes, the Glashütte-Original Documentary Award at Berlinale (2018).

Untitled

Michael Glawogger was born in Graz, Austria, and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Vienna Film Academy. He started as an assistant camera operator, and later worked as a cinematographer, screenwriter, and director. He made numerous internationally-acclaimed shorts, documentaries, and feature films. He had recently devoted himself to literary writing. Michael Glawogger died in Monrovia, Liberia, in April of 2014 while shooting Untitled.

Monika Willi is a film editor who has worked with Michael Glawogger, Michael Haneke, Barbara Albert, and Florian Flicker. She was nominated for the Austrian Film Prize for her work on Whores’ Glory (Glawogger, 2011), and the German Film Prize for The White Ribbon (Haneke, 2009). She received the Austrian Film Prize for Best Film Editing for The Dead and the Living (Barbara Albert, 2012), and the Filmplus Award for Best Feature Film Editing for The White Ribbon (as well as for Barbara Eder’s Thank You for Bombing [2016]).

Singing with Angry Bird

Hyewon Jee works has worked in the Korean television industry since 1995 as a commissioning editor for a nationwide broadcasting network. In 2008, she established a production company, Upright Media, with her partner, Wooyong Song. She has produced and directed many TV documentaries about culture, history, and human interest stories, and won numerous awards. Singing with Angry Bird is her first feature documentary.

Sand and Blood

Matthias Krepp studied Comparative Literature and History, and joined Michael Haneke's directing class at the Vienna Film Academy in 2012. During his studies he directed several short films in collaboration with Angelika Spangel and Magdalena Gruber. Sand and Blood is his first feature-length documentary film.

Angelika Spangel was born in 1987. She is an Austrian filmstudent of cinematography. She studied Educational Science and received her degree in 2012. Since 2013 she has studied cinematography with Wolfgang Thaler at the Vienna Film Academy. She has worked on several short films with Matthias Krepp and Magdalena Gruber.

The Remnants

Paolo Barberi, visual anthropologist and documentarist, has released several documentaries with a focus on indigenous populations. Paolo is a founding member of the association, Esplorare la Metropoli (ELM), and research associate and lecturer on media studies at at the University of Ferrara.

Riccardo Russo is a geographer and filmmaker, holding a PhD in Human Geography with a specialization in multimedia for human rights. He has made several widely-screened documentaries on global socio-environmental issues.

The Russian Job

Petr Horký studied journalism in Prague. He graduated in photojournalism in London, later moved to Berlin and then Prague where he worked for economic periodicals. His job exposed him to a wide range of issues, one of them was a Russian story which inspired him to make the documentary The Russian Job.

The Poetess

Stefanie Brockhaus is an independent filmmaker from Munich. She graduated from London College of Communications, University of the Arts with a BA in Film and Television in 2002, and the Munich University of Television and Film in 2016. She has worked on numerous awarded documentaries as a producer and director.

Andreas Wolff studied at USC's Graduate School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, and at HFF University for TV and Film in Munich. His debut On the Other Side of Life, co-directed with Stefanie Brockhaus, premiered in 2010 at SXSW film festival. His second feature documentary, The Captain and His Pirate (2013) won the German Camera Award for Best Editing at Berlinale and further awards in Leipzig, Zagreb, Saarbrucken, Munich and Brussels.

Napalm

Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018) was a French journalist, writer, and film director best known for Shoah (1985), a nine-and-a-half-hour documentary on the Holocaust. As a teenager he joined the French Resistance and fought against the Nazis. After WWII, he studied philosophy at the University of Tübingen, later taught at the Free University, and began writing for Le Monde on the persistence of Nazism. Lanzmann directed several films on the Holocaust and Israel, using firsthand interviews to construct his narratives. His distinctions include the Resistance Medal with rosette, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, and Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit. Lanzmann is one of the few French intellectuals and artists of international stature whose body of work left its mark on millions of viewers all over the world. His memoirs, The Patagonian Hare was published in 2009.

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