Festival’s guests

Aleksandr Balagura was born in 1960 in Luboml (USSR, actual Ukraine). He graduated in History from Kiev State University. From 1989 to 1998 he worked as film director at Ukrainian Documentary Film Studios. His first short film To Our Brothers and Sisters was awarded the Documentary prize at Festival dei Popoli in Florence in 1990. In 1991, he presented in Florence his second short film Widow-Street (out of competition). He has shot more than 20 documentaries among which Antologion (1996), Wings of a Butterfly (2008), selected in Festival Cinéma du réel and Torino IFF, Life Span of an Object in Frame (2012) – Jury’s Special mention at FID Marseille. His film Story for an Empty Theatre (2016), made together with avec Cesare Bedogné, was selected in more than 30 international festivals and received numerous awards as Best Documentary and Best Experimental film. He has been living and working in Genoa, Italy, since 1998.

Ardit Sadiku is an Albanian filmmaker. He began to make his first short subjects when he was still a teenager. His work reflects questionings and social tensions in Albania, such as attitudes toward mental illness or the role of mass media. Before Freestyle to Montenegro, he made Life between the Water (2017), The Forgotten Mountain (2018) and Encounter in the Air (2019) which have been shown in several festivals in Europe and the United States.

In Portugal, Brazil and Africa, Ariel de Bigault, French author and director, has been exploring Portuguese-speaking cultures for years. Her film career began in Lisbon with documentaries. Then came the meeting with Brazil and the series Éclats Noirs du Samba (1987), with the great artists Gilberto Gil, Grande Othelo, Martinho da Vila, Paulo Moura, Zézézé Motta, celebrating Afro-Brazilian creation. She has contributed to the dissemination of African urban music: Anthologie des Musiques du Cap Vert 1959-1992 (1995), Musiques Urbaines d’Angola 1956-1998 (1999) and many records. The film Canta Angola (2000) shows the resistance of popular music artists in a war-torn Angola. Afro Lisboa (1996) reveals the faces and voices of various generations of African immigration in Lisbon. Margem Atlântica (2006) introduces us to authors, actors and musicians of African origins – Mariza, José Eduardo Agualusa, Kalaf Ângelo, Ângelo Torres – whose creations captivated audiences. Ghosts of an Empire, on the colonial imagination in Portuguese cinema, is a new stage in her Afro-Lusophone journey.

Arne Körner was born in 1986 in Hamburg. Following his apprenticeship as a baker, he studied film at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg, at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and graduated from Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School. Körner‘s short films were shown at more than 100 national and international festivals and won numerous prizes. His first feature-length film The Bicycle (2015) had its world premiere at the Festival des Films du Monde de Montréal and received the Prix du Jury. His second feature film Gasman (2019) premiered at the 41st Cairo International Film Festival and had its nationwide cinema release in 2021.

Christian Serritiello is a filmmaker born in Canterbury, UK. He graduated from the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and has appeared in many theatre and film productions in the UK and abroad. His production company, set up with the artist Arthur Patching in 2009, has produced several shorts that have premiered in various festivals. Their critically acclaimed debut feature film Gelateria was awarded the Grand Prix at the Kinolikbez Film Festival in St. Petersburg.

Eva Stefani is a Greek video artist and director. She studied Political Science in Athens, and then documentary filmmaking at the Ateliers Varan (Paris), at the Tisch School of the Arts (MA, New York University), and at the Film and Television School (London). She also obtained a doctorate in Ethnographic Cinema at Panteion University in Athens. She filmed a considerable number of short and experimental documentaries,  some of which won awards at Cinéma du Réel, the Thessaloniki Film Festival, and SEE Docs in Dubrovnik. She teaches theory and the history of cinema at the University of Athens and is a guest professor at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Days and Nights of Demetra K. is her first feature-length film.

Florent Marcie is a French journalist and reporter. For thirty years, he has been covering terrains where history is being made. He shoots, edits, and finances his own films, with an economy of means and a sense of precarity that brings him closer to the men and women he is with. His first documentary film, The Tunnel Tribe (1995) was selected for Les États Généraux du film documentaire in Lussas. There followed Under the Trees of Ajiep (Soudan, 1998), Saïa (Afghanistan, 2000), Itchkéri Kenti (Chechnya, 2006), Commander Khawani (2014), Tomorrow Tripoli (2015). They are all on the borderline between cinema and reportage, and presented out of sync with current events: a kind of middle road he is proud of. In 2015, a retrospective of four of his documentaries was organized by the Cinémathèque française. The Athens Avant-garde Film Festival devoted a retrospective to him in 2019.

