USA

Deeyah Khan is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentary film director. In 2016, she became the first UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for artistic freedom and creativity. Her documentary, Banaz: A Love Story (2012), chronicles the life and death of a young, British Kurdish woman murdered by her family in a so-called honor killing. Khan's second film, Jihad, involved two years of filming with Islamic extremists, convicted terrorists and former jihadis. Khan has also produced a number of critically-acclaimed albums, including Listen to the Banned, a compilation that brought together musicians from around the world who have been subject to persecution, censorship and imprisonment.

Jonas Mekas was born in 1922, in the farming village of Semeniškiai, Lithuania. He and his brother Adolfas were taken by the Nazis in 1944 to a forced labor camp in Elmshorn, Germany. After the war he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz. At the end of 1949, the UN Refugee Organization brought Jonas and Adolfas to New York City, where they settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Two months after his arrival in New York, he borrowed money to buy his first Bolex camera and began to record brief moments of his life. He soon became deeply involved in the American Avant-Garde film movement. In 1954, together with his brother, he started Film Culture magazine, which soon became the most important film publication in the US. In 1958 he started his legendary “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice. He founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative in 1962, and two years later, in 1964, the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives—one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde cinema. During this time he continued to write poetry and make films. He published more than 20 books of prose and poetry, which have been translated into over a dozen languages. His Lithuanian poetry is now considered classic Lithuanian literature, and his films can be found in leading museums around the world. He is largely credited for developing the diarist form of cinema. Mekas has also been active as an academic, teaching at the New School for Social Research, the International Center for Photography, Cooper Union, New York University and MIT.

Stephen Loveridge Londonban alkotó digitális művész és filmrendező. A MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A. az első egészestés dokumentumfilmje.

Liza Mandelup eredetileg new yorki származású, jelenleg azonban Los Angelesben él. Két fényképes albumot is kiadott és saját alkotásait számos kiállításon bemutatták. Hosszú távú együttműködés fűzi több olyan neves online platformhoz, mint amilyen a Vogue, Nowness, i-D vagy Dazed. A Filmmaker Magazine beválasztotta a "2017-es év 25 új filmes szakembere és független filmkészítője" közé, nemrégiben pedig a Sundance Film Fesztiválon a zsűri különdíját vihette haza.