Opening Scenes Lab

Manuel Abramovich (b. Buenos Aires, 1987) is a filmmaker, artist and director of photography. His work explores different ways of staging intimacy. In his films, ordinary people become characters. His films have been shown at festivals such as Berlinale, Venice, Tribeca, MoMA Doc Fortnight, Viennale, IDFA, San Sebastián, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Cinéma du Réel, BAFICI and received numerous awards. His first short film ‘The Queen’ won over 50 international awards, while ‘Blue Boy’, his latest work, won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale Shorts Competition 2019. His latest work ‘Pornomelancolia’ premiered at the Official Selection of San Sebastian Film Festival and won the Best Cinematography award. He is currently editing his last film ‘Croma’, while working on the development of a new project.

Zurich, 1995. Tatjana Fanny is a Swiss filmmaker based between Zurich, London and San Sebastián. Her background is in painting & religious studies. She is currently working on two projects: ‘102 Narra’, a documentary co-directed with her partner Rafael Manuel and set in the suburbs of Manila; ‘Mädchenmorgen, Blütenträume’ a project that explores her family archive, which will be her graduation film for her MA at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola. Tatjana Fanny is the director of ‘Sonnenhof’, selected in the Opening Scenes Competition.

Born in China, Yu Wang is a filmmaker based in France since 2018. Following her previous film studies in Beijing and Taipei, she currently develops personal work between France and China. Her next project ‘Between Themselves’ will be a diptych portrait of four young Chinese in Marseille. Yu is the director of ‘Under One Roof’, selected in the Opening Scenes Competition.

Born in Jaén, in 2001. During his studies at the ECAM, he discovered documentary film and decided to specialize in this branch. Alongside three schoolmates, he directs the medium-length film ‘Ruinas Futuras’, where he explores everyday life tainted by mystery and magic, as well as time and memory.

Ran Chen (Lishui, 1993) graduated from the ECAM Documentary Film Department. During her school years, she completed the medium-length film ‘Ruinas Futuras’, in which she experimented with using “present“ fragments and stable spaces to reshape “memories“. She pursues the exploration of visual expressions that combine the real and the poetic through metaphor.

Ghada Fikri (b. 1990, Cairo) is an Egyptian documentary filmmaker, editor, producer, cinematographer, colorist and academic instructor currently based in Lisbon. In her films, she traces stories and sensitively creates single-minded depictions of the personal but universal, with hints of the social contexts. Ghada holds an MA in Documentary Directing, she received an Erasmus+ scholarship to attend DocNomads (2020-2022) where she directed, filmed and edited four short films, in Lisbon, Budapest and Brussels. Ghada is the director of ‘How Are You, Baba?’ selected in the Opening Scenes Competition.

Alhasan Yousef (1991) is a Syrian filmmaker and photographer with a bachelor’s degree in Audiovisual and a master’s in Documentary Film Directing from DocNomads. He fuses the lines between fiction and nonfiction in his documentaries in an experimental and personal manner, drawing on his subjective viewpoint to recount experienced social, political, and emotional narratives. Alhasan’s latest documentary, ‘Locus Cordis’ will premiere at the Visions du Réel festival in the Opening Scenes Competition. He is also developing a project on “helping out of helplessness“, inspired by the recent earthquake in his hometown as a Syrian living in exile.

Giulia Di Maggio was born in Palermo in 1995. She obtained a degree in Communication and Entertainment from the University of Pisa and then she graduated from the experimental film school Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Palermo as a documentary director with the short film ‘Once More’. Giulia is currently developing her debut feature film ‘Two Mothers’, a biographical and experimental documentary that she has been working on for 5 years and in which she tries to reconstruct the memory of her mother.

Spencer Bogaert (1997, Ghent) just graduated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. From the age of 9 he started performing in two consecutive international theater productions. At the age of 14, Spencer made his screen debut and won an Ensor as Most Promising Actor. This was followed by a handful of acting jobs in Belgium, France and the USA. As a film student Spencer made his first short film After Laughter (17’) in 2020. ‘For Mouna’ (13’) is his graduation film and second short to date.

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 explore the moving image further, she gave up her job to attend the Yangon Film School in 2020, and has since worked in various roles including sound recordist on ‘The Singing Bookman’ (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. ‘Dear Daughter’ marks her first film as a director in her own right. She is currently developing her first short drama ‘Lost Girl’ with support from the Myanmar Script Fund.

