Ukraine

Svitlana Zinovieva (Ukraine) is a cinematographer and documentary film producer. She graduated from the Cinematography Department of the Karpenko-Karyi National Theatre, Cinema and Television University (workshop of Suren Shakhbazyan). She worked at the Odesa Film Studio and Kyivnaukfilm Studio, shooting 7 feature films and around 30 documentaries as a cinematographer. She is a member of the National Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine.

Since 1993, Zinovieva has been working as an independent producer and founded Inspiration Films Company. Together with partners, she initiated and organized the Ukrainian Documentary Co-Production Workshops, which ran for eight years. She has produced around 50 documentary films, widely presented at prestigious international film festivals.

She is also the founder and co-curator of the Close Up Documentary Film Club, as well as an expert, jury member, and lecturer.

Romania

Award-winning Romanian writer and director Bogdan Mureșanu, born in 1974, shifted from literature and advertising to cinema with continued success. Since his debut in 2008 with the script for THE HUMAN TORCH (Best Short, TIFF scriptwriting competition), his work has covered animation, documentaries, fiction films and TV series. He is a member of the European Film Academy and best known as the scriptwriter of SANDALS, a short animated film that won numerous international awards, including the Youth Jury Award at Clermont-Ferrand in 2020. He is also known as the director of The CHRISTMAS GIFT, winner of the European Film Academy Award for Best Short Film 2019 and another 72 awards from 200 festivals, including the Grand Prix at Clermont-Ferrand, Best European Short Film at Alcine European Film Festival and three awards at Tampere Film Festival. His short art documentary NEGRUZZI 14 was showcased at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016.

Filmography: The New Year That Never Came (2024), Cadoul de Craciun (2018), Spid (2016), Tuns ras si frezat (2013)

Ukraine

Alyona Penzii is the Head of the Film Archive at the Dovzhenko Centre, a film critic, and a curator of film and exhibition projects.

Since 2018, she has been working at the Dovzhenko Centre, researching the history of Ukrainian non-fiction cinema, particularly animation. She has organized retrospectives of Ukrainian animation at both international and national venues, including ANIMATOR, StopTrik, LINOLEUM, and La Cinémathèque Française.

Between 2022–2024, she co-curated film programs at the Dnipro Centre for Contemporary Culture (DCCC). In 2023, she co-curated the exhibition “The River Cried, Roared, and Moaned Like a Wounded Beast” as part of the Kyiv Biennial.

She is a board member of the KINOKOLO National Film Critics Award and writes as a film critic for LB.ua, Ukrainska Pravda, and other media outlets.

France

Head of SFC | Rendez-vous Industry (Festival de Cannes, Cinéma de Demain)
Programming Consultant (FNC Montreal)
Associate Programmer (SXSW, Documentary Shorts)
Distributor (Solal Films) 

Holding a Master’s degree in Film Studies, Florian has coordinated the various industry initiatives elaborated as part of the Short Film Corner | Rendez-vous Industry for ten years, before becoming, in 2024, head of this four-day forum organized by the Festival de Cannes. The event aims to highlight short film forms, emerging talents and facilitate the interactions between the filmmakers and the industry. 

Florian is also programming consultant for Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, where he also co-programs the national competition, and associate programmer at SXSW for the Documentary Shorts. 

Ukraine

Adelina Borets is a director, screenwriter, and dancer, as well as a laureate of the Sergei Parajanov Award and a recipient of the Gaude Polonia Scholarship from the Polish Minister of Culture. Born in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, she holds a directing degree from the Warsaw Film School, the Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School in Katowice, and has completed the Script course at the Wajda School. Adelina is the founder and director of NGO STROOM, a creative organization producing films and documentary shorts. She is also an alumna of Esodoc 2022, Ekran+ 2022, and Film Independent 2024.

Latvia

Žulijens Nuhums Kulibali (1994) is a film programmer and critic from Riga, currently based in Barcelona. He's currently the head curator of the "Pure Queer" section of 2ANNAS ISFF (Latvia), but has also created film programmes for Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) and Riga International Film Festival (RIGA IFF), and curates film programmes for a number of art-house cinemas and cultural institutions. His work mostly focuses on queerness in film as structural and narrative categories, with a particular focus on non-Western European film.