Hungarian Premiere

How I Became a Partisan

Vera Lacková is a Roma director and film producer. Born in Slovakia and based in Vienna, Austria, she is the founder of the Czech-Slovakian production company, Media Voice. Her background working with Roma people, sharing their stories and movements, enables her to bring a unique insider perspective on important and timely ethnic and political Roma themes for the community. A participant of the 2019 IDFA Academy, her feature-length documentary debut film, How I Became a Partisan, attempts to uncover the fate of forgotten Roma partisans. Her own search for and exposure of stories of Romani partisans is primarily based on the life of her great-grandfather, Ján Lacko. The film premiered at goEast Film Festival in Wiesbaden, in 2021. There she received the Federal Foreign Office for Cultural Diversity Award. The project was developed at the Ex Oriente film workshop, pitched at the 2020 East Doc Platform, and is part of the East Silver Caravan distribution program, supported by the Institute of Documentary Film.

Far Eastern Golgotha

Born in 1995, in Moscow, Julia Sergina graduated from the Russian State University of Cinematography (VGIK), and the non-fiction film workshop of Sergei Miroshnichenko. Her film, Therapy, won the Laurel Branch award for best debut documentary. She is the Co-founder of the STAYA.DOC documentary film studio.

Almost Fine

Fanni Hatházi is a director and producer. She graduated with an MA in documentary directing from the University of Film and Theatre Arts. In the last ten years she has worked as a field producer and reporter for various TV news and entertainment programs. She’s also researching how the emergence of Netflix and other streaming services has changed the documentary market, as she strongly believes that understanding these new models of distribution is crucial in reaching future audiences.

Retrograde

Outside

Olha Zhurba directs and edits documentary and fiction films, commercials, and music videos. She graduated from the I. Karpenko-Karogo National University of Theatre, Film and Television in Kiev in 2010, with a degree from the Department of Cinema Documentary Directing.

Nelly & Nadine

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.

Myanmar Diaries

The Myanmar Film Collective is a group of anonymous young filmmakers in Myanmar, working with an anonymous group of European film professionals, who, as an act of creative resistance, are determined to continue making films in the aftermath of the military coup of 1 February.

Midwives

Snow Hnin Ei Hlaing has worked as a freelance filmmaker in Myanmar since 2006, acting as director, producer, editor, and sound recordist after attending film schools in both Myanmar and Germany. Her short, Burmese Butterfly played festivals in over 20 countries, and Period@Period won for best short at the Wathan Film Festival. Midwives is her feature documentary debut.

Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege

Abdallah Al-Khatib was born in 1989, in Yarmouk, and studied sociology at the University of Damascus. Prior to the revolution, he was a coordinator of activities and volunteers for the UN. Along with several friends, he created the humanitarian aid association Wataad, which carried out dozens of projects in Syria, particularly in Yarmouk. He participated in several documentary films related to life at the Yarmouk camp, notably as a cameraman for 194. Us, Children of the Camp, which premiered at Visions du Réel in 2017. The German magazine Peace Green identified him as a 2014 “peacemaker”. He received the Per Anger Human Rights Award in Sweden, in 2016. Abdallah currently lives in Germany, where he recently received refugee status.

The Killing of a Journalist

Matt Sarnecki is a journalist, producer, and film director at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. He earned a BA in political science and history at Columbia University. He spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Romania before moving to Prague, Czech Republic, where he held a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts. In 2011 he moved to San Francisco, and earned a master’s degree in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2013 he has lived in Bucharest, Romania. His documentary Killing Pavel, about the murder of investigative journalist Pavel Sheremet, won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Medal in 2017, and the DIG Award (Italy) in 2018.

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