Dora Bouchoucha is a film producer with a degree in English Literature. She has produced numerous Tunisian and foreign feature films, shorts and documentaries with her company Nomadis Images, including the African short film series Africa Dreaming (1997), Baraket! by Djamila Sahraoui (2006), Satin Rouge (2002), Les Secrets (2009), Un printemps tunisien (2014) and Corps étranger (2016) by Raja Amari, Inhebbek Hedi (Best First Feature and Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance, 2016 Berlinale), Weldi (2018) by Mohamed Ben Attia, and Ghodwa by Dhafer L’Abidine (2021). All her films have been selected at the Venice, Cannes and Berlin festivals. Dora Bouchoucha created the Carthage Film Festival Workshop in 1992 and was director of the festival in 2008, 2012 and 2014. For over a decade she was a member of the CineMart-Rotterdam Film Festival’s Expert Committee and was a consultant for the Venice Film Festival for the selection of Arab and African films. She has also led the pedagogical committee for several training programmes for Arab and African producers and scriptwriters.

Born in 1971, Carlo Chatrian studied literature and philosophy and also holds a degree in film studies, with a thesis on the films of Jacques Rivette. He served as artistic director in Locarno for six editions (2013-2018) and in Berlin from 2019 to 2024. He has been a programmer for the Alba Film Festival, the Florence Festival dei Popoli and Visions du Réel. As a journalist, author and programmer, he has collaborated on several magazines and published essays and monographs on filmmakers such as Nanni Moretti, Errol Morris, Johan van der Keuken, and Frederick Wiseman. He has curated retrospectives on Ernst Lubitsch, Vincente Minnelli, Otto Preminger, and on Japanese Animation.  He has served as juror in Buenos Aires (Bafici), Jeonju, Morelia, Paris (Cinema du Réel), Sarajevo, Sundance, and Toronto. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 

Born in Geneva, Carmen Jaquier studied graphic design, before making her own shorts as a self-taught filmmaker. She attended the University of Art and Design in Lausanne (ECAL), and her graduation film Le Tombeau des filles (2011) won the Pardino d’argento at the Locarno Film Festival. She then explored cinematography and editing as part of the Aamen collective and made two shorts: Les Vagues and Le Bal des sirènes. Her film La Rivière sous la langue and the collective feature film Heimatland were both selected for the 2015 Locarno Film Festival. She also served as the cinematographer for the film A Bright Light – Karen and the Process, by Emmanuelle Antille, which was screened at Visions du Réel in 2018. Her first feature film Foudre (2022) was screened at a number of festivals (Toronto, San Sebastian, Busan, Rome, Marrakesh) and was chosen to represent Switzerland at the Oscars. Her second feature film Les Paradis de Diane (2024), which was co-directed with Jan Gassmann, was chosen to open the Solothurn Film Festival and had its international premiere at the Berlinale, in the Panorama section.

Devika Girish is the Editor of Film Comment and a Talks programmer for the New York Film Festival. She contributes regularly to The New York Times, and her work has been published in The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Criterion Collection, among others. She has also served on selection committees for the Mumbai Film Festival and the Berlin Critics’ Week.

Lyse Ishimwe Nsengiyumva is a film curator and photographer. Lyse is currently based in Belgium where she founded Recognition in 2016. Recognition is a Brussels based community film screening program that focuses on work for and by people of African descent. Lyse currently works at the International Film Festival Rotterdam as a programmer for the Feature, Short & Mid Length sections. Previously, she was a film consultant for the Berlinale Forum.

Eduardo Williams is a filmmaker and artist whose works explore a fluid mode of observation, looking for shared relations and spontaneous adventures within both physical and virtual networks. Williams’ shorts films Pude ver un puma (2011) and Que je tombe tout le temps? (2013) premiered at Cinéfondation and Director’s Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival, followed by Tôi quên rồi! (2014) which had its premiere at FIDMarseille. His first feature, El auge del humano (The Human Surge) (2016), won the Pardo d’oro at Filmmakers of the Present at the 69th Locarno Film Festival and was shown at Toronto IFF, New York FF and other festivals. His last works, Parsi (2018) and Un Gif Larguísimo (2022) had their premiere at Berlinale, and his latest feature El auge del humano 3 (The Human Surge 3) had its premiere at Locarno Film Festival. In 2019 he received the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists. The Film Study Center at Harvard University awarded him a Robert E. Fulton III Fellowship in Nonfiction Filmmaking for 2020-21.

Pauline David is the founder and Artistic Director & General Manager of the Belgian documentary film festival En ville! and of the Brussels-based writing encouragement programme Regards sur les Docs. She has been an independent programmer of contemporary and heritage documentaries for 15 years under the Le P’tit Ciné label. She is committed to helping people discover original forms of non-fiction cinema and notably directed the Regards sur le Travail festival. Having first trained as a historian, before obtaining a degree in political science and cinema, she began her career in the film industry in other roles including working as an archivist/researcher, a research officer at the European Commission, an institutional manager, a training course designer and coordinator. After working at Eurodoc, Pauline continues to sit on several film committees. She joined Tënk’s programming committee in 2021.

