Alba Sotorra (1980) is a feminist film director and producer based in Barcelona. Her work focuses on stories of genuine characters that reflect, from a gender perspective, on issues like Freedom, Love, Islam and Women, Motherhood, Capitalism or Climate Change. Through creative documentary and AV Installation, she modestly aims to open spaces for reflection and discussion to facilitate understanding of the world in which we live. Her last film, Game Over, has been awarded best documentary in the Gaudi Awards, Premis Ciutat de Barcelona, and Docs Barcelona. She is also the author of Qatar The Race and Unveiled Views.
Alina Rudnitskaya (1976) is a director and producer. She graduated of St. Petersburg University for Arts and Culture, Department of Film Directing and started her career in the St. Petersburg Documentary Film Studio. Her works has been shown worldwide and got prizes during festivals in Leipzig, Madrid, Tampere, Oberhausen, Zagreb, Berlin, Belgrade, Moscow, St. Petersburg. Rudnitskaya’s films always have a characteristic original perspective. She is interested not only in depicting the facts of life but also in exploring the internal worlds of her characters. She succeeds in painting a vivid image of modern man while maintaining a very personal and humanistic approach toward each of her stories. She lives and works in St. Petersburg. Currently, she is working on her new film and is full of new ideas for her future work. She directed movies like Blood or I Will Forget That Day.
Alisa Kovalenko (1987) – born in Zaporizhia, Ukraine. She studied journalism at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and documentary filmmaking at the Kyiv National Karpenko-Kary Theatre, Film, and Television University. In 2015 she won a Gaude Polonia scholarship to study documentary filmmaking at the Andrzej Wajda School in Warsaw.
Her selected films: Kiev from Dawn till Dusk (2011), That how it is (2012), Grandma Galia (2013), Sister Zo (2014), Alisa in Warland (2015) presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Alison Rose is a director and writer whose filmmaking explores how people experience and understand the world – scientifically, ethically, and spiritually. Her previous documentaries include Galileo’s Sons and Love at the Twilight Motel. Star Men is her first cross-platform project. Alison’s lifelong interest in astronomy was seeded growing up in rural places with brilliant star-filled skies. At 10 Alison began using binoculars to look at the night sky. But no one told her she could be an astronomer! In Grade 8 she wrote her public speaking address on the kind imagination it takes to conceive of a black hole, using the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the school library as her primary resource. Alison studied political science at Trinity College, the University of Toronto and began a career in journalism, moving from daily news to magazine writing and eventually to documentary filmmaking. Filmmaking led her back to astronomy. Her first documentary, Galileo’s Sons, explored the Vatican Observatory and asked how a religious priest could be a scientist. During the making of the Star Men, Alison got a job at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics for 18 months, learning about the field in its present state and seeing just what an important contribution the four had made. Alison says: “I think a lot about storytelling from an existential point of view. As in, ‘what am I doing? what does it matter?’ I really struggle with that. I’ve come to think over the course of making this film that story telling is essential to human life.”
Andreas Johnsen (1974) – director, producer, cameraman. His films have been shown at festivals all around the world and have been broadcasted in countless countries. He is renowned for such films as Kidd Life about the Danish rapper and YouTube star; A Kind of Paradise, Murderer and Ai Weiwei – The Fake Case, which in 2013 was nominated in IDFA’s “Feature Length Competition”, in Berlin 2014 at Cinema for Peace Awards and won the Danish Film Critics Award in 2014. For him filmmaking is about giving in to his driving force: curiosity. Making films has become his way of investigating, experiencing, and coming to know the world. This dedication to curiosity and empathy with his subject are clearly expressed in the resulting films. His latest movie Bugs will be shown during 13 Millennium Docs AG FF.
Andreas Koefoed has degrees in sociology and anthropology from Copenhagen University and in documentary direction from The National Film School of Denmark. He has directed numerous documentaries since 2001, focusing on universal stories on human existence. His movies have won awards on many festivals, including Tribeca, Amsterdam’s IDFA, Sheffield Doc, and CPH:DOX. In 2013, his film The Ghost of Piramida received our festival’s Chopin’s Nose Award for best documentary about art. His newest movie, At Home in the World, winner of the Best Midlength Film award at the IDFA festival in Amsterdam, will be screened at this year’s MDocsAG. At Home in the World tells the story of a school for refugee children in Denmark.
Andreas Voigt (1953) – German documentary filmmaker and director. He studied physics in Cracow and economics in Berlin, worked as a screenwriter and editor in the DEFA Documentary Film studio, then graduated from the Film University in Potsdam. Between 1987 and 1991 Voigt was a screenwriter and director in the Documentary Film Studio in Berlin. When the studio was shuttered following the reunification of Germany, Voigt became an independent director, screenwriter, and producer for private enterprises and national institutions. His series of five movies made over the 1986-1996 period, collectively entitled “Leipzig Filmen” and showing the residents of Leipzig in the era of the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, gained international fame and acclaim. His latest movie, Time Will Tell, a continuation of his Leipzig series, will be screened at the 13th edition of the Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival. Andreas Voigt is a visiting lecturer at universities in several European countries as well as the USA, Canada, Singapore and India.
