Juriu
Juliette Lepoutre
After a Masters in Linguistics at the Sorbonne University, Juliette Lepoutre is offered a grant by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to study International business in the US. Living in San Francisco, she is quickly involved in the high tech business. She has worked for over fifteen years with Silicon Valley companies, where she specialized in developing international markets. Based in San Francisco, California from 1991 till 2006, her territories included Europe, Japan, Pacific Rim, and Latin America. She has fluency in both the language and cultural practices of those dominant markets.
In 2007 she cofounded the production company Movie Partners in Motion Film (MPM Film).
Rapidly, she produced the first feature films Hooked by Romanian director Adrian Sitaru (Venice Days 2008), Port of Memory by Palestinian Kamal Aljafari (Cinéma du Réel 2010) and the short film Flower Seller by Palestinian Ihab Jadallah (Clermont Ferrand 2011). She also coproduced The Turin Horse by Hungarian Béla Tarr (Silver Bear, Berlinale 2011) Historias by Brazilian Julia Murat (Venice Days and Toronto 2011), Tarr Béla, I used to be a filmmaker by French Jean-Marc Lamoure (FID Marseilles 2013).
In 2014, Juliette Lepoutre was producer on Dzma by Georgian Teona Mghvdeladze Grenade and French Thierry Grenade (Rotterdam 2014) and coproducer on Xenia by Greek Panos Koutras (Cannes Un Certain Regard 2014), NN by Peruvian Hector Galvez (Rome competition 2014, Rotterdam 2015) and Box by Romanian Florin Serban.
At Berlinale 2015 she announced partnership with Pierre Menahem in newly founded company, Still Moving. She is currently coproducing two new projects, Pendular, second feature by Julia Murat and Scarred Hearts by Radu Jude.
Ștefan Adrian
Born in 1974, he studied at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz and holds an M.A. in Film Studies, Sociology and Business Management. During his studies and after, he worked as a freelancer for several film production companies.
From 2005 to 2008 he worked at Nordisk Büro as Project Manager, developing fashion shows and corporate events in Germany, Austria, Morocco and Russia.
Since 2009 head of management and organisation at goEast Film Festival. Since 2011, he is also Executive Director.
Sheila Seacroft
Devoted to watching film since her childhood in the 50s, Sheila is an editor and writer. This is her 9th year of reporting on TIFF for the website Jigsaw Lounge, where she has been a regular contributor since 2006. She also writes for the arts website Floatationsuite, where she has contributed more than 600 film reviews.
Based in the North of England, she was for four years a programme consultant for the Bradford Film Festival at the UK’s National Media Museum, where she specialised in Eastern European Cinema. She was one of the founding organisers of the Sunderland Film Festival. She has attended and written about film at many European festivals, including Ljubljana, Tallinn, Kaunas, and Tbilisi.
Dimitris Kerkinos
Dimitris Kerkinos studied Film Studies at the University of Manitoba, Canada, and did his PhD dissertation on “Society and Cinema in Cuba of the 90s” for the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of the Aegean.
He joined the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in 1999, and since 2002 he is programming the Balkan Survey Section. He has curated retrospectives and tributes to directors and national cinemas for TIFF and Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.
He has published essays on cinema and anthropology and has been the editor of many documentary and fiction film monographs.
Robert Cueto
Robert is a member of the San Sebastian Film Festival Selection Committee, in charge of the programming at Cineteca in the Matadero Cultural Centre in Madrid and a professor of Audio-visual Communication at the Carlos III University in Madrid.
He has taught classes, courses and seminars at the Madrid Film School (ECAM) and at several Spanish universities. He formerly worked as a film journalist and collaborated with the Gijón and Sitges Film Festivals. He has coordinated various publications, in addition to having contributed with articles to numerous collective books.
Miroslav Mogorovic
He is the owner of Art&Popcorn Motion Picture Company and Soul Food Distribution Company. For ten years, Art&Popcorn Company has participated in filming over twenty films, which makes it of one the most productive Serbian film companies.
Beside film production, Miroslav Mogorovic is also a program director of Palic Film Festival and managing director of Cinema Fontana, a member of Europa Cinema Network. Development of new ideas and searching for what the market needs has led to the development of the FBO - Festival Box Office web platform which provides detailed insight into film success in festivals.
Stig Frode Henriksen
Stig Frode Henriksen is a Norwegian actor and writer. He has been involved in several norwegian successes, such as the Dead Snow movies, both screened at TIFF 2015, and the internationally acclaimed TV show Hellfjord, in which he portrays the 69-year-old man, Kobba. He co-wrote both Deas Snow movies and Hellfjord with director Tommy Wirkola.
Henriksen also had a smaller part in the Hollywood blockbuster Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, and could be on his way to international stardom.
Jose Miguel Beltran
He studied journalism and specialized in art reviews, working for a long time in this field. In 1992 he founded a Film Society at the Basque University and he began to coordinate different film events.