Gabriel Gonzalez was born in Geneva. He has a Bachelor’s degree in cinema from the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) and a Master’s degree in editing from the Brussels-based film and drama school, INSAS. After working in Paris as an assistant to editors including Aël Dallier Vega and Yaël Bitton, he went on to edit a number of documentaries and short fiction films which have been screened at the Cannes, Berlin, Visions du Réel and Les États généraux du film documentaire festivals. He has worked with Mati Diop, Alexis Langlois, Yann Gonzalez, Anton Bialas, Maya Kosa and Sergio Da Costa, among others. He recently finished editing Mati Diop’s Dahomey, screened in the official competition at the Berlin film festival 2024, and Alexis Langlois’s first feature film, Les Reines du Drame, currently in post-production.

Bojana Marić holds a MA in Archaeology from University of Belgrade, Serbia. Interpreting the past of humanity has a lot to do with storytelling, and Bojana was naturally driven to documentaries as another form of creative research. Her passion brought her to Lightdox, a Swiss and French based international sales and distribution agency representing powerful and transformative documentary storytelling.

Born in Dakar in 1995, Rokhaya Marieme Balde began her studies at Sup’Imax Dakar in 2017, after studying business in China and political science in Canada. She obtained a Bachelor’s degree in filmmaking from the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) in 2020, and a Master’s degree in screenwriting from the University of Art and Design in Lausanne (ECAL) and the HEAD in 2022. Her short films have been screened at international festivals such as Clermont-Ferrand, Locarno, Rotterdam and Visions du Réel in Nyon. Her graduation film À la recherche d’Aline was nominated for the Swiss Film Award 2022.

Zsuzsanna Kiràly studied Communication Science in Vienna and Berlin. From 2009 to 2020 she worked with Komplizen Film as Head of Development. Since 2017, Zsuzsanna has been producing artistic fiction and documentary films with her own production company Flaneur Films. These titles include, amongst others, Phantasiesätze (2017), Afterwater (2022), Projekt (2023) and The Garden Cadences (2024) by Dane Komljen, Outside Noise (2021) by Ted Fendt, Two Minutes to Midnight (2021) by Yael Bartana and A Flower in the Mouth (2022) by Éric Baudelaire. Zsuzsanna is a member of the editorial team of Revolver, Zeitschrift für Film, and of the funding bodies of IDM-Südtiroler Filmförderung, World Cinema Fund; she is also a member of the selection committee of TorinoFilmLab and of the jury of the German Short Film Award II. She teaches at various film schools and universities such as DFFB, Universität der Künste and ZeLIG.

Carla Vulpiani lives in Italy and Ireland. Alongside completing degrees in Cultural Studies and in Documentary Practice in Milan, she started her career as a festival programmer then co-artistic director at Milano Film Festival. Mainly devoted to all types of shorts films, and any length animation, she moved to Ireland where she works as a producer for the Dublin-based animation studio And Maps And Plans. Co-founder of Varicoloured holistic film agency, a distribution company exclusively dedicated to short films, she is involved in heading the animation division at MIA Market in Rome, and animation, immersive and gaming programmes at TSFM, Talent and Short Film Market in Turin. Since 2021 she has served in the role of short film advisor for the Venice International Film Festival, Orizzonti Short Film Competition.

Valérie Arato studied art history and history in Zurich. For as long as she can remember, she has had a passion for literature, cinema, history and photography. She is particularly interested in documentary film and photography as a means of observing and describing reality. She has been working for the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG) for over a decade as Head of Culture. Her work focuses on the politics and culture of remembrance, relevant cultural policy issues, and the preservation and promotion of Switzerland’s Jewish cultural heritage. Looking back at the past, including her own painful family history marked by the Holocaust, and engaging in dialogue about it, are key to understanding today’s world and the future.

Jean-Claude Boillat is a professional catechist and adult educator, and serves as a Permanent Deacon in the Catholic Church. He headed a communications department from 2016 to 2023, and is active as a director and producer, having written a feature-length fiction film, Le trophée Richard Besson. His work has included partnering with the International Catholic Film Office (OCIC) in Burkina Faso to train a production team in the Nouna and Dédougou regions. From 2002 to 2022, he shared his ICT expertise, teaching the New Information Technologies and Communications course at the business school at Delémont. In 2013, he co-authored a book with François-Xavier Amherdt titled Web&Co et pastorale. Since 2015, he has been a member of the management committee of Cath-Info, the Catholic media centre for French-speaking Switzerland and partner of RTS.