Anna Wydra (1979) – film producer, nominated to the Oscar for her Rabbit a la Berlin. Head of Otter Films, a production company based in Warsaw. Recipient of the Best Producer Prize at the 2009 Krakow Film Festival. Wydra was also nominated to the Polish Film Institute’s Promotion of Polish Films Abroad prize. She produced and headed the production of many critically acclaimed documentaries and feature films (executive producer: Hanoi-Warsaw, K. Klimkiewicz, 2009 – European Film Award 2010; production manager – All That I Love, J. Borcuch, 2009 – Poland’s Oscar® nominee). Wydra participated in the Discovery Campus Masterschool 2006, Ex Oriente 2008, EKRAN 2007 and EAVE 2011 training programs. She is a former lecturer and Head of Production Department in the Andrzej Wajda School. Her latest film production Zud will be screened at the 13th edition of the Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival.
Antoine Viviani (1983) – young award-winning French filmmaker. First he produced documentaries with a filmmaker and long-time collaborator Vincent Moon and worked with a contemporary artist Pierre Huyghe. In 2009 he created his production company, Providences. In 2011 he produced and directed In Situ, a feature documentary about artistic interventions in urban space in Europe, which received the Best digital documentary Award at IDFA in Amsterdam in 2011 and the Best film award at London Doc Fest in 2012. In 2015, he produced and directed In Limbo Interactive, a documentary essay and interior voyage into the limbo of the Internet, as if the global network was dreaming of itself. The film premiered in November 2015 as part of the international competition of CPH:DOX in Copenhagen and of IDFA in Amsterdam.
Antonio Tibaldi – New York-based director. He was born in Melbourne, Australia and spent most of his formative years in Europe. He has worked as writer/director in the film industries of Europe, Australia and North America. His films have been presented at festivals such as Berlin, Sundance, San Sebastian, Rotterdam; and released by companies such as Miramax, Warner Bros. In 2004, Antonio Tibaldi started collaborating with United Nations’ Department of Public Information, shooting documentaries on some of the world’s most under-reported realities. His films shed light on under-reported realities in South and Central America, Africa, and Asia. Antonio Tibaldi is a director of Thy Father’s Chair presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Arto Halonen (1964) is internationally award-winning documentary and fiction film director and producer, who is known for socially strong-stance subjects. His first fiction feature film Princess (2010) got more than 300 000 viewers in cinemas in Finland and became one of the most financially successful Finnish features of the last decade. Arto Halonen’s latest fiction feature film A Patriotic Man had its Finnish premiere in December 2013. The films rights have been sold to 24 countries. Halonen’s documentary films have attracted much public debate and have received numerous international awards. The Shadow of the Holy Book is one of the most distributed Finnish documentary films worldwide, and it has been nominated for the European Film Academy’s award for the best documentary of the year in 2008. In 2008, Halonen received the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The festival’s official statement described Halonen as one of the most important documentary filmmakers of his time, saying his work contributes to the development of documentaries on an international scale. Arto Halonen is a director of White Rage presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Bartek Dziadosz is a filmmaker and media theorist. He co-directed The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger, a series of film essays forming the portrait of one of England’s preeminent art critics, the author of “About Looking” and the prizewinning novel “G.”, together with Colin MacCabe, Tilda Swinton, and Christopher Roth. Dziadosz’s debut film, “The Trouble with Being Human These Days”, presents the sociological views of Zbigniew Bauman. Dziadosz currently teaches the art of essayistic filming at the University of London, studies editing theory and heads the Derek Jarman audiovisual laboratory at Birkbeck College.
Bartosz Konopka (1972) – director and screenwriter. Konopka holds degrees in film theory from the Jagiellonian University, as well as in direction from the Silesian University’s Faculty of Radio and Television. After a successful debut, Three for the Taking, Konopka went on to produce The Art of Disappearing, Rabbit a la Berlin, Fear of Falling and other films. His movies won numerous awards at Polish and international film festivals. In 2010 his short documentary, Rabbit a la Berlin, was nominated to the Oscar®; Konopka got the idea for this film after hearing Marcel Łoziński speak about rabbits living in the space between East and West Berlin. Bartosz Konopka is a member of the Polish Film Academy and European Film Academy, as well as a board member of the Polish Film Institute. Bartosz Konopka is a director of Road to Excellence presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Carl A. Fechner is a pedagogue, publicist, producer, and the director of Power to Change. After 2 years as the managing director of the traveling theater ensemble Berliner Compagnie and a short sting as a foreign correspondent for the German ARD TV station, in 1989 he opened fechnerMEDIA GmbH. The company promotes sustainable development and received numerous international awards for its documentaries and PR campaigns. Having made more than 50 TV movies, Fechner produced his first feature-length documentary, The Fourth Revolution – Energy Autonomy, in 2010.
Caspar Stracke (1967) is an interdisciplinary artist filmmaker and curator. He is currently professor for Contemporary Art and Moving Image at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. Stracke holds an MFA in Experimental Film and Photography from the Academy of Fine Arts, Braunschweig, Germany then moved to New York City and continued studying Film and Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. Stracke’s films, videos and installations formulate critical responses to cinema, architecture and urbanism and have been shown internationally in places such as MoMA, The Whitney Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, ZKM among many others. He is an active member of The Thing, a center for art and net culture based in NYC. From 2005 until 2013 Stracke was the co-director of video_dumbo, an international moving image exhibition and festival in New York. In 2014 he he co-curated the 60th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar together with Gabriela Monroy. Caspar is currently editing “GODARD/BOOMERANG”, a book about contemporary artists engaged with Godard’s films, theories and aesthetics, to be published summer 2016. Caspar Stracke’s latest documentary time / OUT OF JOINT presents a bunch of temporal experts: physicists, philosophers, cultural scholars and artists who have specialised in the quirks of time and its tracks. The film helps understanding time as a concept and offers astounding visual moments.
