Awards

Constantin Hatz graduated with a focus on photography and audiovisual media in Vienna. He then studied directing at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and realized documentaries and feature films. He received several awards for his work, including the German Short Film Award and the German Cinema New Talent Award. His film "Forces" was invited to the "Perspektive Deutsches Kino" of the Berlinale and was awarded the Heiner Carow Prize.

Silvana Santamaria, German-Italian filmmaker and producer from Berlin, graduated in 2010 from the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg. She directed and produced films which were screened and awarded at major Film Festivals as Cannes, Venice, San Sebastian, Warsaw, Shanghai, DOK Leipzig, Rotterdam or Cairo. Santamaria is a member of the European Film Academy and one of 20 uprising European producers selected for the prestigious "Producer on the move" program at Cannes 2023.

Şafak Şengül started her acting studies at the Rostock University of Music and Drama, which she graduated in 2023. During her studies she was already engaged at the Staatstheater Hannover and shot several film projects, among others directed by Andreas Dresen. She was nominated for the German Cinema New Talent Award for her acting performance in "Clashing Differences" and by Theater Heute as "Young Artist of the Year".

Filmmaker (documentary film) and screenwriter (feature film) from Munich. She has a penchant for milieu studies, intercultural themes, dramedy and children's films. Became well-known with "Summer in Orange" and "Vampire Sisters 1-3", various awards, currently in the cinema with "Thabo - The Rhino Adventure".

Denise M'Baye has been active in film and television since 2009 and now also as a podcaster. In 2022 she was awarded the Heimspiel Award for her role as Dr. Ellen Cooper in "The Ordinaries". In 2023, we will see her in the ZDF neo series "Was wir fürchten" (What we fear) as well as in the Netflix production "Die Liebeskümmerer" (The love carers) and the children's series "Mein Traum, meine Geschichte" (My dream, my story).

Juliane Pielot studied German language and literature and philosophy (Mag.) in Berlin and then started working in press relations with a focus on arthouse films and festivals. For the past five years she has been part of the German film distributor missingFILMs, which she manages together with Christos Acrivulis and Andreas Severin.

TUMULT is a Berlin-based directing duo consisting of Paola Calvo and Patrick Jasim. Their first feature-length documentary LUCHADORAS celebrated its world premiere at the prestigious SXSW and won several awards, among others at TIFF, SEMINCI, Nottingham as well as HoF.

They are currently preparing their second feature length documentary and are also producing shorter formats. Inspired by their Latin American and Arab roots, empowerment stands as a dominant theme in their work.

Franziska Schönenberger, writer and director, explores the idea of home, family and belonging in her stories. In cooperation with Jayakrishnan Subramanian she produced the documentaries AMMA & APPA and DIE SCHATTEN DER WÜSTE as well as the two award-winning short films RETTAI JADAI - DAS MÄDCHEN MIT DEN ROTEN SCHLEIFEN and MY MIRROR (HoF 2020).

Susanne Gottlieb is a culture and film journalist from Vienna whose texts have been published in the daily newspapers Der Standard, Kleine Zeitung, Wiener Zeitung, NZZ am Sonntag, in the magazines TV Media, Filmbulletin, The Gap and Cineuropa. Other guest articles have been written for Kino Zeit, Talking Shorts, Ubiquarian and DMovies. She works in the cinema team and as an exhibition assistant at Metro Kino Kulturhaus and has collaborated on catalogs for the Zurich Film Festival and Locarno Film Festival. She holds degrees in journalism and theater studies.

Holger Heiland lives as a freelance author and journalist in Berlin. His film and cultural criticism appears in Jungle World and Die Presse (Vienna), on the portal Kunst + Film and his own blog weltwundern.net. At the Humboldt University in Berlin, he teaches creative writing to students of linguistics in practical seminars. His film "Tangled" (2000), for which he was responsible for writing and directing, screened at film festivals worldwide. In 2022 his first novel "Vom Wetter reden und vom Tod" (Talking about the weather and death) was published, in 2023 the novella "Vom Ordnen der Dinge" (On ordering things).

Teresa Vena is a film critic and curator. She writes for various print and online media such as NZZamSo, Filmbulletin and Cineuropa. In 2022, she took over as co-editor-in-chief of the Swiss film trade magazine Cinébulletin. In addition to her work as a critic, she develops thematic film series. She founded the film cycle "Magnificent Films!", which presents films from the Netherlands and Flanders, and the Festival Film: Switzerland. Her fields of interest and research are the film landscapes of German-speaking countries, Latin America and Asia.

Christian Pfeil manages several cinemas in Jena, Gera and Munich. He has received several awards for his dedicated cinema work. He still works as an actor and takes on teaching activities, for example at the HFF Munich, the Babelsberg Film University and the CICAE Arthouse Cinema Training & Mentoring at the Venice Film Festival.

Romain Roll is International Industry Project Manager at the Grossmann Fantastic Film & Wine Festival in Slovenia. He is a co-founder of BIF-Market and has been working in various fields of the genre film industry for almost 40 years. As an actor, he can be seen in Paul Burrow's thriller "Nature Morte" and in Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani's "The Strange Color of your Body's Tears".

Ramona Sehr from Munich shot five short films during her directing studies at the HFF Munich. "Pan" was awarded the Starter Film Prize in 2018. Already during her studies she was active as a writer in writer's rooms.