Kornél Szilágyi and Hevesi have worked together making independent films since 1995, using the pseudonyms Igor and Ivan Buharov. They are also involved in the creation of several music projects and film music. Their works always dance on the edge of fine arts and cinematography, at the frontier between dreams and reality. The Buharovs film mainly in Super 8, combining experimental shooting style and classic narration. They are the authors of The Programme (1998), The Triumph of Sympathy (2000), Slow Mirror (2007), Rudderless (2011), Meteorit Buddha (2013), Most of the Souls that Live Here (2016).

Inês T. Alves is a Portuguese film maker. She studied Cultural Narratives in several European universities. A grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation allowed her to study documentary filmmaking at London University of the Arts. Along with her career as a filmmaker, she runs film workshops in various associations.  She took part in the creation of the collaborative Movimento project in Portugal. Her previous short subjects have been screened at various festivals in Portugal and abroad. Her short documentary Around Corners received the New Cinema award at the Porto/Post/Doc Festival. Waters of Pastaza is her first feature-length documentary. Her documentary Waters of Pastaza has just been screened at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival (Generation Kplus program).

Ivo Ferreira was born in 1975 in Lisbon to actor parents. At the age of 18, having barely begun his film studies, he left for Macao, then on the eve of being integrated into the People’s Republic of China. He lived there for nearly twenty years and made several short and medium films. From the Sino-Portuguese city, the perspective is different on the history of the Lusitan empire. He made his first feature-length fiction film Em Volta (2001) in Africa and the East and then documentaries in Angola and São Tomé. Hotel Império (2019), his latest feature film, is a kind of farewell to Macao…“But I always go back to it”. Contemporary history inspires many of his achievements. Aguas Mil (2009) evokes the disillusionments of the left in the years following the “Carnation Revolution”, a subject he will again address in 2022 with a film about the terrorist group FP 25. Letters from War, in competition at the Berlinale 2016, made him known to the general public and won 9 Sophia Awards, Portuguese equivalent of the Césars. His qualities as a director and director of actors are also excellent in Sul (2019), a Lisbon series, quite dark, which was met with great success.

Jan Czarlewski (1988) is a Franco-Polish director who works between Paris, Lausanne et Warsaw. He graduated from ECAL/the Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne in 2012. He likes to explore the off-beat and ironic, in both documentaries and fiction. His short subjects The Ambassador & Me and Stammering Love retrospectively won a Golden and Silver Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. Between 2015 and 2016, he filmed a 50-minute documentary about a popular Polish polar adventurer who crossed Europe on foot from Russia to Santiago de Compostela. From 2017 to 2019, he worked on the most important documentary series based on historic archives made in Poland after 1989 – Polskie 100 lat (Polish 100 years). He was responsible for the screenplay and archival research, and he directed eight of the 42 thirty minute episodes.

Keren Moriano is a French actress, director, and producer who graduated from CNSAD and EICAR. She has worked most notably with Marceline Loridan Ivens, Philippe Bérenger, Olivier Lorelle, Hervé Palud, Eric Guirado and Anne Villacèque. Her first short subject Memoirs of a Disturbed Young Lady (2011 won several awards, among which the Grand Prix at the Nimes Film Festival. With her own production company, Options Production, she produced Full Orchestra (2017) with Lolita Chammah and Yannick Choirat and Ictus Erotique (2015) with Vanessa Guide and Benjamin Lavernhe. In 2019, she directed the short film, based on a script by Michaël Delmar and choreographed by Bianca Li, Sentiments distingués (2019), that has participated in nearly thirty international festivals. Lost for Passion is their second collaboration.

