Russian

Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan was the delegate producer of Adina Pintilie's Golden Bear winner, Touch Me Not. She directed A Mere Breath, which won Best Documentary at LET'S CEE Film Fest and in Sarajevo. With her newly established company, Manifest Film, she produced Acasă - My Home, which won the Best Cinematography Award at Sundance 2020.

Ebba Sinzinger is a producer, scriptwriter and director. She produced and co-produced films like Brothers of the Night, Domaine by Patric Chiha, The Forgotten Space by Noël Burch and Allan Secula, and Pianomania, which won awards in Berlin, Venice and Locarno. She received the Upper Austrian Cultural Award for Film in 1997 for her directorial work.

Suhaib Gasmelbari was born in 1979, in Sudan, where he lived until the age of 16. He attended Cinema Studies in France at the University of Paris VIII. He has written and directed several short films, both fiction and documentary. He is also a researcher and was able to find long-lost Sudanese films, and actively takes part in saving and digitizing the works of Sudanese cinema.

Andrei Kutsila was born in 1983, in Baranovichi, Belarus. He earned a degree in journalism from the Belarusian State University in 2007, and graduated from the Belarusian State Academy of Arts in 2009. He works as a freelancer for studios and television.

Yuriy Pivovarov was born in Moscow in 1990. He majored in philosophy at the Russian State University. He has worked as a first camera assistant in movie productions since 2013, and has attended the Marina Razbezhkina and Mikhail Ugarov School of Documentary Film and Theater since 2018.

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.

David France is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, bestselling author, and award-winning investigative journalist. His directorial debut, How To Survive a Plague, has been hailed as an innovative and influential piece of storytelling. It is regularly screened in university classrooms, and by community groups and AIDS service organizations. The film also garnered Academy Award and Emmy nominations, as well as a Peabody Award. His 2017 film, The Death & Life of Marsha P. Johnson, received rave reviews and won numerous festival prizes. 

Ksenia Okhapkina is a Russian documentary film director. She graduated from St. Petersburg State University of Film and TV in 2012, and has been working with the Estonian company, Vesilind since 2014. She has shown her commitment to the composition and meaningfulness of a single frame, and her ability to capture “the poetic in profane”.

Iryna Tsilyk is a Ukrainian writer and filmmaker. She graduated from Kyiv National University of Theatre, Cinematography and Television in 2005, and along with writing poetry, prose and children's books, has directed several short fiction and documentary films. Her works have been translated into more than 10 languages, and have been presented at international literary festivals. The Earth is Blue as an Orange is her first feature documentary.

Born in Uzbekistan, Askold Kurov has lived in Russia since 1991. He earned a degree in documentary filmmaking at Marina Razbezhkina and Mikhail Ugarov’s School of Documentary Film and Theater in Moscow. His films Winter, Go Away!, Leninland and Children 404 won critical acclaim and were screened at numerous festivals. His work focuses on human rights and social conflict in contemporary Russia.

Anna Eborn is a Swedish artist and filmmaker, working and producing her films in Denmark. She studied Film and Photography in Malmö, and Human Geography at the University of Gotland, Sweden. Her debut documentary, Pine Ridge (2013), was in the Official Selection at the Venice International Film Festival 2013, and was awarded the Best Nordic Documentary at the International Film Festival in Gothenburg in 2014.