Btihaj AJANA

FILM: BORDERSCAPES
BIO: Btihaj Ajana is an international scholar and media practitioner in the fields of digital culture and social analysis. She is Professor of Ethics and Digital Culture at the department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Her academic research is interdisciplinary in nature and focuses on the ethical, political and ontological aspects of digital developments and their intersection with everyday cultures and modes of governance.

Rafael AQUINO

FILM: MAMA – AFRICANS IN SÃO PAULO
WEBSITE
BIO: Rafael Aquino is from the city of Contagem, Minas Gerais, has a master’s degree in Social Sciences, a degree in Management Processes, and author of the book Políticas de Cultura. In audiovisual he works with research, production and direction of documentaries.

Jaime BOFILL

FILM: THE MUSIC OF THE WIWA PEOPLE
BIO: Jaime Bofill is a musicologist and an assistant professor at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico. His research focuses on Latin American music and the relationship between sound, music and environment.

Michael BRIMS

FILM: THE MUSIC OF THE WIWA PEOPLE
BIO: Michael Brims is a documentary filmmaker & video artist from  Germany living in Houston, Texas. He is also an associate professor for Art, Communication & Digital Media Studies at the University of Houston Clear Lake. His documentary work focuses on Latin American musical traditions and as aspects of sustainability.

Michael BROWN

FILMS: BRICK MULE & PORTRAITS OF DISABILITY
Website
BIO: Professor Michael Brown is an ethnographic and participatory filmmaker and academic. He is based in the University of South Wales, and has taught in a range of UK Higher Education institutions and at Kathmandu University in Nepal where he lived for five years working in participatory development communication. Michael founded Marginal Voices as an organisation supporting marginalised and disadvantaged communities to have a stronger voice in the discussion of issues that directly affect them. Animals and the environment are included in the ‘marginalised’.

Áine CLARKE

FILM: A WORLD OF 3 ZEROS
Website
BIO: Áine (onya) Clarke – Born in 1963 in Belfast Northern Ireland. Graduated from University of Ulster in Environmental Physics in 1987. In 1991, in Belgium Áine and Michel co-founded Azimut Company, an award-winning independent production house to direct and produce commercials and corporate films. Since 2016, they made the decision to work principally on productions about social entrepreneurship. Aiming to add a cinematographic and storytelling dimension to this valuable work of providing solutions to social and environmental problems for the collective good.

James DAVOLL

FILMS: ADLAIS, SPLITTING STONE & TRIBUTARY
Website
BIO: James Davoll is a multi-disciplined artist working across creative digital media, video installation, film, photography, performance and sound. James’ practice explores specific landscapes asking questions of their contemporary role, relevance and our emotive response to them. He has produced works for the Being Human Festival, The Dark Outside Festival and the Festival of Humanity. James seeks to investigate our complex and contradictory relationship with the natural world. Beginning his art career in analogue photography he has become more and more interested in the intersection of the visual and sonic landscape as well as bringing liveness into his work.

Kate P.R. DUNN

FILM: WHOLISTIC CONVERSATIONS ON LIVER WELLNESS: AN INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVE
BIO: Kate Dunn is an Anishinaabe woman who works in a collaborative role increasing awareness and access to Hepatitis C treatment and cure for Indigenous communities in Alberta. Bringing a background in nursing, a master’s in public health, and recently as part of this media project, a Doctorate in Social Sciences at Royal Roads University focusing on Indigenous Health. Kate’s director debut in this Wisdom Seeking research project spends time with Indigenous Knowledge Holders listening to memories, stories, and perspectives on traditional health and liver wellness in co-creating a visual story relevant for all ages.

Luisa ENRIA

FILM: TARMA: COMMUNITIES ON THE FRONTLINES OF EPIDEMIC RESPONSE
BIO: Luisa Enria is Associate Professor in Anthropology and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She has conducted research in Sierra Leone for thirteen years on community experiences of crisis. In 2015 she was deployed to Sierra Leone to work in the Ebola vaccine trials in Kambia District and has since then been involved on several projects on the role of community knowledge in health emergency response. TARMA is her first documentary, made in collaboration with her Sierra Leonean colleagues: Abass S. Kamara (a field epidemiologist) and Mohamed Lamin Kamara (a civil society activist).  