Daniel Cross – documentary filmmaker and founder of EYESTEELFILM in Montreal, named by Real Screen Magazine as on of the top 100 non-fiction production companies in the world. He is an Associate Professor and previous Chair of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University. Cross also serves on the University’s Board of Governors and holds a University Research Chair in Interactive Documentary Filmmaking. Cross’ latest feature documentary I Am the Blues premiered at the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) followed by SXSW, Hot Docs and Docs Against Gravity in Warsaw. He made his mark directing feature length films concerning issues of homelessness; The Street, S.P.I.T and the online interactive documentary Homeless Nation. Cross also co-produced the Genie Awarded films Up the Yangtze and Last Train Home, which also won two Emmy Awards. Documentary productions include Deprogrammed by Mia Donovan, Chameleon, Jingle Bell Rocks, Fruit Hunters, Rip: A Remix Manifesto, Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, China Heavyweight, Inside Lara Roxx, and Forest of the Dancing Spirits.
Donald Lynden-Bell – one of the subjects of Star Men, English astronomer and astrophysicist, former president of the Royal Astronomical Society, known for his theories on the existence of massive black holes in the hearts of galaxies. Lynden-Bell is a member of a group of astronomers known as the “Seven Samurai” (David Burstein, Roger Davies, Alan Dresser, Sandra Faber, Donald Lynden-Bell, Robert J. Terlevich, Gary Wegner), which postulated the existence of the Great Attractor – a huge cluster of galaxies influencing the motion of our galaxy and the entire Local Cluster. Lynden-Bell received the Eddington Medal (1984), the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1993), and the Bruce Medal (1998). In 2000 he was awarded the American Astronomical Society’ s Henry Norris Russell Lectureship. Asteroid 18235 received the name Lynden-Bell in his honor.
Dryden Goodwin – British contemporary artist. His practice incorporates drawing, often in combination with photography and live action video; he creates gallery installations, short films, projects in public space, printmaking, works on-line and soundtracks. Goodwin’s work has been shown extensively nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, The National Portrait Gallery, London, the Venice Biennale and the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenberg, Sweden. His work is in major collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Tate Collection and The National Portrait Gallery, London. His short films have been broadcast on Channel 4, MTV, RAI and SWR and shown in many international festivals since 1995. Unseen: The Lives of Looking is his first feature-length essay film.
Du Haibin (1972) – born in Xian, China, studied cinematography in the Beijing Film Academy followed by an interest in film, photography, and broadcasting. His most well-known work Along the Railway (2001) received Special Mention at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and Stone Mountain (2006) that deals with the workers’ life in the quarry far from China was selected for the 2005 Busan International Film Festival’s AND Dongseo Asia Fund. A story about the survivors of the Sichuan earthquake, 14:28 won the best documentary in the Orizzonti section of the 2009 Venice International Film Festival. Du is currently recognized as one of the most active documentary directors in China. Du Haibin is a director of A Young Patriot presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Edgar Pêra (1960) is a Portuguese filmmaker. He writes occasionally fiction and essays and is also a graphic comics artist. Considered “the most persistently individualistic Portuguese filmmaker”, Edgar Pêra has done more than one hundred films for cinema, TV, theatre dance, cine-concerts, galleries, internet and other media. Pêra started as a screenwriter but in 1985 bought a camera, inspired by Dziga Vertov, and never stopped shooting on a daily basis. The first phase of Edgar Pêra’s work started in 1985 when he was shooting his kino-diaries (mostly with rock bands and neuropunks). It reached its acme in 1991 with The City of Cassiano. Pêra’s first feature, Manual of Evasion LX94 was described as “Portuguese thought-provoking experimental movie with a great potential for cult status.” Pêra invited three major counterculture American writers: Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Rudy Rucker and asked them about the nature of time. In 1996 he founded, with writer Manuel Rodrigues, Akademia Luzoh-Galaktica, a trans-media working space. During that time he produced and directed several films made with students and took four years to edit his feature, The Window (Don Juan Mix), premiered at the Locarno Festival in 2001. From then there’s change in Pêra’s work, inflecting towards a more emotional cinema, but keeping the emphasis in trans-realist aesthetics and eccentric humor. In 2011 Pêra started shooting in 3D format. Besides his 3D kino-diaries, some of his 3D films are: Cinesapens, Stillness, Lisbon Revisited, The Cavern. His last retrospective was in Seoul, and his last 3D feature The Amazed Spectator premiered in the Rotterdam IFFR, 2016.