Elvira Arbós was born in 1999 in Malaga, where she studied at the Lycée Français. In this institution, she began to develop an interest in culture and cinema, so she decided to study a higher degree in lighting and image processing. After graduating, she enrolled at the ECAM and completed a degree in Documentary Filmmaking. During her years at the school, she directed several projects such as ‘L’intimitá’, ‘Los Muertos del Vino’ Dulce or ‘Ruinas Futuras’, co-directed with her classmates Francisco, Ran and Carolina.

Natalia García Clark is a Mexican artist whose work has been exhibited in a number of museums and cultural spaces, including the Kirchner Cultural Centre in Argentina, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in the United States as an award winning artist with her video, ‘Self-Portrait’. Natalia currently investigates the topics of heritage and patrimony laws in Mexico through the development of a film about a prehispanic statue that arrives at her childhood home after her grandmother’s passing. Natalia is the director of ‘The Statues’, selected in the Opening Scene Competition.

Arthur Jaquier was born in 1992 in Geneva. He studied fine arts at ECAL before achieving a Bachelor in Cinema at HEAD – Genève. Arthur is the director of ‘L’Arrestation de C.’ selected in the Opening Scenes Competition.

I work as a cinematographer and director in Stockholm, Sweden. I like films that allow stories to develop organically and where the cinematic image is a given space. The unpredictability and creativity of documentary appeal to me as does the possibility for fantastic encounters with strangers. I have recently become a mother and I am working towards completion of a longterm documentary project about the last days of two brothers who have lived their entire lives in one of Sweden’s oldest iron foundries. Siri is the director of ‘The Building Opposite’, selected in the Opening Scenes Competition.

Carolina Sánchez (Lorca, 2001) graduated from the Madrid Film and Audiovisual School (ECAM) in Documentary Film specialty. During that time she discovered new ways of exploring her questions about sexuality, gender and identity through writing and non-fiction filmmaking. Her work includes ‘El Resto es Porno’ and ‘Ruinas Futuras’, a medium length film made alongside Elvira Arbós, Francisco Armenteros and Ran Chen, which delves into the passage of time and youth. She is currently studying in the Complutense University of Madrid, majoring in Literature.

Aisha is a final year filmmaking student from the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India. She has previously worked on short fiction projects, as well as music videos and ad films. She has a deep interest in the ever-evolving film form and experiments with it in minute ways. This is something that she has tried to do in ‘Songs Along a River’, which is also her first short documentary film. Currently, she is working on another short fiction film project (tentatively called Sticky Fingers), which is about two young adolescents growing up in a small industrial township in India, who find themselves drifting apart as they begin to explore their sexuality and desires. This film is currently in the last leg of its pre-production and is being produced by the Film and Television Institute of India.

Marta Smerechynska is a documentary filmmaker and actress. After graduating from I. K. Karpenko-Kary University in Kyiv in 2019, she participated in documentary directing programs at l’Université d’été of La Fémis in Paris and at the Polish-French Film Academy, Kinographe. Marta’s documentary feature debut ‘Diary of a Bride of Christ’ premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival in August 2022. Currently, she is pursuing a DocNomads Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree. Marta is also working on 2 short films. The first depicts her grandmother’s forced labor migration to Italy amidst Ukraine’s 90s economic crisis. The second film delves into the subject of the compulsory relocation of women due to the full-scale war launched by Russia in Ukraine. Marta is the director of ‘One Aloe, One Ficus, One Avocado and Six Dracaenas’, which was selected in the Opening Scenes Competition.

Otto Lazić-Reuschel was born and grew up in Trieste. After spending a year in Chiapas, Mexico, where he shot his first documentary ‘Que Pasa?’ in 2011, he moved to Berlin where he is currently living. At present, he is working on a creative documentary, ‘Drajcici. A Village at the Edge of Europe’. The documentary is in development but was already selected in various international development workshops. His latest short film When I dance, the Earth trembles, a one take film set in Berlin, was presented at the 24th Black Night Film Festival (P.FF Shorts). In 2022, he graduated in the directing class at the ZELIG School for Documentary, Television and New Media in Bolzano, Italy. My film ‘Do You Get Me?’ is going to be screened as part of the Opening Scenes Competition.