Since 2011 he has been the coordinator of the Film Unit at the Council of San Sebastian. That involves being the director of the Horror and Fantasy Film Festival (25 editions till now), the chief-programmer of the Human Rights Film Festival (13 editions), and also in charge of cooperation with other film events in the city (such as Surfilm Festival, Dock of the Bay Musical Documentary Film Festival etc.). He is also the film curator for classic movies events.
Gyula Havancsák
He was born 1977. He is a computer game developer, but his main activity is CD and book cover-designing. He works for many metal bands, such as The Annihilator, Kreator, Accept, Stratovarius, Glenn Hughes, Destruction, Ensiferum, Arkona, and Tyr. He designed several book covers for Anne Rice, LEM, H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur C. Clarke.
His artworks were collected in a Spectrum Fantasy Art collection in 2012. He is also a bass player for the Bornholm band.
Tonci Valentic
Tonci Valentic, based in Zagreb, is a film critic, editor, journalist and independent researcher at Multimedia Institute. He contributes with essays and film reviews to Croatian publications Zarez (cultural newspaper) and Filmovi.hr (web-magazine), among others. He is currently the editor and head of a TV series on philosophy airing on the Croatian television station.
Sanjin Pejkovic
Sanjin Pejkovic is a film scholar and critic based in Sweden. He writes mainly for Swedish film magazines FLM and Filmrutan, and international film magazines and film scholarly journals. His work concerns topics such as nationalism, historiography, documentary film, European film history, minority cinemas and touches mostly upon film cultures in the East-Central Europe, Soviet/Russia, Balkan cinemas and areas that once constituted former Yugoslavia.
His main interests are topics of representations and (re)constructions of the past, constructions of the national(ist) narratives through films and collective memories in fiction and documentary films.
Laurențiu Brătan
Laurenţiu was born in 1972. After economic studies in Bucharest, he graduated with a diploma in Theater Marketing. For ten years he wrote the cinema column for the weekly 22 and for the Arhitext Design publication. Since 2000 he is a constant contributor for Observator Cultural and an occasional one for Dilema Veche.
Between 1999-2005 and 2007-2013 he worked for the French Institute in Bucharest, and was responsible for organizing multiple film festivals and cinema-related events. Since 2005 he has been the president of the ESTENEST Association, organizer of the International Animation Festival Anim’est.
Violeta Bava
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she studied drama and in 2002 she received a double degree in Theory, Aesthetics and History of Cinema and Drama at Buenos Aires University.
She has worked for the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival since its first edition, in 1999. Currently she is a programmer of the festival and the co-director of the Buenos Aires Laboratory, a co-production market for Latin American independent film projects.
She is co-founder of Ruda Cine, a film production company that has produced, among others, Abrir puertas y ventanas, by Milagros Mumenthaler, winner of the Pardo d’Oro for the Best Film at Locarno 2011.
Since 2002, she teaches Cinema Aesthetics and Ethics at Centro de Investigación Cinematográfica in Buenos Aires. She is the Venice International Film Festival’s delegate for Latin American films and member of the Advisory Board of Torino Film Lab.
Olimpia Melinte
Olimpia Melinte is one of the most talented and versatile actresses of her generation. She has a MA in Dramatic Arts from the George Enescu University in Iaşi and a degree in Journalism from the University of Bucharest.
Her first main part in a feature was Mircea Daneliuc's Floating Things (screened at TIFF 2015!), which landed her two nominations at the Gopo Awards 2010, and then got her major break in Italian film Sette opere di misericordia: it brought her an acting award at the Bobbio Film Festival in Italy.
In 2013 Olimpia had the main part in Spanish film Canibal, directed by Manuel Martín Cuenca. Her double part landed her the Revelation of the Year Award at the Actors' Guild Awards in Madrid and a nomination at the Best New Actress category of the Goya Awards in 2014. In 2014 she had main parts in #Selfie and romantic drama It Takes Two to Fence, the latter bringing her a new nomination at the Gopo Awards 2015 for Best Actress in a feature film.
In 2015 we will see her in The Chosen One, Bucharest NonStop (also screened at TIFF) and Projects in the Past.
George Ovashvili
George Ovashvili is a film director from Tbilisi, Georgia. He is a graduate from the film department of the Georgian State Institute of Cinema and Theatre. He has directed a number of shorts, most notably Eye Level, selected at the 2005 Berlinale, and Wagonette, which received several awards.
His feature debut The Other Bank (2009) was screened at more than 100 international film festivals in more than 50 countries and won about 50 awards. George’s latest film Corn Island (screened at TIFF 2015!) received the Crystal Globe at the 49th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival before being shortlisted for this year's Academy Awards, Best Foreign Language Film category.
Currently he works on his new project, Khibula, a drama-thriller he will release next year.
Dennis Lim
Dennis Lim is the director of programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Centre, where he also serves on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, as the co-director of New Directors/New Films, and as a curator of annual programs including Art of the Real and Projections. The film editor at The Village Voice from 2000-2006 and a contributor to The New York Times from 2006-2013. He has also written for Artforum, Cinema Scope and The Los Angeles Times.
He has taught in the department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard and the Cultural Reporting and Criticism graduate program at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. His book David Lynch: The Man From Another Place will be published in 2015.