Eliza Kubarska – a director and producer. She set up her own film company Vertical Vision Film Studio where she produced her documentary Mountain Love Story which brought her recognition. She is a graduate of Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in Sculpture and Visual Art. Between 2001-2004 she produced and directed video-art installations and short films. Her short Mom Dad and Me won many awards and special mentions at film festivals around the world. Her works were exhibited in prestigious Polish galleries. She is a well-known Polish alpinist and traveller. Eliza Kubarska is a director of K2. Touching the Sky presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Erik Gandini (1967) is an Italian-Swedish film director, writer, and producer and one of the co-founders of production company ATMO. He moved to Sweden aged 19 to attend film school and avoid military service in Italy. After having completed a master’s degree in film science at Stockholm University, he started working as a documentary filmmaker. Raja Sarajevo for Sveriges Television was his first documentary he directed and produced. The film, shot on a small Hi-8 camera, followed four young friends trying to survive the brutality of the siege. In 2001, he co-directed with Tarik Saleh the documentary film Sacrificio – Who Betrayed Che Guevara? The film centers around Ciro Bustos, Che Guevara’s Argentinian lieutenant and the person who was often blamed as guilty of Che’s death. Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers is a film odyssey about the destructive sides of consumer culture, shot in Sweden, USA, China, India, Cuba, Hungary and Italy over a three-year period and described as “a global doomsday satire set to music”. His next movie, Gitmo – The New Rules of War, premiered at IDFA in 2005. It is a documentary about the Guantanamo Bay detention camp by Erik Gandini and Tarik Saleh. Erik Gandini’s 2009 feature-length documentary Videocracy was one of his most successful films. The film explores how Italy has been pushed to the brink of moral melt-down under the rule of Silvio Berlusconi. When it premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, its trailer was banned by Italian state broadcaster RAI, stirring an international controversy. It climbed to the fourth position on the Italian Box Office the first week end and was voted best documentary film at the Toronto Film Festival by a critics poll. His latest film The Swedish Theory of Love will be presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Ester Gould (1975) – Scottish-born documentary filmmaker based in Amsterdam. She studied Film and Journalism and began her career as a researcher and scriptwriter for acclaimed director Heddy Honigmann. Since 2005 she has been directing her own documentaries. Recurring themes are identity and coming-of-age. Her first feature documentary Shout (2010), jointly directed with Sabine Lubbe Bakker and shot in Syria and Israel, won the prize for Best Film at the London International Documentary Film Festival in 2010. In 2013 she co-directed Tough Cookies, a series about young caregivers which won the Rockie Award for Best Children’s Non-Fiction at BANFF 2014 and the Jury Prize at Cinekid. A Strange Love Affair with Ego (2015) is her second feature-length documentary. Premiering at last November’s IDFA, the film won the award for Best Dutch Documentary and an EDA Award for best female-directed film. Her latest documentary Strike a Pose (2016) – in co-direction with Reijer Zwaan – just recently had its world premiere at the Berlinale’s Panorama where it won the second audience award.
Eva Küpper (1984) is a Belgian documentary film director who graduated in 2009 from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Gent with the feature-length documentary What’s in a Name, which received its international premiere at Hot Docs FF in Toronto and won the IDFA Award for Best Student Documentary in 2010. Following What’s in a Name, Eva filmem and directed the 52 minute TV-documentary King and Queen of Hearts for the Belgian cultural broadcaster CANVAS. From 2012 to 2014 she wrote and directed the film Gardenia, Before the Last Curtain Falls together with German-Canadian director Thomas Wallner. The film won the Special Jury Prize at Hot Docs FF 2014. Since then the film has been shown at over 45 film festivals worldwide and won over 8 awards, the most recent one being the Ensor for Best Documentary (i.e. the Flemish Oscars) in September 2015. Since 2013, Eva has been working on a new feature creative documentary Blue to the Bone which will premiere in the summer of 2016. Meanwhile an ambitious cinematic doc feature set in Edinburgh called Dark Rider is in development and scheduled for production in 2017. Alongside her creative endeavors, Eva has been teaching audiovisual production techniques at the University of Gent since 2011. She is a board member of the Flemish Author’s Association and a frequent jury member on international panels and film festivals.
Friedrich Moser – director, producer and cinematographer. He holds a university degree (MA) in History and German Studies from the University of Salzburg, Austria. From 1998-2000 he worked as a TV journalist in Bolzano/Bozen, Italy. In 2001 he founded blue+green communication. In 2008 Friedrich successfully attended the Documentary Campus, the European Masterclass in nonfiction filmmaking, and started to make documentaries for the international market. Friedrich has been writing, directing, shooting and producing documentaries since 1999, with an output of over 20 films. Friedrich’s professional career also includes lecturing on history and documentaries at the University of Vienna / Department of Economic and Social History, as well as teaching video production at the Secondary School for Commercial Graphics in Bressanone-Brixen, Italy. Friedrich Moser is a director of Good American presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Grant Gee – filmmaker from Brighton, England His most recent film Innocence of Memories – Orhan Pamuk’s Museum and Istanbul a documentary-fiction with original script by Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2015. Other works include Patience (After Sebald) and Joy Division which won the Grierson award 2008 for Best Cinema Documentary, the Mojo Vision Award 2009, CPH:DOX festival’s (Copenhagen) Sound and Vision award (2008) and Audience Awards for Best Film at both Gdansk and ‘In-Edit’ Barcelona (also 2008). The Western Lands about writer and climber Jim Perrin’s ascent of The Old Man of Hoy won best short film at the 2007 Banff Film Festival. In a previous life he directed many music videos including the iconic clip for Radiohead’s No Surprises.
