French

Asia Dér graduated from the DOCnomads MA program as a documentary director, and is pursuing her doctoral degree at the University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest. Her graduation film, Letters from Mom, was nominated for best short film at the Hungarian Film Week, and her first feature (co-directed with Sári Haragonics), Her Mothers, was co-produced with HBO and supported by the Sundance Post-production Fund. Her Mothers was shown at more than 30 international film festivals and won several awards, including Best Film award at the Moscow International Documentary Film Festival DOKer, and the CROSSING EUROPE Film Festival in Linz. She has participated at ZagrebDox Pro, CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator, East Doc Platform, Cannes Docs, and the Docu Rough Cut Boutique. Asia’s currently working on her second feature-length documentary, I Did Not Die (Nem haltam meg), and is a member and teacher at the FREEszfe Association, and a presidium member of the Hungarian Documentary Association.

Jan-Christoph Gockel, born in 1982, grew up near Kaiserslautern. He studied theatre, film, and media studies in Frankfurt/Main, and directing at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. He has worked as a freelance director since 2007. His productions usually focus on political issues. Since 2013, Gockel has been intensely engaged with Africa, and the relationship between Europe and former colonies, the effects of colonialism, and economic dependency have become the themes of Congo-Müller, Heart of Darkness, The Mission: Danton’s Death and Coltan Fever. His works have been nominated for the Nestroy Theatre Award (2010, 2016, 2017), which he won in 2017 for The Mission: Danton’s Death. The Revolution Devours Its Children! is his first feature-length film.

Magnus Gertten is a director and producer born in Limhamn, Sweden, in 1953. He was a television and radio journalist for several years before turning to filmmaking in 1998. He has made 15 documentaries for Swedish and international television, which have been broadcast and screened at festivals in more than 60 countries, and which have won numerous awards. He works as a director, producer, narrative consultant, and adviser for his film production company, Auto Images.

Charlotte Ballet-Baz obtained her master's degree from Sciences Po Grenoble in humanitarian project management. In 2018, she turned to documentary films with a one-year training course between the INA and the École des Chartres. Here she directed her first short film, Interior · Exterior screened at various international festivals and awarded Special Mention at the Traces de Vie festival in Clermont. Teenage Lockdown Tales (2020) is her first medium-length film.

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.

Shannon Walsh has written and directed feature documentaries, as well as numerous short films and VR works. Shannon's films have been broadcast, theatrically-released and exhibited in film festivals globally. Her work has also screened in museum spaces, including the Venice Biennale and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Shannon is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. She is a 2020-2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

Juliette Menthonnex was born in 1994. In 2018, following the completion of her short film Anywhere, she graduated from ECAL (L'école d'Art de Lausanne) with a BA in film. She is currently studying at the Docnomads documentary directing program.

Born in Québec City (Canada), Olivier Higgins and Mélanie Carrier are biologists by trade. They discovered video while documenting their numerous adventures. In 2007, they directed and produced the documentary film Asiemut, which chronicles their 8000 km cycling trip from Mongolia to India. In 2010, the director-producer couple founded MÖ FILMS, an independent production company devoted to documentary films, whose objective is to contribute to the debates and societal challenges of our times. Their latest documentary feature film, Wandering, a Rohingya Story examines the Rohingya refugee crisis in Bangladesh. Along with this film, they produced and designed a multidisciplinary exhibition, including the works of several artists, at the Quebec National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBAQ).