Hungarian Premiere

Against the Tide

Sarvnik Kaur is a documentary filmmaker who strives to tell stories that hide the tension and conflict just beneath the surface of the “normal” and “mundane.”’ Her first feature documentary, A Ballad of Maladies, explores the tradition of political resistance in Kashmir through the work of those poets, musicians, and artists who have turned their art into weapons of resistance during periods of heightened state repression and violence in the region. The film was banned from broadcast on the national network, but it won India’s 64th National Film Award for Best First Non-Feature Film in 2017, Best Film at the 11th biennial Film South Asia, and Best Documentary at the 10th IDSFF Kerala. She has spent three years with the Kolis of Bombay, developing her documentary Against the Tide. She is a recipient of multiple grants from the Sundance Film Fund, Catapult Film Fund, IDFA Bertha, San Francisco Film Fund, AlterCine Foundation, and HotDocs Crosscurrents International. She has also been a fellow at Hot Docs Accelerator Lab, IDFA Academy, and the Chicken & Egg Eggcelerator Labs.

Matter Out of Place

Director, producer, writer and cinematographer, Nikolaus Geyrhalter was born in Vienna, Austria in 1972. Geyrhalter's static-camera, well-paced observational films tackle their subjects head-on, whether it's exploring the terrain in Chernobyl, Ukraine (Pripyat), tracing the route of the Dakar Rally (7915 Km), or investigating the production of processed foods (Our Daily Bread). At the age of 22, Geyrhalter started his own production company, Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion (NGF). Geyrhalter examined night labor in Europe with Abendland (2011) and landscapes of urban decay across the world in Homo Sapiens (2016). The latter film played at the Berlinale Forum, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the Cinéma du Réel Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and the Viennale. In 2015, Berlin's Arsenal Cinema programmed a retrospective dedicated to his work. The 38th Cinéma du Réel Festival programmed a sidebar on his documentaries. Geyrhalter's films have also screened at the Museum of Modern Art's Doc Fortnight.

Deep Rising

Matthieu Rytz is a producer, curator, photographer, and award-winning film director. A visual anthropologist by training, his passion for storytelling has led him across the globe to witness and document complex human and environmental stories. Rytz specializes in creating multidisciplinary, multichannel projects using film, still images, and virtual reality – whichever medium best serves the story.

Songs of Earth

Margreth Olin is a Norwegian director and producer. She has made 13 films, all of which have received critical acclaim and catalyzed important dialogues on their chosen topics. Olin has participated in numerous international festivals, and has won several Norwegian and international awards, including the 2022 Chicken & Egg Award, and together with Joachim Trier, Deeyah Khan and Nils Gaup, the Anders Jahre Culture Award 2022, Norway’s greatest honor for outstanding cultural effort. Olin was one of the six directors chosen for Wim Wenders series, Cathedrals of Culture.

20 Days in Mariupol

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.

8th Day of the War

Oksana Moiseniuk was born in Ukraine, where she graduated as a journalist. She currently lives in the Czech Republic. In 2021, she shot a short documentary, Charón. Her debut feature-length documentary, 8th Day of the War premiered at Jihlava IDFF, in the Czech Joy competition, where it was the opening screening. The film had its international premiere at 38. DOK.fest München.

Bloom

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.

Women Behind the Wheel

Hannah Congdon is a freelance filmmaker and TV producer, whose work focuses on gender, politics, and mental health. Her career began at the Berlinale, and led to making her own films. Her short films have been screened at Underwire, Manchester Kinofilm Festival, and Soho Film Festival. She has also been published by the Huffington Post. Day-to-day she produces current affairs documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4, and ITV. She was recently selected for the 2023 BIFA Springboard program for first-time British filmmakers.

Catherine Haigh has a passion for anthropology and ethnographic research. During university, she specialized in women’s health and conducted research with Syrian refugees that led to an award-winning thesis on migration and fertility. Cat is currently a sales manager for L’Oréal. Outside of work and film producing, she’s an avid traveler – from solo tours of India, to volunteering for earthquake recovery projects in Nepal.

Dear Daughter

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.

The Silence of the Banana Trees

Eneos Çarka is a DocNomads alum and PhD student in cinema and media studies at USC. His films have screened at numerous festivals, galleries, and cultural events, such as IDFA, FIPADOC, DokuFest, and Festival dei Popoli, among others.

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