Inna Denisova – journalist and filmmaker born in Crimea. When she was a child, during the days of the Soviet Union’s fall, she moved to Moscow with her parents. Inna’s parents were the translators and teachers of foreign languages who had never travelled abroad, so they were really happy with the changes. After graduating from Moscow State University, where she studied Russian literature, Inna started working as a journalist – a reporter, a film critic and an editor. In 2007 she entered the High Courses of Script-Writers and Directors and studied script-writing. Film Back Home is her first documentary and it is based on her personal experience as a native Crimean.
Jakob Gottschau – director and owner of Express TV-Production (a Copenhagen based independent production company specialized in documentaries for a Danish and an international audience). For the last 18 years he has produced numerous award-winning documentary series, which have been shown in more than 50 countries. These include: Late Lessons from Early Warnings, which examined the history of the global environment and Bringing Life to Space, a documentary exploring man’s desire to settle in outer space. Jakob Gottschau has also produced and directed DR’s ambitious series 100 years of immigration which won a TV Oscar as the year’s best Danish documentary production. His latest productions are Cyberwar – which explores social media in repressive countries; When the Ice Disappears – a three part series about the Arctic and Facebookistan, which will be presented during 13. Millenium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival.
Jean Perret (1952) – studied at universities in Zurich and Geneva, Switzerland. His master in contemporary history was dedicated to Swiss documentaries of the ’30. Since then, he wrote many articles for newspapers, magazines, books. He taught semiotics and cinema, worked for the public radio, produced television broadcasts for independent documentaries. In charge of the documentary section at the Festival of Locarno, he became afterwards the Director in 1995 of the International Film Festival of Nyon (Switzerland), “Visions du Réel”. In 2010, he decided to move to the Geneva University of Art and Design, where he is in charge of the Film Department / cinéma du réel.
Jerzy Śladkowski (1945) – director, alumnus of the Toruń University’s Classical Philology Department and the Warsaw University’s Faculty of Journalism. Śladkowski began a career as a reporter and technical producer in the Polish Television in 1972. In 1982 he emigrated to Sweden, where he lives and works to this day. He produces documentaries for Swedish Television and the Swedish Film Institute, and collaborates with Finnish, Danish and Norwegian TV stations. He has been working with the German public TV station ZDF and the ARTE channel since 1993. After leaving Poland, Śladkowski produced more than 30 documentaries on social issues. Śladkowski is a member of the European Film Academy. Jerzy Śladkowski is a director of Don Juan presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Kaspar Astrup Schröder (1979) – Danish director, self-taught visual artist and designer. Though based in Copenhagen, he often works in Asia. Has exhibited visual work and released music in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Bruxelles, New York, Shenzhen and Tokyo. He has directed feature length documentaries that have been distributed internationally. His documentary City Surfers (2007) won Best Danish Film and Filmic Award at the D.A.F.F. Festival. The Invention of Dr. Nakamats (2009) was selected for IDFA’s Mid-Length Competition. My Playground/Min legeplads (2010), exploring Parkour and Freerunning: selected for the IDFA’s Reflecting Images: Panorama and DOC U! competition. In 2012 he directed Rent a Family Inc., a unique documentary about Japanese family who that rents out fake relatives to customers who need to cover up a secret.
Larry Loewninger – director and experienced sound designer, his credits range over all genres and styles of film and video. Author of series of articles on sound recording and sound design for “Independent Magazine”. He worked on the biggest and smallest kinds of projects and feel comfortable doing both. Co-director and co-producer of Bogdan’s Journey premiering during 13.Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival.
Liubov Durakova (1986) – born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Studied petroleum and mining engineering at the Lomonosov Moscow StateUniversity and documentary filmmaking at the Kyiv NationalKarpenko-Kary Theatre, Film, and Television University. In 2015 she won a Gaude Polonia scholarship to study documentary filmmaking at the Andrzej Wajda School in Warsaw.
Her selected films: Volodka (2011), Kiev from Dawn till Dusk (2011), Teacher of History (2012), Sister Zo (2014) Alisa in Warland (2015)
Łukasz Wolf is the son of Dobrosława Miodowicz-Wolf, ethnographer, mountaineer, alpinist and himalaist who died in the Karakoram during an attempt to climb K2, and Jan Wolf, an eminent mountaineer who died in the Tatra mountains. He is one of the protagonists of Eliza Kubarska’s documentary K2. Touch the Sky, which will be screened at the 13th Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Mantas Kvedaravicius (1976) is a Lithuanian director and academic who teaches visual culture and critical theory at Vilnius University, He holds a Master’s Degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Oxford and PhD dissertation. Kvedaravicius has taught university courses on religion, law, and political theory in New York, and since 2006 he has been conducting research on torture and disappearances in the North Caucasus. Barzakh is was his debut film. His newest documentary, Mariupolis, which examines the stress of living in a frontline town during the civil war in Ukraine was presented during Berlinale 2016.