Sachin GHIMIRE

FILM: INTO THE MIST
BIO: Sachin Ghimire is a Medical Anthropologist and filmmaker from Nepal. Being involved continuously in academic activities throughout his life, he is an expert in his field and nevertheless unceasingly learning more, with a profound interest in deeply analyzing the social fabric of society.

James GOSSARD

FILM: DIVINE INSTINCT
Website
BIO: James Gossard is an award-winning film producer/director, poet, screenwriter, and playwright. His award-winning film, DIVINE INSTINCT, explores the psychological world and art of sculptor and mixed-media artist Gary Spinosa. Gossard worked as a freelance journalist, writing for wildlife journals. StoryPros named his screenplay, WHITE DUST, in its Top Ten Action-Thrillers. Gossard’s screenplays have been optioned and earned laurels in “Spotlight on Screenwriters.” His stage plays have been produced and received awards, including the MSAC Individual Artist Award for “September Moon.” His poetry also received the highest MSAC Individual Artist Award. He earned his M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Adrien HARPELLE

FILM: JOURNEY TO OUR HOMELANDS
BIO: Growing up in a family of filmmakers, I have been on film sets my whole life. I am a professional music producer, composer, and filmmaker. I am a bilingual (English, French) artist who creates music and film with a focus on documentary, sound design and composition. I was the mentor, director, and composer for the 24min documentary Journey to our Homeland which premiered in September 2022. The film follows two elders and six youths traveling by canoe to the old village sites where their families lived from time immemorial. It is made with the support of Matawa First Nations, Shebafilms, and Four Rivers.

Ron HARPELLE

FILM: THE SNIPER – LE TIREUR D’ÉLITE
BIO: Ron Harpelle is an award-winning producer and director and he teaches History at Lakehead University. Together with Kelly Saxberg, he has worked in a variety of capacities on dozens of films and videos. He has a special interest in historical documentaries and in making Social Science research come alive in the form of films, videos, and as new media.

Seyed Habib Omid HASHEMI

FILM: THE ZAGROS NOMADS, BREATHLESS
BIO: Né en 1986 à Téhéran, j’ai a déménagé fréquemment en raison de ma situation familiale ; de 1989 à 1993 en Turquie, puis au Pakistan. En février 2006, je m’installa à Paris pour terminer mes études à l’Université Paris 8 (Vincennes, Saint-Denis), où devenu ensuite chargé de cours. C’est en février 2009, à Paris, que j’ai rencontré Marina Abramovic. Je l’a ensuite accompagnée en juin 2009 à Manchester pour y suivre son travail, et l’année suivante à Madrid en septembre 2010. En novembre 2013, j’ai organisé une journée de réflexion où j’ai commencé à travailler avec Jean-Jacques Lebel. Je me suis rendu en Inde en juin 2015 où je me suis installé dans la cité internationale d’Auroville, ville expérimentale située dans les forêts du sud de l’Inde, près de Pondichéry. En janvier 2023, je suis retourné à Paris avec un bourse post-doctoral de l’université Paris Lumière en tant qu’artiste-chercheur.

Jeffrey HIMPELE

FILM: SHAME ON YOU!
WEBSITE
BIO: Jeffrey Himpele is an anthropologist and filmmaker at Princeton University. He is author of Circuits of Culture: Indigenous Identity, Media and Politics in the Andes and the director and a producer of films including the award-winning Incidents of Travel in Chichén Itzá. He directs the Anthropology Department’s VizE Lab for Ethnographic Data Visualization which explores methods of combining data visualization with documentary film and ethnography to reveal hidden structures of data while casting them in human, experiential contexts. Shame On You! represents his latest effort along these lines.

Wolfram HÖHNE

FILM: HUMAN BEINGS IN THE MUSEUM
WEBSITE
BIO: Wolfram Höhne is an author, filmmaker and cultural heritage researcher. He studied fine arts and realised art projects in collective authorship. Since 2008, he has been working on documentary films. His films include „The Fighter Gene“ (2011) and “Elham – My Music for Afghanistan“ (2013). As part of his teaching activities at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, he worked on film series such as „Studio Bauhaus“ and „From the Second Life. Documents of Forgotten Architectures“. He received his doctorate in 2020 with a thesis on the cultural construction of architectural testimonies and their documentation in the medium of language. Since 2021, he has headed the Research Training Group „Identity and Heritage“, funded by the German Research Foundation in Berlin and Weimar.

