Hungarian Premiere

Mstyslav Chernov is a Pulitzer Prize-winning video journalist at the Associated Press, and president of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers. Since joining AP in 2014, he has covered major conflicts, social issues, and environmental crises across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Most recently, Chernov documented Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Together with longtime colleague Evgeniy Maloletka, Chernov recorded the siege of Mariupol, giving the world eyewitness accounts of the Russian attacks on the city. Chernov’s courageous reporting in Mariupol earned him the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. He was named Camera Operator of the Year in 2016 and Young Talent of the Year in 2015 by the UK’s Royal Television Society.

Canadian documentary filmmaker and editor Fanie Pelletier graduated in social sciences and filmmaking. Her short film, Faded Photograph (2016), a revelation about her father’s life story, has been screened and awarded at several festivals. Her documentary Bloom, which, like her previous films, addresses the issue of representation in the context of social structures, is her feature debut.

Hsu Pan Naing was born in Yangon, in 1997. The daughter of a writer, she grew up surrounded by the books of her mother and many other writers, and soon fell in love with storytelling. Shortly after receiving her journalism degree from the National Management Degree College, she was hired by The Myanmar Times as a video journalist. Keen to further explore the moving image, she gave up her job to attend the Yangon Film School in 2020, and has since worked in various roles, including as sound recordist on The Singing Bookman (Dir. Nan Cho Lae Yee Thein). Her first brush with animation was Reborn, a short film she co-created with other students during a YFS Animation & Mixed Media course in 2021. Developed at a time when the pandemic and the military coup made independent filmmaking in Myanmar more challenging than ever, Dear Daughter marks her first film as a director in her own right. She is currently working as an intern in a developmental organization whilst developing her first short drama, Lost Girl, with support from the Myanmar Script Fund.

Growing up in the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, and Switzerland, in 2014 Nathalie Berger completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and Economics at Duke University (USA), and went on to earn a Master's Degree in Documentary Filmmaking from the Zurich University of Arts. In March 2019, she completed her first feature documentary film, Call Me Intern, about millennials striking back against unpaid internships. It won Best New Zealand Feature and Best Editing at DocEdge Film Festival 2019, as well as the Nigel Moore Youth Award at DOXA. As a director she often works alone, but also works on other people's documentaries as a cinematographer. Since 2022, she has worked as a teaching assistant in the Cinema Department at the University of Arts (HEAD) in Geneva.