Marek Gajczak studied at the Łódź Film School’s cinematography department and completed the Masterclass for DOP workshop in Budapest. While he was still a student, he began winning numerous international awards – his etiude A Method for Moravia was screened at the young filmmakers review of the Cannes Film Festival and won the Silver Tadpole at the Camerimage festival in Poland. Gajczak received the cinematography award at the European Short Film Festival in Stuttgart-Ludwigsburg for his work in Adam Guziński’s short feature Antichrist. This movie was also submitted for an Academy Award after winning the Grand Prix at the 2002 Bilbao festival. Gajczak debuted as a screenwriter and director with his 2006 feature film The Underneath. He collaborated with the TVN TV station and Polish Television. Currently works mainly as a cinematographer and documentary and feature film director. Marek Gajczak is a codirector of Jarocin presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Marta Minorowicz (1979) – documentary film director. She studied Theatre at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and completed a documentary film course at the Wajda School. Her documentary “A Piece of Summer” (2010) was awarded at the festival in Clermont‑Ferrand, the DOK festival in Leipzig and at the ‘Man in Danger’ media festival. Marta Minorowicz is a director of Zud presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk work together as Metahaven. Originally experimental graphic designers, they turned to art and moving image as a natural progression of their research into aesthetics and politics after the internet. They worked with organisations like WikiLeaks and Independent Diplomat, and produce music videos with the progressive EDM superstar Holly Herndon. Metahaven’s publications include Uncorporate Identity (2010), Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? (2013), and Black Transparency (2015). Their film The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda) premiered at IFFR in 2016. Together, Kruk and Van der Velden teach at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland as well as Yale School of Art, Sandberg Institute and ArtEZ Academy of Arts. Their work has been exhibited and published worldwide.
Mia Donovan is an award-winning filmmaker working with EyeSteelFilm in Montreal, Canada. Donovan’s first documentary film, Inside Lara Roxx (2011), follows ex-porn star Lara Roxx over a tumultuous 5-year-period as she struggles to build a new identity and find hope in the wake of her past. Deprogrammed (2015) is inspired by the kidnapping and deprogramming of her stepbrother by famed deprogrammer Ted ‘Black Lightning’ Patrick. Deprogrammed explores a time in American history when there was a moral-panic over cultic-brainwashing and how one man’s deprogramming efforts were considered heroic to some and tortuous to others.
Michał Jaskulski is a cinematographer and director. He studied at the National Film School in Łódź in the Direction of Photography and TV Production Department. His works include music videos and numerous documentary and feature films. Jaskulski co-directed and co-produced Bogdan’s Journey, a documentary premiering at the 13th edition of Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival.
Mirosław Dembiński (1959) – director and producer with degrees in mathematics from the Toruń University and in direction from the National Film School in Łódź, where he’s been teaching documentary filmmaking since 1990. Dembiński authored almost 30 movies and TV shows (mainly documentaries), and received numerous awards at international film festivals. His most important films include: “My Little Everest”, an etude on mountain climbing; “The Orange Alternative” about a street happening in Communist-era Poland; “The Fruits of the Black Soil” about pollution; “The Summons” – a feature film based on a widely publicized court case against an emergency department doctor; “Icarus”, the portrait of a paraglider’s tragic death; “It Is Necessary to Live” – a TV show about people battling addiction; “Shared Flight” – the tale of a paraplegic paraglider; “Losers and Winners” about world football championships for the homeless; “Grandpa” – the portrait of an 80-year-old paraglider; “Dwarfs Go To Ukraine” – a glance at the Orange Revolution from the point of view of young Poles; “A Lesson of Belarusian” about the protests of young Belarusians surrounding the rigged presidential elections in 2006; and “Music partisans” about young Belarusian rock bands opposing the Lukashenko regime.
Monika Pawluczuk – a documentary filmmaker most recognized for When I Am A Bird (2013), Models (2007) and It’s You Who Should Change (2007). She is a graduate of the American Studies Center and Journalism Center at the University of Warsaw and the DOK PRO Documentary Programme at Wajda School. She worked as a film and television journalist and producer. She is a co-author (together with Katarzyna Miller ) of a book “How to Be a Woman and Not Go Crazy”, translated into several languages. Her latest movie End of the World will be presented during 13. Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival.
Nelly Ben Hayoun designs extremes experiences for you to become an astronaut in your living room while dark energy is being created in your kitchen sink and a volcano erupts on your couch. She leads an interdisciplinary ‘Willy Wonka’ design studio in London which devises subversive events and experiences and is on a mission to bring chaos, subversion, critical thinking and disorder into the scientific and digital world.
In 2013, Icon Magazine nominated Ben Hayoun as one of the 50 international designers “shaping the future”. She is the Head of Experiences at We Transfer, Designer of Experiences at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and a member of the International Astronautical Federation. In 2014 Wired magazine awarded Nelly Ben Hayoun with a WIRED Innovation fellowship for her work to date and its ‘significant impact on the world’.
Nikolaus Geyrhalter (1972) is an Austrian filmmaker. He has directed, produced, written, and worked as cinematographer for numerous documentaries. At the age of 22 he established his own production company. Geyrhalter who always holds the camera for his films, is known for his very personal cinematic handwriting. He listens to people and space without comment leaving room for interpretation for an audience. His films won international recognition and many awards. His first documentary Washed Ashore (1994) was a story about life on the Danube. Pripyat (1999) was a look at residents who live near the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine. Our Daily Bread (2005) explored mechanical food production. 7915 Km (2008) looks at the Dakar Rally and the lives of racers and locals. His latest film, Homo Sapiens (2016) was selected at the Berlinale Forum.