M KAPLAN

FILM: LIAR-IN-CHIEF: A CHRONICLE OF THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY THROUGH THE EYES OF AN OUTRAGED GRAPHIC ARTIST

Nilay Kılınç

FILM: ARKADAşLOCH – Nobodys Problem
WEBSITE

BIO: Nilay Kılınç is an Istanbul-born social anthropologist with a focus on migration studies. She is based in Helsinki and works as a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Helsinki. Nilay holds a BA degree in International Relations from Istanbul Bilgi University, MA degree in European Studies from Lund University and PhD degree in Migration and Mobility Studies from University of Surrey. She studied drama in Istanbul City Conservatory, acted in a musical and in several theatre plays during her youth. She focused on script writing and directing early on.

Marie Anna LEE

FILM: CAI LUN’S KEY: HOW THE KAM PEOPLE PRESERVED THE EARLIEST PAPERMAKING
BIO: Marie Anna Lee is a Czech designer and artist who has worked on preserving the Chinese Kam minority heritage since 2007. She has documented the Kam arts, crafts and culture in general though photographs, videos and writing. In 2008, she wrote the “Kam Women Artisans of China: Dawn of the Butterflies” published by Cambridge Scholars. Lee is now producing several short documentary films on the Kam crafts and completing an online archive of her documentary work. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of the Pacific in California, USA.

Bernardita LLANOS

FILM: LA CHISPA EN LA PRADERA (A SPARK IN THE MEADOW)
BIO: Bernardita Llanos is a professor of Latin American Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies and has published many articles and books on women writers and documentarians from Latin America. She is also a documentarian and this is her second short. Her first one is titled The Tree of Life and tells the story of feminists in Nicaragua and the plight of Zoila America Murillo, President Ortega’s step daughter.

Angelo LOY

FILMS: TROPIC OF CHAOS & LOOSING GROUND
BIO: After a degree and a doctorate in biology, Angelo Loy turned to filmmaking in 2000 directing narrative documentaries on social themes, of medium and long duration: among others, Black Pinocchio (2005), An Italian School (2010), Commonplaces (2015), Loosing Ground (2022) , State Servants (2023). Since 2000 he has held training seminars and conducted participatory video workshops in Italy, France, Germany, Morocco, Kenya and India. Some of the products of these laboratories were meant for national and International broadcasters, such as TV Slum (2002), African Spelling Book (2005), Millennium News (2009). He currently produces and directs documentaries for the Italian Public Television.

Eve A. MA

FILM: Rasaki’s Drums and the rich rhythms of Nigeria’s Yorubá
WEBSITE

BIO: A filmmaker since 2004, like many other independent filmmakers, Ma is essentially self-taught. Her work has screened and been in festivals in eight countries on four continents, and several have been broadcast over national PBS (including her recently completed documentary, “Flamenco: the Land Is Still Fertile”). She produces and directs in both English and Spanish, and in certain respects considers herself an international version of Les Blank. Her passions are music, dance, and cross-cultural understanding; and she tries to combine each of these elements in her work, whether documentary, narrative, or experimental. Her earlier careers (history professor, lawyer, and non-profit administrator) also have a significant effect on her filmmaking.

Eugene MARLOW

FILM: JAZZ IN CHINA
BIO: Eugene Marlow, MBA, Ph.D. is an award-winning documentarian, music and live event producer, composer/arranger, author, and educator. His documentaries, 13 books and hundreds of articles often focus on music and individual freedom of expression. In addition to a book entitled The Journey of the Word: A Biography, his current documentary project is “Jazz in Arabic Culture.” His company MEII Enterprises is headquartered in Brooklyn,
NY.

Blake McWILLIAM

FILM: THE TIME WE HAVE LEFT
WEBSITE
BIO: Blake McWilliam is a director and producer based in Edmonton, Canada. With an official selection at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, a Canadian Screen Award Nomination in 2016, plus multiple AMPIA and CCMA nominations and awards along the way, Blake is quickly establishing himself at the forefront of the Canadian film industry. He recently completed production on the feature film “Hands that Bind” starring Paul Sparks, Landon Liboiron, and two-time academy award nominee Bruce Dern, and is next set to produce and direct the comedy film “May Long”, the drama “Salt Water”, and the series “Timberwood”.

