Florence Almozini is Senior Director of Programming of Film at Lincoln Center. She is a member of the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films and Rendez-Vous with French Cinema committees, and supervises the venue’s weekly film releases. She has organized many retrospectives at FLC, including Walerian Borowczyk (2015), Anna Magnani (2016), Marcello Mastroianni (2017), Jiri Trnka (2018), Luchino Visconti (2018), The Female Gaze: Contemporary Women Cinematographers (2018), Agnès Varda (2019), Wong Kar-wai (2020), and Jordan Peele (2023). As director of BAMcinématek, where she worked from 1999 to 2013, she presented retrospectives of Hong Sang-soo (2003), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (2005), Manoel de Oliveira (2008), Bong Joon-ho (2009) et Andrzej Zulawski (2012). In 2009, she launched the BAMcinemaFest, of which she was artistic director. She was on the selection committee for the Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight in 2022, and has served on the jurys of the Berlinale, Mar del Plata and Tribeca film festivals, as well as the Cinema Tropical and IFP Gotham Awards. She was named Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture in 2013.

David Epiney was born in Geneva in 1976. After training in drawing and animation, he worked as a graphic designer at Atelier Pfund, before founding production company Alina Film together with Eugenia Mumenthaler in 2008. Their first film – Abrir Puertas y Ventanas by Milagros Mumenthaler –  won the Golden Leopard at the 2011 Locarno Film Festival. They would then go on to produce La Clé de la Chambre à Lessive (Grand Prix SSR at Visions du Réel 2013), Une Jeunesse Allemande by Jean-Gabriel Périot (Panorama, Berlin), La Idea de un Lago (Locarno 2016), Autour de Luisa by Olga Baillif (Mostra Sao Paolo 2017), El Año del Descubrimiento by Luis López Carrasco (Rotterdam, Grand Prix at Cinéma du Réel, 2 Goyas), Azor by Andreas Fontana (Berlinale/Encounters), El Agua by Elena Lopez Riera (Directors’ Fortnight) and Nuit Obscure by Sylvain George (Locarno 2022). David Epiney was also chosen to participate in the Producers on the Move programme at Cannes 2012.

Born in Recife, Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho became a film programmer and critic while making award-winning short films. Neighboring Sounds, Mendonça’s first feature film, had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2012 and was Brazil’s entry in the race for the Oscars. The New York Times listed it among the ten best films of the year. His second feature film Aquarius, starring Sonia Braga, was in competition at the 69^th Cannes Film Festival, in 2016, before being nominated for a César and an Independent Spirit Award. In 2019, Bacurau, co-directed by Juliano Dornelles, was awarded the Jury Prize of the Cannes Film Festival. Kleber is also a film programmer for the Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and the artistic director of Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife.

Leonardo Bigazzi is a curator and artist’s film producer based in Florence. He has been curator at Fondazione In Between Art Film since 2020 and at Lo schermo dell’arte – Contemporary Art and Cinema Festival since 2008. He is the founder and curator of VISIO – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images, and founder and co-director of Feature Expanded (2015-2018). He has commissioned and/or produced over 20 artist’s films, which have received international awards from the Locarno Film Festival, IFFR Rotterdam, and Festival dei Popoli among others, and which were presented at Tate Modern, London; MoMA, New York;  Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Biennale Arte, Venice; and Manifesta 14, among others. He has curated exhibitions and film programmes at Fondazione Merz, Turin; Paul Klee Zentrum, Bern; CAC-Passerelle, Brest; Palazzo Grassi-Pinault Collection, Venice; MAXXI, Rome; Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; and the Marino Marini Museum, Florence, among others. He has been part of the selection committee of the Villa Medici Film Festival since 2022.

Michelle Carey is a Berlin-based film programmer, curator and creative producer. She is a member of the features selection committee at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, a mentor for the Talents Press at the Berlinale Talents, and a co-founder of The Red Balloon Alliance, dedicated to providing family-friendly solutions at film festivals. She was previously on the selection committee for the Directors’ Fortnight and the artistic director of the Melbourne International Film Festival. Beyond the big screen, she curated the online platform Vive le cinéma! for the exhibition of the same name at the Eye Filmmuseum and was festival reports editor at Senses of Cinema. She is a recipient of a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government.