Patryk Rebisz (1980) – director and director of photography, originally come from Poland. He has shot and directed hundreds of various productions: almost a dozen feature-length films, numerous music videos as well as commercials and television shows. His short film Between You and Me has garnered him worldwide awards and recognition for its innovative use of still photography. Patryk moved to New York City as a teenager and studied painting at the prestigious Cooper Union School of Art before exchanging the paintbrush for a camera. Shoulder The Lion is his feature-length debut as a director and its cinematographer. He’s interested in how the form shapes our perception of the world and how that perception is never really our own.
Pieter-Jan De Pue (1982) – independent film maker and photographer who graduated from the film academy RITS in Brussels. While been directing commercials, he was concentrating on his first full documentary The Land of the Enlightened. In view of this film he has been traveling for long periods of time to Afghanistan, photographing the country and its people for organizations such as the International Red Cross, Caritas International, UN and international demining organizations. His photo work on Afghanistan and Central Asia has been published in Weekend Knack, Le Monde or DeMorgen, De Standaard, and has been exhibited in several galleries and museums such as Photo Museum Antwerp, deBuren in Brussels and the Institut des Cultures d’Islam in Paris. In between film and photo projects abroad he worked as a film director and photographer on several book projects and museums. Pieter-Jan is connected to the German photo agency LAIF.
Raffaele Pinto (1951) – born in Naples and educated at the Universities of Naples and Pisa. Raffaele Pinto is currently Associate Professor of Italian Philology at the University of Barcelona. He is the president of the “Societat Catalana d’Estudis Dantescos” and the coordinator of the “Seminario de psicoanálisis, cine y literature” at the Universitat de Barcelon. The main topics of his interest are theory and history of literature and how Dante’s literary output influenced literature and cinema. He is a protagonist of the film Academy of Muses that will be presented during 13. Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival.
Rama Thiaw (1978) is a Mauritanian-born writer, director, and producer. She studied Economics and Film in Paris. Currently she works with the Senegalese film production company Boul Fallé Images. Her first film „Boull fallé: the wrestling way” brought her international recognition. The film documented the Senegalese youth movement. The revolution won’t be televised, which is her second documentary, was selected at the Berlinale Forum in 2016 and will be presented during 13. Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival.
Richard Brouillette (1970) – film producer, director, editor and programmer. Starting as a film critic for the Montréal weekly, “Voir” (1989), he then worked for Québec’s top independent distribution company, Cinéma Libre (1989-1999), which has since folded. In 1993, he founded the artist-run center Casa Obscura, a multi-disciplinary exhibition space, where he still runs a weekly cine-club. He produced and directed Too Much Is Enough (1995); Carpe Diem (1995); Encirclement – Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy (2008); Prends garde à la douceur des choses (2014) and Oncle Bernard – A Counter-Lesson in Economics (2015). He also took part in the collective film St-Henri, the 26th of August (2011), and produced seven feature length films (including six documentaries). In 2014 he won the CALQ Award for best artist of the year in Mauricie.
Ross Lipman is an independent filmmaker and archivist. Formerly Senior Film Restorationist at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. His many restorations include Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles, the Academy Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, and works by Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Shirley Clarke, Kenneth Anger, Barbara Loden, Robert Altman, and John Cassavetes. He was a 2008 recipient of Anthology Film Archives’ Preservation Honors, and is a three-time winner of the National Society of Film Critics’ Heritage Award. His essays on film history, technology, and aesthetics have been published in numerous academic books and journals. Lipman’s filmmaking works have screened internationally and been collected by museums and institutions including the Oberhausen Kurzfilm Archive, Budapest’s Balazs Bela Studios, Munich’s Sammlung Goetz, The Academy Film Archive, Anthology Film Archives, and Northeast Historic Film. Through his parallel disciplines lies a fascination with the temporality and transience of human endeavor. His most recent film restorations are Thom Andersen’s Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer and (in collaboration with the Conner Family Trust), Crossroads. Notfilm is Ross Lipman and Milestone Film’s first feature production.
Sergei Loznitsa One of the most important contemporary Eastern European auteurs. Author of films such as My Joy, In the Fog, or Maidan. He has received many prestigious awards, and his films were screened at top-tier international film festivals, including Cannes, Venice, and Toronto. During this year’s festival, we will show his latest film, The Event, about the events surrounding the fall of communism in Russia.