Knut Erik Jensen (1940) is a Norwegian director, screenwriter, and producer. After studying French, Russian and History, he entered London Film School, and then went to work at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK). With his own company, Nordkappfilm, he made films in all cinematographic forms and formats. Knut Erik Jensen is the author of the documentary series Finnmark between East and West (1983-86), which won the Amanda Award for the best Norwegian film, the feature- length documentary Cool and Crazy (2001) and many short subjects. He also directed four feature films : Stella Polaris (1993), Burnt by Frost (1997), Passing Darkness (2000) and Icekiss (2008). He is one of the founders of the Nordkapp Film Festival.

Lionel Bernardin was born in Angouleme, France, in 1981. With a degree in images and communication, he first worked as a composer. He also participated in recording an album of urban music in New York in 2003, and then at the Francofolies workshops in 2005. Always fascinated by images and fiction, he went on to directing in 2009. He wrote and directed five short subjects for which he also composed the original music. Confessions Financières (2015) received an award from Cédric Klapisch at Sundance Channel Shorts in 2015. The film was then selected by several festivals, such as the Angouleme Francophone Film Festival, the Sacramento International Film Festival, and the European Short Festival in Bordeaux. Grounds of Hope  is his first feature-length fictional film.

Lorenz Merz was born in 1981 in Zurich. After studies in music, painting, and photography, he studied cinema at the Zurich University of the Arts and at the Universidad del Cine de Buenos Aires. His graduation short subject One Day and Nothing, released in 2008, won several awards, including the Silver Leopard at the 61st Locarno Film Festival and the Swiss Film Award 2009 for Best Director. His improvised road movie Cherry Pie (2013) with Lolita Chammah, won several international awards, including the Luna de Valencia Award 2014. As DOP, he participated in several editions of Camerimage. He twice won the Swiss Film Award for best photography for Summer Games (2011) and for War (2014). In 2013, he founded the Zurich production company 8horses. He is also a member of the European Film Academy, the Swiss Film Academy and the Swiss Cinematographer’s Society. He is currently at work on the screenplay for Who/Man.

Martin Ziegler, born in 1956 in Germany, is a French author-director. At the age of 17, he left Germany to pursue crossover studies: fine arts, literature, and social sciences. For 6 years, he worked on a thesis with Michel Foucault on the notion of bios: biography in Antiquity and hagiography in the Middle Ages. He then published several collections of poetry. While still pursuing his work as an author, Martin Ziegler also directed feature films: The Seven Sisters (2013), With Out (2014), VWaR (2015), Patmos (2016), Joyce (2016), alternating edits and shoots over long periods of time, indeed over several years, which allows him to elaborate a mode of writing close to authoring texts, with progress and rewrites. That is made possible by very precise organisation and reduced crews. Adieu Vénus is his sixth feature film.

Michał Krzywicki is a Polish director, screenwriter, producer, and actor born in 1989 in Chełm. He began his artistic formation in 2011 with an acting scholarship at the Warsaw Film School. He has a degree in History from the Université of Gdańsk. He then moved to London where he wrote the screenplay of his first feature film, Diversion End. The film was produced in 2016 in coproduction with Rockzeline (France) et Unboiled (USA). It won several awards, including the Young Jury Award at the Koszalin Debut Film Festival, Mlodzi i Film.

Mirko Stopar is an Argentinian filmmaker who has been living in Norway since 2001. He began his career making music videos and commercials. His first documentary Nitrate Flames (2014) was screened at 20 festivals as well as during a Carl Theodor Dreyer retrospective at the Cinémathèque française. Two other documentaries, Mermaid on Board (2021) and A Devil with Harpoon (2021), complete a trilogy of films made in Norway and Argentina. His latest film A Devil with Harpoon was inspired by his own book Lars Faen published in 2019.

Noah Teichner is an American-born filmmaker, artist, and researcher based in Paris, France. His films, performances, and installations make use of a variety of sound and image technologies to look at issues related to both humor and historiography. He holds an MFA from the Paris-Cergy National Graduate School of Art and a PhD in Film and Media Studies from the University of Paris 8, where he has taught since 2015. In addition to his practice as an artist and filmmaker, he has presented research at conferences and published articles in English and French on subjects related to the history of comedy, media archaeology, and sound studies. He is a member of the artist-run film lab L’Abominable, where he made first feature-length film Navigators.