Director, critic and reader Majid Movasseghi studied at the Drama Faculty at the University of Tehran and has worked both as a theatre director and assistant director in Iranian cinema and television. From 2003 to 2009, he studied filmmaking at the VGIK (Russian State Film Academy) under the guidance of Vadim Abdrashitov. He has taken part in numerous ateliers and masterclasses. His short films and documentaries have been selected by a number of local and international film festivals. Majid has been teaching courses on directing and acting at various universities and has also held many ateliers on film and theatre in Iran and abroad. He recently moved to Zurich. He has sat on the judging panel at a number of festivals, including the interreligious jury at Visions du Réel 2018, the documentary film festival DOK Leipzig 2019 and as a judge for the Swiss Association for Film Journalism at the Zurich Film Festival 2020.

Claude Rossi grew up in a bilingual family in Basel-Landschaft and trained as a bookseller in a French-speaking bookshop in Bern. From 1989 she worked as film management and purchasing director at the Biel City Library. Her great passion was the Filmpodium cinema in Biel, which she ran from its inception in 1986 until 2022, in her role as director and curator. In addition to attending countless festivals, she has taken part in the Queersicht film festival in Bern and the Women in Film festival, also in Switzerland. She has been a member of the Swiss Film Academy since 2014.

Marion Blöchlinger has worked in trusts, asset management and translation. She is active in several fields of volunteering for associations and sport clubs, and is a member of several commissions within the commune where she lives. 

Born in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1985, Jorge Cadena initially studied photography in Buenos Aires. In 2016, he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in cinema from the HEAD (Geneva) with his film El Cuento de Antonia, which won the Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Festival. He then obtained his master’s degree at the ECAL/HEAD in 2018 with Soeurs Jarariju, which received a special mention at the Berlinale. In 2019, he was selected to take part in the EFP Future Frame programme in Karlovy Vary, the TIFF Lab in Toronto in 2020 and the Berlinale Talents in 2021. He directed Flores del Otro Patio in 2022, which won Best Swiss Short Film at the Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, the Special Jury Award at SXSW and was nominated for the European Film Awards 2023 in the Best Short Film category, after winning the Brief Encounters Grand Prix. He is currently writing his first feature film, Malestar Tropical.

General and Administrative Director of the Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival (LUFF) since 2014, Marie Klay has a wealth of experience in the Swiss cultural field, with a particular interest in film and audiovisual media. She graduated from the University of Lausanne with a degree in French and Philosophy in 2015. Throughout her studies, she worked as an administrator and programmer for the Zinéma, a small independent cinema in Lausanne. Alongside her work at the LUFF, she joined the team at the Cinéma Spoutnik in Geneva (2015-2017), coordinated the subtitling of films for the Fête du Slip (2018-2020), assisted the production of the Six Pompes Summer Tour (2020-2022) and became General Secretary of the Swiss Association of Audiovisual Production [AROPA] (2021-2023), coordinating the Lex Netflix campaign for French-speaking Switzerland. In 2017, she joined the team at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival as coordinator of the NIFFF Invasion label, and she will be responsible for the 2024 programming. At the end of 2023, she became the new administrator of the Association du Salopard with a view to the opening of its brand new concert hall.

Angelone is a Swiss-Italian-Syrian filmmaker and scientist. He teaches Filmmaking and Storytelling across various Swiss universities (e.g. Zurich, Geneva, Lausanne, Basel, ETH) and film festivals (e.g. Locarno Film Festival). Angelone is the founder of the Swiss Science Film Academy and the Global Science Film Festival, and a member of the Swiss Association of Film Journalists. He holds dual PhDs in Film Studies and Biology, embodying a special blend of artistic creativity and scientific rigor in his work.

Călin Boto is a film critic and curator based in Bucharest. He writes for several publications, including Filmexplorer (Switzerland), FILM, and Films in Frame (Romania), and works as an associate curator for Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, BIEFF. He is also a member of Fipresci and an alumnus of several writing and history workshops organized by film festivals, including those in Sarajevo, Warsaw, Locarno, Trieste, and Pordenone. He curated series of screenings at the Romanian Cinematheque, as well as retrospectives of experimental cinema, queer cinema, silent cinema, etc. In 2023 he took part in RAW, a workshop organized by Short Waves (Poznań) for emerging film programmers. In 2024 he curated the first Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour in Bucharest. He has been working for the Romanian Filmmakers Union since 2020.

Petra Meterc is a film critic and a translator, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. For many years, she worked at the alternative community radio Radio Študent. Today she regularly publishes in various film magazines and works for the cultural newsroom of the Slovene national radio programme. She is involved with different Slovene festivals, among them Animateka, Kino Otok – Cinema Isola, and Migrant film festival, all of which she also helps to programme. She has in the past attended the Berlinale Talents programme for film critics and in 2020 was the recipient of the award for film criticism of the Slovene magazine for film and television Ekran.

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.