Competitions and Awards

Avishai Kfir

Writer, producer and director of scores of documentaries, TV programs and feature films.
Director of Haifa Cinematheque (2010-2018), produced The Haifa International Film Festival (2005 – 2007), served as Chairman of the Israeli Documentary Forum (2008 -2011).

Efrat Corem

Efrat Corem is a filmmaker, screenwriter, film curator and lecturer, and a cum-laude graduate of the Sapir College School of Audio & Visual Arts. Her films played at Cannes and the Berlinale, won multiple awards in Israel and internationally, and aired on numerous television networks. From 2008 to 2016, she was the Artistic Director of Cinema South Film Festival in Sderot, Israel, where she curated retrospectives for local and international filmmakers and edited the festival’s official journal, Cinema South, published by Resling since 2012. Efrat Corem was a mentor in a women’s incubator for feature film development, supported by the New Fund for Cinema and Television and the Israel Film Fund. She also curated film-related events at Inbal Ethnic Center. Efrat Corem researches Israeli cinema and teaches creative writing and film directing at the Sapir College School of Audio & Visual Arts. She will begin her new role as head of the school’s film department in October 2021.

Adele Kohout

Born in Prague in 1981, Adele Kohout studied New History and Art History with a focus on film at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf and at the University of Zurich. During her studies she worked as an assistant director for Czech Television for long and series formats in 2004 and 2005. In 2008, she worked as an assistant in project management at Stein Promotion and studied for a Masters degree in Cultural History and Cultural Management in Ludwigsburg. From 2008 to 2010 she was in charge of public relations at DOK.fest. She became assistant to the festival management in 2010 and took on tasks in the areas of financing and project coordination. She has been a permanent member of the programme committee since 2010 and has also been responsible for sponsoring and partner communication since 2012. From 2015 to 2017, she headed the office of the Kunstareal München and has been Deputy Managing Director of DOK.fest München since 2016.

Gary Byung-Seok Kam

Gary Byung-Seok Kam is a documentary filmmaker and tutor, and is hte first ever Korean documentary producer nominated for an Oscar. He produced PLANET OF SNAIL (2011) which was the first Asian documentary that won Best Feature-Length Documentary at IDFA and many more international awards. His recent filmography includes an Oscar nominated film IN THE ABSENCE (2018), SHADOW FLOWERS (2019) and CROSSING BEYOND, the official Olympic film for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics.

Barbara Orlicz-Szczypuła

Barbara Orlicz-Szczypuła is the Head of the Programme Department of the Krakow Film Festival, the oldest Polish documentary and short film festival. She graduated from the History Faculty (Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology) of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Before joining the festival she worked in a film distribution company where she was responsible for film events and marketing. Since 2003 she has been working for the Krakow Film Foundation, where, in 2005 she established KFF Sales & Promotion, the agency whose main goal is the international promotion of Polish documentary, animated and short films. She has served as a juror at many festivals, coordinated many projects connected to film. She is also a lecturer in the film department at Krakow University.

Aalam-Warqe Davidian

Award winning script writer and director, born in 1979 in Awash, Ethiopia, Alamork Davidian moved to Israel in 1991. Following a documentary research job, Alamork was caught under the spell of cinema. She studied at Tel Hai College where she directed her first short fiction film MULU (2007, Special Mention, TLV Student IFF). She continued to the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School and graduated in 2012. During her studies, she directed KORKI (2010, short fiction, Montreal IFF, Wiesbaden IFF, Wolgin Competition at the Jerusalem IFF and more) and her diploma film CLEANING TIME. In 2012, Alamork Davidian, along with Kobi Davidian funded Black and White films, a production house that creates fiction and documentary films. In 2016 she completed the short fiction film FACING THE (Best Short Film 33rd Jerusalem International Film Festival). Her short fiction film TRANSITIONS premiered at the 2016 Haifa International Film Festival and has been screened in festivals around the world. Alamork’s 2018 debut feature-length drama FIG TREE screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the Eurimages Audentia Award for Best Female Director. It was also nominated for an Ophir Award for Best Picture. In 2021 her 83min, documentary WITH NO LAND was screened on Kan11 TV channel, starting its festival tour. HONEY TRAP, her current documentary, is still in production.