Elena López Riera is visual artist and filmmaker from Spain. In 2008 she moved to Switzerland, where she teaches cinema and comparative literature at the University of Geneva and the HEAD (Haute école d’art et design). She has also worked as a programmer for film festivals such as Entrevues Belfort Film Festival (France), Seville European Film Festival (Spain) and Visions du Réel.
Her first short film Pueblo premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight of the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 and was selected for more than 20 international festivals. In 2016, her short film Las vísceras was selected at the Locarno Film Festival and received the Silver Mikeldi Award at ZINEBI – Bilbao International Festival of Documentary and Short Films. Her next short, Los que desean, was nominated for the European Film Awards, and won the Pardino d’oro at the Locarno Film Festival in 2018.

Her films have been screened at prestigious international film festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival, the San Sebastián Film Festival, the Zagreb Film Festival, Cinéma du réel, the Leuven International Short Film Festival, the Filmadrid International Film Festival, the Festival do Rio, the Reykjavik International Film Festival, and the Lincoln Center in New York. The Cinémathèque française (Paris), the Cinemateca de Bogotá (Colombia) and the Gijón International Film Festival (Spain) have devoted retrospectives to her work.
El agua, which premiered at the Director’s Fortnight of the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, is her first feature film.

Anne Delseth studied journalism in Fribourg, where she quickly became involved with the FIFF: first as a volunteer, then secretary, executive assistant, and finally programmer. After a degree in cultural management, she moved to Paris, where she was quickly scouted by Édouard Waintrop and invited to join the programming team of the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, on which she spent ten years (2012-2022). Sharing her time between Paris and Lausanne, she was also head of the Masters in Cinema at the ECAL (Lausanne) and the HEAD (Geneva). She now works as programmer for the Marrakech International Film Festival, artistic director of the Ulaanbaatar International Film Festival, consultant for the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival, programming delegate for the Zürich Film Festival, and manages the CityClub cinema in Pully. She is also an active member of numerous Swiss cultural and cinema organisations.

Francesca Mazzoleni, born 1989, is an Italian director and author. In 2015 she graduated from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome and in 2018 she made her debut with the coming-of-age film Succede, produced by Indigo Film and Warner Bros Italia. Her second film, a documentary about the Idroscalo community in Ostia, Punta Sacra, won in 2020 the Best Film award at Visions du Reél and was later screened and awarded in more than 70 festivals around the world. She subsequently filmed an episode of the series Romulus II, produced by Groenlandia and Cattleya for Sky. At the moment, she is working on the series Supersex, produced by The Apartment and Groenlandia for Netflix, and also on her second documentary feature film Rebibbia 310.

After working for ten years at Zadig Productions as director of production, Eugénie Michel Villette founded the production company Les Films du Bilboquet in 2014. Since then, she has produced or co-produced many documentary films presented in international festivals, including Tinselwood (Berlin Film Festival), A Mansourah, tu nous as séparés (Visions du Réel, IDFA-International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) L’Ultimu sognu (Doclisboa, DOK Leipzig, Ji.hlava, International Film Festival Rotterdam) and Taamaden (Visions du Réel, IDFA). Joined by Mathilde Raczymow in 2016, Les Films du Bilboquet accompanies films at the frontiers of genres, forms and subjects.

Since 2020, Eugénie has been co-directing the Yaoundé Film Lab, a development workshop dedicated to cinema in Central Africa. She also co-directs the Master’s degree in documentary film at the Jules Verne University in Amiens, where she also teaches.

Alaa Eddine Aljem is an Italian-Moroccan screenwriter and director born in Rabat, Morocco in 1988. He studied cinema in Marrakech, then at INSAS in Brussels in directing and screenwriting. Since 2011, he has been producing creative documentaries through the company Le Moindre Geste, which he co-founded with Francesca Duca. His short film Les poissons du désert won the Grand Prize, the Critics’ Prize and the Screenplay Prize at the National Film Festival in Morocco, and received much international attention. In 2019, his first feature film Le Miracle du Saint Inconnu had its world premiere at the Cannes Critics’ Week and was acclaimed by French and international critics.  The film was distributed in several countries, nominated for the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and shortlisted for the Oscars in the Best Foreign Film category.
In 2021, Alaa Eddine Aljem was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République française. He developed the series Citizen Ahmed and co-wrote the series Carré d’as with Félicien Jutner, produced by GMT productions. In 2022, he co-wrote the film Nefta Football Club based on Yves Piat’s short film of the same name, nominated for an Oscar and a César.