Olga Beregova is a filmmaker, graphic designer and interior designer. Before 2019, she worked in digital marketing at Google. Hurdle is her first film created with the talented musician Page Blank. 

Page Blank
I’m Page Blank. Why? Because, starting everything from a blank page creates something special. I’ve been writing music for 20 years and it allows me to connect with myself and the world.

Born in 1934 in Tbilisi, Georgia, Otar Iosseliani studied music brilliantly before starting scientific studies in Moscow, which he abandoned to join the National Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. His first short films Aquarelle (1958) and April (1961) were blacklisted in the USSR. His first feature-length film, Falling Leaves (1966), traces the daily life of a peasant community in a very impressionist style. His art of contemplative distance, similar to Jacques Tati’s, his acknowledged master, asserted itself with Once Upon A Time There Was A Singing Blackbird (1971) and Pastorale (1976). His work totters between fiction and documentary. His attraction to purely visual language brought him closer to the authors of the Nouvelle Vague Française: François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard. Despite their creator’s international reputation, these films were banned from export for many years. Based in France since 1982, Iosseliani directed his first French film Favorites of the Moon in 1984, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Mostra. He then shot And Then There Was Light (1989), Chasing Butterflies (1991), Brigands, Chapter VII (1995), Monday Morning (2001) – Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival, Gardens in Autumn (2005). Outside his country, Otar Iosseliani manages to keep the humanist vision nuanced with humor and irony that made the success of his Georgian films. His latest film Chantrapas (2009) is an ode to freedom. It follows the story of a young director (alter ego of the author) who makes no compromise with censorship, whether ideological or economic, in the name of freedom of creative thought. He has also directed several documentaries for television: Euskadi (1982), A Little Monastery in Tuscany (1988) and Georgia, Alone, a documentary triptych of more than four hours about his country of origin. www.cineressources.net

Stefan Arsenijevic has a degree in direction from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, where he now teaches. His short subject (A)torsion (2003) won more than 30 national and international awards, among which the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, the European Film Academy Award, and an Oscar nomination. He directed one of the six episodes of the project Lost and Found (2005) created at the Berlinale Forum. His first feature film Love and Other Crimes (2008) premiered at the Berlinale Panorama Special section and then participated in numerous international film festivals, where it won several awards.  With Bojan Vuletic, he co-wrote the feature film Practical Guide to Belgrade with Singing and Crying (2011). They also collaborated on the screenplay for Stefan’s second feature film, As Far as I Can Walk (2021). Since 2015, Stefan also directs the Goethe Institute’s professional formation program for Southeastern European directors, FIRST FILMS FIRST and is a member of the European Film Academy.

Vibeke Bryld is a Danish filmmaker. After studying comparative literature and philosophy, she obtained an MA in Documentary at Goldsmith’s College in London. She is the author of documentaries:  Throwing paint tins off the roof (2007), nominated for a New Vision Award at CPH:DOX,  Bedtime Stories from the Axis of Evil (2011) about North Korea, which was nominated for Best Documentary at the Danish Film Academy. Her other short subject about North Korea, Pebbles at Your Door, was selected for the short subject competition at the Berlinale in 2015. Her documentary Without My Dad (2018) was shown by the Danish network TV2 and participated in the International Documentary Film Festival in Copenhagen. Vibeke Bryld was also editor in chief of the magazine DOX.

Vincent Duluc-David is a graduate of ESRA. He is a director, film editor, and scriptwriter. He is passionate about photography and works with video. He’s created different video projects and music clips. His position as film editor at Hands Up allowed him to develop the sense of the rhythm and of the sound. Youthful is his first film.

Vlastimir Sudar is a director and producer born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He studied filmmaking at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. He directed a number of short films, pop-videos and short fashion films, one in collaboration with the famous fashion photographer Nick Knight and designer Peter Saville. He co-directed and co-wrote his first feature-length fiction film Borders, Raindrops with a colleague, Nikola Mijović, in 2018. The film was screened at 30 festivals, winning 13 awards, including Best Debut Director, Best Feature Film, Audience Award at Bergamo Film Meetings and Prix Sauvage at the L’Europe autour de l’Europe Festival in Paris in 2019. Vlastimir’s latest short film is Where is my Love? filmed in London with participation of the soprano Dušica Bijelić.