Gabrielle brady

Gabrielle Brady is a filmmaker based in Berlin. Gabrielle studied Film at the International Film School in Cuba (EICTV). Her award- winning debut feature film Island of the Hungry Ghosts (2019) was awarded numerous prizes including Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film festival, the Byens- Chagoll Award at Visions du Réel and the Human Rights award at the IDFA Film Festival. Her various works have been screened internationally at locations such as the Museum of Moving Image New York, Contemporary Institute of Art London and the Berlin Film Festival.
Gabrielle has had work commissioned for the Art gallery of New South Wales and the Australian Centre of Moving Image. She is currently developing her next feature film project, supported in development by the German Federal Film Board, Screen Australian and BBC Storyville.

Noam Pinchas

Noam Pinchas is an award-winning Israeli filmmaker. He is a graduate of the North East College of Communications in Boston and a Tribeca Film Fund grantee. He has been writing, directing and producing documentaries since 2006. His films explore a wide variety of the human experience – from personal, character-driven features to political investigative series. Noam’s work includes The Good Son (IDFA, DocsBarcelona), The Wonderful Kingdom of Papa Alaev (Hot Docs), A Fish Tale (Jerusalem IFF, winner of the Other Israel Award and Audience Award).

Noam recently released a short documentary for BBC. His next project as a director/producer is a three-part international investigative series produced with Saxonia Entertainment, ZDF/Arte, Hot-Channel 8, NFCT and Dogwoof. Noam continues to develop and direct various projects. For nearly a decade now, he has been working with troubled teens as part of Docaviv’s DocuYoung initiative.

Keren Shayo

Keren Shayo is a director, screenwriter and creator of films and documentary series. Her works deal with social and political issues that evoke thinking of perceptual and social change. Among her most notable works is the film Sound of Torture (Yes Docu, ARTE, PBS, SVT, AL JAZEERA), which deals with the torture camps of African refugees on their way to Israel, which premiered at the IDFA festival and was also nominated and won various awards, among them: The Israeli Academy Award, the European Film Awards, the Debut Film Award at Docaviv Festival and more; The documentary series After Midnight, the Best Kept Secret in Town (Yes Docu), which deals with sexual assault and rape date drug has raised one of the most acute issues in the public discourse; The new documentary series The Guide to Gentrification (Hot 8), which follows the institutional process of dispossessing the weakened population, especially the Arabs from the city of Jaffa and stimulates an important and relevant discourse these days. Shayo holds a BA degree in Film and Television from Tel Hai College and the Open University.

Sascha Lara Bleuler

Sascha Lara Bleuler was born in Zürich to an Israeli mother and a Swiss father. She studied Cinema, English, and French Literature at the University of Zürich. She has been a member of the selection committees of the Winterthur International Short Film Festival, Visions du Réel in Nyon, Docaviv (The Tel Aviv International Documentary Film Festival), as well as the Semaine de la Critique in Locarno. Since 2015, Sascha has been the Artistic Director of the Human Rights Film Festival Zurich which takes place annually in December.

Adi Adwan

Adi Adwan, an award winning film and TV screenwriter, director & producer. Among his films is Arabian (a full-length feature film) which is still considered the first Druze film made in the Israel, Hurani, Alone and others, as well as the documentary series Clash of Civilizations, Place at the End of the World and Fulfill the Dream. These days he is working on the second season of the successful series Fulfill the Dream, broadcast on the Arabic-language public broadcasting corporation Makan.

Yael Messer

Yael Messer is the Director and Curator of Beit Hagefen’s gallery, Arab Jewish Cultural Center, Haifa. She has been collaborating with museums, institutions, and independent art spaces internationally, including Depo, Istanbul; CCA Tel-Aviv; Stedelijk MuseumAmsterdam; Van AbbeMuseum Eindhoven; Apexart New York; Matadero Art CenterMadrid; CCA Warsaw; Artport Tel-Aviv; and the 13th Istanbul Biennial.

Mark Isaacs

Marc Isaacs is viewed as one of the top filmmaker’s in Britain to have dedicated so much time to the observation of British lives over an extended period. His work has been written about in numerous books on the documentary form such as Paul Ward’s The Margins of Reality and This Much Is True by James Quinn. Marc has won BAFTA’S Grierson Awards and numerous prizes at international film festivals. His filmography includes the multiple award winning Lift (2001): Calais the Last Border (2003); All White In Barking (2008); Men of the City (2010) and The Road: A Story of Life and Death (2013).

