Ivan Bakrač
Ivan Bakrač graduated from the Faculty of Arts and Design in Belgrade (Serbia) with the MA degree in film directing. He has written and directed films that participated in many international festivals and won awards (“Wars” / 2013, medium-length; “Our skin is going to gray” / 2014, short; “Malesh” / 2016, short). Ivan participated in various programs such as Berlinale Talents, Talents Sarajevo and Zurich FF Academy. Apart from filmmaking, he also works as a festival programmer.
His debut feature, “After the Winter”, was premiered at the 55th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
Ella Cieslinski
Ella Cieslinski is a German film director and writer with a strong international background formed in France, Brazil, the U.S. and Uruguay. Currently she is based in Berlin. She finished her screenplay studies at Film university in Munich in 2018. Her diplom work won the best feature screenplay at Sehsüchte filmfestival. Since then she has written and co-written several feature scripts. Her short movies FOU DE TOI and FANTASY IS A FLEEING ANIMAL were shown at numerous international film festivals such as Hofer Filmtage. She has collaborated as a script consultant with both fictional and documentary film projects. Also she was part of the short film festival jury in Triest in 2021. Currently she is working on her first feature film.
Gaia Meucci-Astley
Gaia is a film programmer, script reader and project assessor, with 10 years of experience working in new and emerging talent.
From 2012 to 2021 Gaia was the Short Film Programmer of short film and animation festival Encounters in Bristol, in charge of curating the live action international competition. In 2009 and 2010 she was the Short Film Programmer of the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Gaia also worked in the UK and France in different capacities, including animation production for Red Kite Animation in Scotland, short film distribution for Paris-based Autour de Minuit, film festivals operations and programming. Her festival positions also include the BFI London International Film Festival and the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival.
As a freelance film curator, she has collaborated with organisations such as the ICA in London, where she programmed the retrospective Jarmusch in Context in 2009, and the Forum des Images in Paris, where in 2012 she was the Assistant Programmer of London Calling, a season of films about London.
Currently, she is focusing on expanding her freelance work in talent development, collaborating as a script reader, mentor, assessor and judge for organisations (BFI Network, Serial Eyes…)
Michal Reich
Michal Reich has been working in the film industry since 2011. He is a graduate of the Editing Department at FAMU in Prague and participated in several script consulting workshops (Script Consulting Incubator, Midpoint Training, Script Circle).
Some of the films he edited have garnered international recognition / Cannes 2012, TIFF 2019, Busan IFF 2019, Cairo IFF 2019, Cottbus FF 2020 / and since 2017 he has been teaching film language and dramaturgy at FAMU.
Co-founder of script consulting platform “Catalyst” (in development) which aims to support films from the initial idea to the final cut.
In his free time, he loves to visit remote regions around the world, listen to local stories and direct short documentaries on socio-political issues.
Enrico Vannucci
Enrico Vannucci born 1981 in Sassuolo, Italy, has been passionate about films since childhood due to his permissive parents letting him watch VHS tapes and going to the cinema together with them. In 2007, he graduated in screenwriting from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and was awarded his MA in Film Studies from the University of Bologna in 2008 with a thesis exploring John Frankenheimer and Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate. He has been a member of film festival programming teams since 2010 and currently works as a short film advisor for the Venice Film Festival, and as a short film programmer at the Torino Short Film Market, as well as being a freelance programmer and curator. In August 2018 together with Carla Vulpiani he co-founded Varicoloured, a holistic film agency. In recent years he has written essays on the short and feature film festival ecosystem that have been published and presented at international conferences. Finally, he has covered major film festivals as a journalist since 2009.
