Competitions and Awards

PAWEŁ ŁOZIŃSKI

Polish director, cameraman and producer of documentaries. Graduate of the Directing Department at the Film School in Łódź. Author of more than 20 award-winning documentaries. He makes distinct and emotionally charged films about people of whom he draws intimate portraits.
Łoziński gained international recognition with his documentary debut Birthplace (1992). His next films Sisters, Chemo, Father and Son, You Have No Idea How Much I Love You and the latest The Balcony Movie are considered innovative as they venture into new thematic areas and explore uncharted spaces within the documentary film genre.

Angeliki Petrou

Angeliki holds a BA in Film Studies from Middlesex University in London, and a Master’s degree in Contemporary Cinema Cultures from King’s College. She is the International Program Coordinator of the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival (TiDF), a senior member of both the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF) team since 2007, and has participated in the production of more than 30 festival editions. For the past 10 years, she has been programming the Youth Section (NextGen) of both TiDF and TIFF, as well as organizing tributes and spotlights for TIFF and its annual activity.

Anath Kandell

Anath Kandell is a producer and the owner of the film production company “Panas Boded Hafakot” (One Light Productions). She has produced notable films such as A Crime Called Man, 17 Beginnings of Talia, Fluchkes, Call Me When You Are Ready and the documentary series Makom Batzameret, Dancing with Tears in Our Eyes and Pasha. Anath graduated from The Department of Film and Television at Tel-Aviv University.

Paul Sng

Paul Sng is a bi-racial British Chinese filmmaker based in Edinburgh, Scotland whose work focuses on people who challenge the status quo. His work has been broadcast on television and screened internationally, and his feature film credits include DISPOSSESSION and POLY STYRENE: I AM A CLICHE (winner of BIFA 2021 Best Documentary, BIFA 2021 Raindance Discovery Award). He is a BAFTA Breakthrough 2022/23 artist.

Alon Marom

Documentarist and filmmaker
Currently working on two documentary projects:

– A film that delves into an unsolved murder mystery that shocked Jerusalem a decade ago (produced by HOT 8 and The Rabinovich Foundation).
– A VR project, in collaboration with filmmaker Irit Dolev, Israeli funds Gesher and Makor and Canadian funds NFB and CMF. The VR project tells the story of a family tragedy that took place in the shadow of police violence.
Alon Marom directed the documentary series Citizen K. (yes Docu), The Stripper, the Alligator, and the Minister’s Wife (HOT 8), and The Team (yes Docu); as well as the documentary feature films 17 Seconds (Kan 11) and Deep Freeze (IETV, Channel 23).
Alon also gives lectures about television at Reichman University and teaches film.

Udi Nir

Born 1990. Lives in Haifa. Worked in theater for several years, before meeting his partner Sagi Bornstein and turning to documentary filmmaking. His films have won several international awards and screened in dozens of countries. His filmography includes: Viral Dreams (2021), Golda (2019) #uploading_holocaust (2017).

Efrat Shalom Danon

Director and screenwriter . Her works deal with feminist and social issues.
She created and directed “The Elected” – a 3 episodes TV series which was broadcasted on Israeli television (KAN11) and was nominated for 6 Israeli academy awards.
Her films, “The Dreamers” (2011) and “An Ordinary Life”(2019) were screened at many International film festivals (FIPA, Docaviv, Jerusalem Film Festival, etc.)

Marusya Syroechkovskaya

Marusya Syroechkovskaya (1989) is a Moscow-born award-winning filmmaker and visual artist.
Her debut film, How to Save a Dead Friend, had its’ world premiere at Visions du Reel 2022 in the international competition, where it won a Special Mention. It was screened at Cannes Film Festival (ACID), Docaviv, FIDOCS, Nordisk Panorama, Athens IFF, Busan IFF, Festival du nouveau cinéma de Montréal (FNC), Film Fest Ghent, Festival dei Popoli, Singapore Film Festival, DOC NYC, IDFA, Cork FF, and many others. The film was selected in a shortlist as the best documentary by European Film Awards 2022.

Sinai Abt

Sinai Abt served in different positions in the documentary field in Israel: Between the years 2001-2009 he served as the Head of Channel 8, was the Artistic Director of the Docaviv Festival between 2011-2016, and served as Head of Documentaries at the Israeli Public Broadcasting corporation between 2016-2018. An episode from the documentary series Secularism which he co-created, will premiere at Docaviv Festival.

Meital Zvieli

Meital Zvieli is a filmmaker that graduated from Jerusalem’s Sam Spiegel Film & Television School screenwriting program with honors. Most notably, Meital was the director, producer, writer and editor, with Itamar Alcalay, for THE CAMERA OF DOCTOR MORRIS, Best Israeli Film Award winner at the 24th Docaviv Festival. She was the Head of Research for the animated documentary WALTZ WITH BASHIR by Ari Folman, a Golden Globe and Cesar winner for Best Foreign Film and Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film. She was editor and screenwriter for THE LAST LEAGUE, a docu-series about Jewish and Arab football players competing in the last league of Israeli football and for DESIGNING A NATION, a docu-series about Israel’s design history. Along with writing and editing, Meital directed ADRENALINE, a docu-series examining Israelis’ struggle with technology’s takeover of everyday life and she was the editor of OFF SEASON, a docu-series portrait of Eilat, the most remote city in Israel.