Zeynep Güzel is a filmmaker and the head of Doc Station at Berlinale Talents. She was the head of the Yeni Film Fund founded by Anadolu Kültür and !f Istanbul Independent Films Festival. Zeynep directed and produced the documentary Come Rain or Shine (2019) and has produced two other documentaries, Beginnings (2013) and Impressions of A Summer (2020). Zeynep works as consultant on storytelling, international grant writing, pitching and co-financing strategies including the Doc Toolbox program at Berlinale EFM and DOK Leipzig Industry. She was a fellow of the 2021 Berlin Artist in Residency (AiR) at Nipkow Program with her first narrative feature film When the Sun Comes Out. Zeynep has been a senior consultant at the Documentary Association of Europe (DAE) since its foundation.

Enrico Vannucci works as programmer and member of the selection committee of Pardi di Domani at Locarno Film Festival. He also works as artistic director of Torino Short Film Market, which he co-founded in 2016. He has been working in film festival programming teams since 2010; from 2014 to 2020, he was appointed short film advisor at the Venice Film Festival; and he was a member of the selection committee at LIM – Less Is More for several years. In the past, he has written essays on the short and feature film festival ecosystems and covered major film festivals as a journalist since 2009. In August 2018, together with Carla Vulpiani, he co-founded Varicoloured, a holistic short film agency. Since February 2020, he has been a board member of Talking Shorts, an online film magazine dedicated to short films, for which he hosts a weekly podcast called Short Talk. At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, he developed the idea for the online fundraising event My Darling Quarantine Short Film Festival. In 2021 he became a member of the European Film Academy.

Nicolas Besson (*1970), Pastor of the Reformed Church of Vaud, worked for 15 years as a parish pastor in Morges and 11 years as head of human resources for his cantonal church. Today he divides his time between chaplaincy in schools in Nyon, interventions at the University of Lausanne in the context of the training of leaders of religious communities and the implementation of a project to enhance the value of people and their contribution in companies. He holds a degree in theology and an MAS in educational sciences from the Universities of Lausanne and Geneva. He is passionate about the question of meaning in daily life and, as such, is a fervent visitor to the Visions du Réel festival.

Linda Dombrovsky (*1980) studied at the Academy of Film and Drama in Budapest and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. In 2013, she obtained her degree in film and television directing and media and communication at the Péter-Pázmány Catholic University. Her short films have won awards at several EFA and Oscar-qualifying festivals, and her first feature film was part of the Foreign Language Film Series at the Golden Globe. She was a member of the ecumenical jury of the IFF Mannheim-Heidelberg (2017) and the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in 2021, as well as a member of the jury of Ars Sacra, Faludi Ferenc and the Cinemira Filmfestival.

Garance Hayat (*1966) was preparing to become a German teacher, but that was before pushing open the doors of the Cinémathèque and discovering Dreyer, Griffith, Lubitsch… In order to see even more films (even bad ones), she couldn’t think of anything better than becoming a film critic. She averages 300 films a year. She shares her passion on Fréquence Protestante, a radio station for which she is also an interviewer. She was head of the cinema section of Aime magazine and has worked for Chronic’art and Paris Mômes, among others. Since 2020, she has been the press officer for the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Mohammad Rezaeian, born 1986 in Tehran, grew up in Berlin, Tehran and Bern, studied law in Berne and business administration in Tehran. He works with and in the different cultures of the East and West as a builder of bridges, intercultural translator, lawyer and project manager, and brings people and cultures together. His main topics are economic analyses, legal implementation and the development of culturally appropriate implementations in new market openings. Through his interest in literature and film, which oscillates between the rationalism of Descartes and the love of Rumi, he tries to better understand his own and other cultures and to bring people together.

Simone Jenni-Pfingsttag holds a Master’s degree in Literature from the University of Geneva and has dedicated her career to cinema. Since 2005, she has been managing cinemas and open air events in Geneva, Nyon and Rolle. From 2012 and for seven years, she was communications and partnerships manager for the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon, and then communications manager for the Basel-based film distributor cineworx. She is a member of the Pro Short association and a jury member for several festivals (FIFAN Nyon, 48 Hour Film Project Geneva and Lausanne). Commissioned by the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur and the association Base-Court in Lausanne, she has been responsible since 2017 for the coordination of the Nuit du Court métrage in French-speaking Switzerland and Ticino, a travelling festival dedicated to the short film format. In parallel, she is also short film programmer and press officer of the FIFF in Fribourg since 2019.