Isaacs’ films look into how people dwell in contemporary, late-capitalist, postcolonial Europe through the notion of a spaced based cinema, whose real and metaphoric values, it simultaneously represents, foregrounds and contests. His work pushes the creative possibilities of the documentary form. Isaacs has had retrospectives in France, Israel and the UK and in 2018 Second Run DVD released a complete box set of his work. Isaacs is an Associate Professor in Ethnographic and Documentary Film at UCL.

Ruth Patir

Ruth Patir is a multimedia artist and filmmaker whose works deal with gender paradigms and power relations, often mixing historical and national narratives with the artist’s own autobiography. She is the recipient of the Young Video Artist prize from the Israel Ministry of Culture (2018) and a recent alumni of the Artport Residency program sponsored by the Arison Foundation (2019-2020). Her film Sleepers (2017), awarded The Experimental Cinema and Video Art Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival, is a contemplation on the dream-state as a site for political intervention and it was commissioned for Danspace Projects New York and ironically presented during president elect Donald Trump’s inauguration. Patir’s work has been exhibited at venues such as CCA Center for Contemporary Art – Tel Aviv, Ashdod Art Museum, PrintScreen Festival, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Anthology Film Archives – New York, MoMA Museum of Modern Art – New York, Kav 16 Gallery – Tel Aviv, and Flux Factory New York among others.

Avishai Sivan

Avishai Sivan (1977, Israel) is a filmmaker, visual artist and published author. His most recent short film, His Death (34 min), won the Best Israeli Short Film Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival 2020. He is the creator of three full-length feature films: The Wanderer (2010), Visa (2013), Tikkun (2015), as well as the docu-diaries Soap Opera of a Frozen Filmmaker (2007), The Uzbek Trilogy (2011), Soap Opera of a Filmmaker With His Back to the Light (In post-production).

Lukasz Konopa

Lukasz’s documentaries have played at festivals, such as Hot Docs, Camerimage, Visions du Reel and SXSW. His film After won the CILECT Best Documentary Film Award, which is chosen by the association of the world’s major film and television schools. He regularly films in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the US.

Currently splitting his time between Tel Aviv, where he works as a cinematographer on documentaries produced by one of the Israelis top production companies, Heymann Brothers Films, and Denmark, where he is currently directing two feature length films with Made in Copenhagen.

Lukasz has a Master Degree in Documentary Film Directing from the UK’s National Film and Television School (NFTS) and an MA in sociology from the University of Warsaw, Poland.

Nirith Nelson

Nirith Nelson is a curator and lecturer on contemporary art and curatorial studies. She resides in Israel and earned her BA and MA in Art History from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Since 1998, she has been a faculty member at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, teaching curatorial practices and contemporary art. In 2019, she was appointed to be Head of the Curatorial Studies in the Policy & Theory of the Arts Masters Program at Bezalel.

She worked at the Israel Museum as a curator and lecturer, headed the JCVA residency as its Artistic Director – during which it was declared as one of the leading art residencies in the world – and was the art adviser to the Jerusalem Foundation. For these institutions, as well as independently, Nelson has curated over forty exhibitions both in contemporary art and design, which were shown in major venues in Israel and abroad.

Ron Omer

Ron Omer is a longtime film editor. Among his works are feature-length films, both documentaries and fiction. He has won three Israeli Academy Awards.

Sharon Yaish

Sharon Yaish is a documentary film director and editor. Her directing debut, A Whore Like Me, won Best Documentary Ophir Award 2019 (the Israeli Oscar). Some of Sharon’s recent editing work include Love It Was Not (Docaviv 2020 Best Israeli Film Award), Elish’s Notebooks (Docaviv 2017 Best Editing Award) and The Rabbi From Hezbollah (Docaviv 2019).

Sharon has been an editor for the last 25 years, editing dozens of documentary feature films and television documentary series.

Lisa Linde Nieveld

After studying psychology at the University of Amsterdam, Lisa Linde Nieveld started a career in journalism. She worked for Dutch public television and radio broadcasters. In 2010 she started working for Eye Filmmuseum, where she takes care of the international marketing and promotion of Dutch documentaries and short films. Eye is the museum for film and the moving image in the Netherlands and combines a world-renowned film collection with expertise in restoration, educational programmes, exhibitions, international promotion and marketing.