Petr NUSKA

FILMS: ROOTED MUSICIANS FROM KLENOVIC & HOPA LIDE
BIO: Petr Nuska is a visual ethnomusicologist and ethnographic filmmaker. His passion for capturing music straddles music documentaries and music videos, both guided by commitment to innovation in pursuit of underexplored perspectives on music. Since 2011, he has been involved in projects worldwide in the fields of documentary and ethnographic film, educational and activist videos, and production of music videos with independent musicians. His recently completed doctoral research at Durham University concerned the musicianship of the Roma in central Slovakia. The film “Hopa lide” is his feature-length directorial documentary debut based on long-term research in this locality.

H. Clive RICHARDS

FILM: ECHOES OF WAIPI’O VALLEY TARO FARMERS
WEBSITE

BIO: H. Clive Richards is now retired from a 40-year filmmaking career in Hollywood.

Guillermo ROSABAL-COTO

FILM: SOMOS LA MÚSICA (WE ARE THE MUSIC)
BIO:Costa Rican born Guillermo Rosabal-Coto is an ethnographer, sociologist and educator who studies how the Western establishment alienates the relationships that we affirm, explore, and celebrate when engaging with music in our daily life, from a Latin American, decolonial perspective. While he has been a university professor in his home country, teaching and doing research internationally, he recently began his career as a self-taught filmmaker.

Raquel SALVATELLA DE PRADA

FILM: BEYOND
WEBSITE
BIO: Raquel Salvatella de Prada is a computer artist and educator. She practices graphic design, motion graphics, and video design. Her work often focuses on integrating computer animation and motion design with different traditional art forms by collaborating with artists of diverse backgrounds such as printmaking, painting, installation art, poetry, puppetry, theater, and musical performance. She finds that the combination of her digital medium with physical visual media can be a powerful way to communicate social issues.

Or SCHAAP

FILM: WALL: A STORY ABOUT TWO GARDENS IN THREE PARTS
WEBSITE
BIO: Or is an anthropologist and filmmaker with a focus on ecological engagement and practice. Following bachelor studies in philosophy, anthropology and performance, I graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a degree in visual anthropology. I’m interested in practices which blur or deconstruct the ontological barriers that separate many of us from our respective environments, while engaging a wide range of theoretical frameworks and in an investigation of grounded philosophy. In recent projects I explored themes such as ecological practice, permaculture, and interspecies communication, using a combination of sound, visual materials, and storytelling to demonstrate the importance of ecological awareness and engagement starting from an embodied personal level and expanding to societal and planetary scales.

Greta SCHILLER

FILM: THE FIVE DEMANDS
WEBSITE
BIO: Greta Schiller is an internationally
acclaimed documentary filmmaker and co-founder of Jezebel Productions. Since 1984 she has produced over a dozen films, unearthing lost histories of marginalized groups and writing them into the cultural narrative. Her work includes international favorites such as: Before Stonewall (1984 Emmy Award, 2019 National Film Registry),
International Sweethearts of Rhythm (PBS, 1986 Best Doc, Philadelphia Film Festival), Paris Was a Woman (1995 Audience Award Winner, Berlinale), and The Man Who Drove with Mandela (PBS, 1998 Best Documentary at Berlinale). Her films have screened at the most prestigious international film festivals over the last 35 years, making her one of the most respected, longest-producing independent filmmakers of her generation.

Zach SCHRANK

FILM: LIMINAL: INDIANA IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
WEBSITE
BIO: Zach is a 9th generation Hoosier, sociology professor, and director of the Center for a Sustainable Future at Indiana University South Bend. He teaches social theory, consumer society, and environmental sociology courses. In 2020, he co-directed the documentary Big Enough, Small Enough: South Bend in Transition, which is streaming through Hoodox; a service featuring exclusively nonfiction, Indiana-based films.