Thomas Tode works in Hamburg as freelance writer, curator and filmmaker. In his research and teaching he focuses on essay film, the Soviet avant-garde, and political documentary film. Special interests are films on architecture, archeology, and those made for “re-education”. Film programmes, symposia and exhibitions curated by Tode include „Angesichts des Äußersten: Die Filme über die Befreiung der Konzentrationslager und der lange Schatten der Bilder” (Univ. Hamburg, 2015), “Die erwartete Katastrophe. Luftkrieg und Städtebau 1940–45” (Freie Akademie der Künste Hamburg, 2013), “PhotoFilm!” (National Gallery of Art Washington, 2012; Tate Modern London, 2010), and “bauhaus & film” (Barbican Centre London, 2012; Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Hamburg 2009), for which he tracked down film and light installation pieces by Bauhaus artists, many of which were thought lost. His films include Die Hafentreppe (1991), Im Land der Kinoveteranen: Filmexpedition zu Dziga Vertov (1996), Hafenstrasse Revisited (2010), and Das Große Spiel: Archäologie und Politik (2011). He is the author of several books, including “Johan van der Keuken: Abenteuer eines Auges” (1987/1992), “Chris Marker – Filmessayist” (1997), “Dziga Vertov – Tagebücher / Arbeitshefte” (2000), “Dziga Vertov – Die Vertov-Sammlung im Österreichischen Filmmuseum / The Vertov Collection at the Austrian Film Museum” (2006), “Viva Fotofilm – bewegt / unbewegt” (2010), “Der Essayfilm – Ästhetik und Aktualität (2011), and bauhaus & film” (2012). Tomas Tode is a director of Dreams Rewired presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Uldis Cekulis created the independent production company VFS Films almost 18 years ago. He has worked on almost fifty creative documentaries and TV projects both as a producer and sometimes as a cameraman. Most of the films he produced such as Roof on the Moonway, Theodore, The Deconstruction of an Artist, Double Aliens or Ukrainian Sheriffs presented during 13 edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity and others have travelled and received awards around the world, including nomination for the European Film Academy Documentary Award 2005 for Dreamland by Laila Pakalnina; and the Lithuanian official Academy Award entry Ramin by Audrius Stonys in 2012 for Best Foreign Language Film. Several times, his productions have received Best Documentary Prize at the Latvian National Film Festival. He has co-produced documentaries with Ukrainian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Russian, German, Italian, French, Greek, Icelandic, Finnish, and Georgian production companies. A member of the European Documentary Network (EDN) since 1998. Other activities include lecturing at the Riga International School of Economics and Business Administration and tutoring at many EDN organized workshops in Europe and the Caucasus. Currently he is working on five documentary co-productions.
Victor Purice – manager, former projectionist and lifetime cinephil. He struggles to preserve Dacia Panoramic Cinema in Piatra Neamţ – one of the last remaining cinemas in Romania today. Having lived through “the golden age” of cinema, he dreams of bringing back the good old glory days. Victor Purice is a protagonist of Cinema, Mon Amour by Tudor Panduru.
Viktor Yerofeyev – Russian writer and essayist, author of best-selling books translated into dozens of foreign languages. His works are a sarcastic, ironic take on Russian myths and culture (The Good Stalin, Russian Beauty). He hosts a TV show on the Kultura channel, as well as a program broadcast on Radio Liberty in Moscow. Scandalizing and provocative, Yerofeyev’s erotica-suffused books sarcastically take Russian history and myths to task.
Vitaly Manskiy (1963) – he studied at All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography. Since 1989 he has shot more than 30 films. His works were presented at more than 400 international film festivals. He was awarded with more than 50 awards and prizes in Russia and abroad. His films were shown on the leading channels in practically all European countries, as well as in Japan, Australia, China, Canada and other countries. Since 1996 Manskiy has been working on a project that aims at archivation of amateur private video files that were shot in the times of the former USSR from 30’s till 90’s of the ХХth century. Thus we have the unique archives of one and only films – evidences of the Soviet society’s private life. Since 1995 he has been popularizing documental films on the Television. Manskiy was the author and producer of the TV project “Reality cinema”, where one could see premières of the best world documental films. In the same year he became director of the Film Demonstration Service, and then the first General producer of the channel “REN – TV”, on which hundreds of best documentary films from all over the world were shown for the first time. In 1999 he went to the “Russia” channel, where he became Head of Production and demonstration of documentary projects Service. Being a director, he released more than 300 films that were demonstrated on channels “Russia”, “First Channel”, “NTV”, “STS”, “Culture”, “7TV”. Manskiy became one of the founders of the guild of “Non-fiction cinema and television of Russia”. Vitaly Manskiy is a director of Under the Sun presented during 13. edition of the festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
William Edward Binney is a former intelligence official with the United States National Security Agency (NSA) He resigned in 2001 after he turned whistleblower and after more than 30 years of working with the agency. He was a critic of his former employers during the George W. Bush administration. Currently Binney continues to speak out about the NSA’s data collection policies, and his experiences and views on interception of communication of American citizens by governmental agencies. Binney testified against of the NSA in a legal case, stating that the NSA is in deliberate violation of the U.S. Constitution. William Edward Binney is also the subject of A Good American, a documentary that uncovers extremely alarming facts about activities of the American security system.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand (1946) has always nurtured a passion for animals and the natural world. He began to use a camera to record his observations and accompany his writings. On the occasion of the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, Yann decided to embark upon a major photographic project about the state of the world and its inhabitants: “Earth From Above”. The book enjoyed international success. In 2005 Yann established the GoodPlanet Foundation, non-profit organization that has been investing in educating people about the environment and the fight against climate change. In 2009 he made his first feature-length film, Home, about the state of the planet. This movie was seen by almost 600 million spectators around the world. In 2011, Yann codirected Planet Ocean with Michael Pitiot, which had its world premier in June 2012 at Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. His next film Human premiered in 2015. Through this collection of personal statements about love, happiness, and also hatred and violence, Human forces us to confront the Other and to reflect on our own lives. This feature-length film conveys more than ever Yann’s desire to awaken our collective consciousness, with the aim of raising awareness among as many people as possible. Also in 2015 Yann presented another film, Terra, which retells the incredible story of life on Earth. Yann Arthus-Bertrand is now directing his latest project, Woman.