Annika Mayer

Annika Mayer is a filmmaker based in Berlin. In 2019 she co-founded Majmun Films, producing and editing documentaries. Her films have been shown at competition programs of numerous festivals, like IFFR Rotterdam, Guanajuato, Visions du Réel, Docaviv, and DOK-Leipzig.

Noa Aharoni

Noa graduated her studies in TV and Cinema from Sapir College in 1994. She is the recipient of the prestigious “Aliza Shagrir Prize” for her student film Seret Bruto. In 2000, Noa began her journey as a director & screenwriter. In 2011 she directed her first feature film, By Summer’s End, that won awards at the Haifa & Rehovot Film Festivals. In 2017, her documentary movie Shadows was selected for Docaviv and the prestigious IDFA documentary film festival, and won the Best Film award of the Israeli Documentary Guild. In 2020, she directed Shut Up, a short film which won the Best Film award in Japan at the Short Shorts Festival, and at the Topaz film festival. The film was nominated for the Ofir awards (Israeli Academy Award). The documentary feature film Not A Word of Truth was screened in the international Jerusalem Film Festival, 2021, and was adapted into a documentary series called Dr. Rudy: The Naked Truth that was nominated for Best Documentary Series by the Israeli Documentary Guild. Her last documentary film Sabotage won the Best Documentary Film of the Israeli Documentary Guild.

Alon Levi

Alon Levi is an award winning filmmaker, creative director and at times also a director of animation. He is a graduate of the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School, and holds an MA in Visual Media Anthropology from Freie Universitat (Berlin). He’s married, a father of two, and believes that documentaries can change the world (or at least the world of those who created them).

María Silvia Esteve

Educated in arts and music since her youth, she has directed films that have premiered at Cannes, won Locarno, and were selected at ND/NF MoMA, Hong Kong International Film Festival, IDFA, Docaviv, Sitges, amongst other more than a hundred film festivals.

Dr. Ohad Landesman

Ohad Landesman is a lecturer and film scholar from the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University. He holds a PhD from the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU (2013). He lately co-edited the anthology Truth or Dare: Essays on Documentary Cinema (Am Oved Publishing House, 2021) and is currently writing a book on travelogues and documentary visits to Israel (forthcoming in SUNY Press). He has published broadly on documentary, digital cinema and animation in several anthologies and peer-reviewed journals, and his critical writing appeared in several magazines, such as Reverse Shot, Film Comment, Takriv and the blog doctalk.

Moran Ifergan

Moran Ifergan is a filmmaker and editor born and raised in Be’er Sheva. Her films explore political, social, theological, and women’s issues in Israeli society from a personal point of view. Her filmography includes “My Sister Riki,” “KMS: Jewish Negroes,” “Maternity Leave,” and “Palestinians: Us First.” Her feature film debut, “WALL” (2017), premiered internationally at Cinema du Réel and was later screened at the Barbican Centre and Doc Leipzig. The film also won the Best Israeli Film award at Docaviv 2017. Her second feature film, “Je t’aime Ronit Elkabetz” (2022), was screened at Jerusalem Film Festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Patricia Perez

Patricia is a Film Distribution professional, with much experience in festival programming and operations, including at such leading independent film companies as MUBI, StudioCanal and Curzon Artificial Eye. She is also an established film curator, having been the Head of Programming at the London Spanish Film Festival for over a decade. Her current role at MUBI as Global Distribution Operations Manager involves setting MUBI’s festival strategy on an international scale, working closely with local teams on MUBI’s international distribution strategy.

Itzik Giuli

Itzik Giuli—a multidisciplinary artist, a dramaturge, a playwright, and an actor—is a co-artistic director at the Yasmeen Godder Dance Company. Before this he was the artistic director of the Israel Festival (2014–2021) and the Curtain Up dance festival (2014–2016).

Itamar Alkalay

An independent filmmaker whose work blurs the lines between documentary and fiction. Among his films are Stefan Brown and Off Season. His films have been screened at countless leading festivals around the world, won awards and were broadcast on Sundance Channel. Itamar teaches at the Bezalel Academy of Arts. His latest film The Camera of Doctor Morris (created with Meital Zvieli) won the grand prize at the Docaviv Film Festival 2022, and will be screened this summer on ARTE.

Michal Weits

Michal Weits is an Israeli documentary director and producer. Michal is Head of the documentary department at HSCC – Slutzky Communications. She studied at the “Sam Spiegel” film and television school, and was the former Head Producer of the leading Israeli documentary Channel 8 (HOT network).
In 2016 Michal founded “Tape Runners”, an independent production and distribution company. Tape Runners’ titles include her directorial debut Blue Box (2021) that won the Best Research award at Docaviv Film Festival, and Wall (2017), produced by Michal, that won the Best Documentary Award at Docaviv Film Festival.

Evgeny Gusyatinskiy

Evgeny Gusyatinskiy (b. 1983) is a member of the selection committee of International Film Festival Rotterdam, where he is focused on programming films from Eastern Europe, CIS countries, Israel, and Greece. From 2018 to 2022, he was a member of the curatorial team of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow). He has contributed to a number of international book publications on contemporary cinema and has written on film for a variety of international media. He is based in Tel Aviv.

Anna Somershaf

An Israeli filmmaker and producer. Her feature documentary Women of Valor was screened in dozens of film festivals and was nominated for the Israeli Ophir awards. Anna directed a TV series and a mid-length documentary, and produced several international documentaries.