Yehuda SHARIM

FILM: EL OJO COMIENZA EN LA MANO (THE EYE BEGINS IN THE HAND)
WEBSITE
BIO: Yehuda Sharim is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and poet. As the son of Persian immigrants to Israel, his work focuses on the relationship between the quotidian and poetic. Sharim’s films have appeared in film festivals, artistic venues, and universities across the world. Oscillating between fiction and documentary filmmaking, his work offers an intimate portrayal of those who refuse to surrender amidst daily devastation and culminating strife, offering a vision for equality and a renewed solidarity in a divisive world. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Program of Global Art Studies, University of California, Merced.

Alcaeus SPYROU

FILM: WHY THE MOUNTAINS ARE BLACK
WEBSITE
BIO: Alcaeus Spyrou (b.1991) is a filmmaker who researches the creation of mythologies for our industrial landscapes. By documenting these superstructures of capital from their logistical abstraction into their metaphysical and spiritual dimensions, he renders visible the effects they have on the environment and the inhabitants that populate and work in these topographies. These cultural landscapes, which are understood as interrelated sites across an area, contain archaeological evidence of how factors of production are organised in depth of time, their geo-political implications, but more importantly, how they stand as a reflection of society’s moral heritage.

Mark STREET

FILM: DIG DEEPER
WEBSITE
BIO: Director/writer Mark Street has worked in the film and TV industry for 25 years as a producer, director, camera operator, editor and sound designer, mostly at the ABC on a variety of productions in drama, comedy, and documentary. As a part of the Arts department, he has produced segments for both on-air and online. His recent feature documentary ‘Can Art Stop a Bullet?’ has won awards at the Melbourne Documentary film Festival, ATOM and AACTA as well as at festivals Internationally.

Niobe THOMPSON

FILM: THE TIME WE HAVE LEFT
WEBSITE
BIO: Niobe Thompson was raised in the northern Canadian Cree community of Wabasca, in a family of traditional wood canoe builders. A wildfire firefighter, paddler and filmmaker, he finished doctoral studies in anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and spent two years living in Arctic Russia researching the fate of settlers abandoned by the collapse of the Soviet state. Niobe returned to Canada to make science, nature and adventure documentaries, developing a unique style Canada’s Globe & Mail calls “indescribable, but brilliant.”

Michel VAN DER VEKEN

FILM: A WORLD OF 3 ZEROS
WEBSITE
BIO: Born in 1961 in Liège Belgium.
Graduated from IAD film school in 1985. In 1991, in Belgium, Áine and Michel co-founded Azimut Company, an award-winning independent production house to direct and produce commercials and corporate films. Since 2016, they made the decision to work principally on productions about social entrepreneurship. Aiming to add a cinematographic and storytelling dimension to this valuable work of providing solutions to social and environmental problems for the collective good.

Nelson VARAS-DíAZ

FILM: THE BEE – A REFLECTION ON WOMEN, LAND, AND OCCUPATION
BIO: Dr. Nelson Varas-Díaz is a professor of social-community psychology at Florida International University’s Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies. He directed the award winning documentaries “Collapse,” “The Ear,” and “Acts of Resistance: Heavy Metal Music in Latin America.” Together, his films have garnered 100 sets of laurels in international film festivals.

Andrea WEISS

FILM: THE FIVE DEMANDS
WEBSITE
BIO: Andrea Weiss (Producer/Director/Editor) is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder, with Greta Schiller, of Jezebel Productions. Her last film Bones of Contention, was a feature documentary delving into the historical memory movement in Spain and the unknown story of LGBT repression under the Franco dictatorship. Bones of Contention premiered in the 2017 Berlin Film Festival, screened on the film festival circuit around the world, and had an art-house cinema release in Spain.

Dorna VAN ROUVEROY VAN NIEUWAAL

FILM: FINDING ENOK, COPING WITH OUR COLONIAL PAST
WEBSITE
BIO: Dorna van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, born in Jakarta, Indonesia. Filmmaker.
Her Canadian father Robert instilled in her a love for film, and after the Dutch Film and TV Academy, she did another postgraduate year at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. She directed many documentaries, especially on colonial subjects, two feature films, authored and co-authored film scripts. Produced animated short films that won regular awards, including a special jury prize in Tribeca. She was a jury member of the Fantastic Film Festival (Netherlands), Festival Ashdod (Israel) and Festval Avanca (Portugal). IMDB