Dora Manz was born in Zurich in 1950. After studying clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophical anthropology and German literature, she obtained her degree from the University of Zurich in 1974. She works in analytical and systemic psychotherapy with children and adolescents in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and practices psychology in schools and psychotherapeutic settings. Dora Manz is a member of Club Zonta.

Fisnik was born in Kosovo during the war. Exiled in Switzerland, he held refugee status until 2005. After a Bachelor in International Relations at the University of Geneva, and a Masters in Geopolitics at King’s College London, he studied Film Directing at the ECAL and the HEAD (Switzerland). Between 2016 and 2021, he wrote and directed three short films and three feature documentaries. He has presented his work at the Locarno Film festival, the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, Visions du Réel, and the São Paulo International Film Festival among others. He is an alumnus of Berlinale Talents (2020), Ateliers d’Angers (2019) and Sarajevo Talents (2018). His first fiction feature, The Land Within, premiered at the Tallinn Black Nights Festival in 2022, where it was awarded Best Film in the First Feature Competition. He is currently developing several feature films in Switzerland, in Kosovo and in Argentina.

Since the 1980s, Ruggero Calich has collaborated with the Istanbul Film Festival as a jury translator, guest guide and moderator. Later on, he contributed to the same festival as a catalogue writer, and is currently an advisor in the documentary category.  He was co-curator for the two editions of the documentary screenings in the Art.Mov Minifest organized by the Trieste Contemporanea art gallery in Trieste. He is also an advisor for the Human Rights Documentary Film Days, organised in the city of İzmir by the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey. He has been a freelance film critic since 2012, focusing on documentaries from all around the world. His reviews, signed with various pen names, have been published on many internet sites, newspapers and magazines in Turkey.

Dina Pokrajac is a film critic, curator, and programmer. She majored in Journalism and Political Science and is a PHD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at University of Zagreb with a thesis on film archives and counter-memory practices. She works for Restart, an organization focused on the production, distribution, and exhibition of documentary films and is the manager of Dokukino KIC cinema. She is the artistic director of Subversive Festival and has curated numerous interdisciplinary projects combining film and critical theory. She also works as a translator, having translated Lewis Mumford’s Art and Technics, Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners and Laura Mulvey’s Afterimages among others. She is an editor for Jesenski i Turk and Bijeli val publishing houses and has edited over 20 books in the fields of philosophy, political science, and film theory. She was the winner of the Vladimir Vuković Award for Best New Film Critic in 2017. She participated in the Sarajevo Talents 2020 and the Berlinale Talents 2021.

Dominic Schmid (born 1983 in Solothurn, Switzerland) graduated in Film and Japanese Studies from the universities of Zurich and Berlin. He has been a freelance film and culture critic for various Swiss online and print outlets. He lives in Biel, Switzerland and co-manages the last surviving Swiss video rental store in Zurich, is a programmer for Filmgilde Biel, the largest Swiss Ciné-club, and works as a presenter at the Solothurner Filmtage. He is a member of the Swiss Association of Film Journalists and was a member of the FICC-Jury at the Berlin Film Festival in 2004 and of the Fipresci Jury at the 2021 Golden Apricot Film Festival in Yerevan, Armenia.

Aziyadé Poltier-Mutal is Senior Officer of Partnerships in the Office of the Director General of UN Geneva. She heads the Coordination Team of the future Portail des Nations / Visitor’s Center of UN Geneva and also supervises the Perception Change Project, which aims to broaden the understanding and the importance of the work done by international actors based in Geneva. She has worked in the field of communications in public relations firms and United Nations agencies for more than 25 years, during which she initiated and managed successful partnerships with world leading advertising agencies, media, artists, film makers, cultural entities, sports organizations and the private sector to boost corporate communication and benefit projects in the field. Aziyadé Poltier-Mutal graduated from la Sorbonne, the Institute of International Relations Studies in Paris and the Graduate Institute of Development Studies in Geneva. Originally from The Netherlands, she lived many years in South America and is fluent in English, French and Spanish.

François Vioud joined the UN Geneva Perception Change Project in 2016 as an intern and is now a Programme Management Specialist. In charge of youth programmes, he organises numerous conferences with different Swiss school classes, but also public events such as exhibitions, sports and cultural gatherings, open doors, inaugurations, etc. Before joining the United Nations, François Vioud worked as a freelance writer for the ecotourism website Evaneos. Originally from Annemasse in Haute-Savoie, François Vioud holds a Master’s degree in International Relations and Diplomacy from Lyon III University. He is passionate about cinema, photography and nature.