Pritish Bagdi
Tareq AHMED
Tareq AHMED is a filmmaker and producer whose career in producing and directing documentaries and television programmes spans more than twenty-five years. As a producer, he has used his extensive knowledge of producing audio-visual programmes for local and international agencies to nurture a space in Bangladesh for the development of numerous notable documentary projects. In this capacity, he is also the director of the Dhaka DocLab, a project market for Asian documentary filmmakers in Bangladesh. He is also the Artistic Director of Liberation DocFest, the foremost documentary festival in Bangladesh organized by the Liberation War Museum. For nearly a decade, he led a media and communication organization, which worked with grassroots media and media professionals. He has also authored a number of books on cinema.
Subbiah NALLAMUTHU
Subbiah NALLAMUTHU is an award-winning wildlife filmmaker from Chennai. He studied cinematography at the Film and Television Institute of India. Following this, he filmed Living on the Edge, India’s longest-running Panda Award-winning environment series. He has also worked with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as a high-speed cameraman. His passion for the Royal Bengal Tiger has translated into five tiger-centric international documentaries for National Geographic Channel and BBC. His prolific filmography includes Tiger Dynasty (2012-2013), Tiger Queen (2010) and The World’s Most Famous Tiger (2017). He has made innumerable documentaries on the environment and the interaction between humans and the ecosystem such as Earth File (2000) for BBC World and The World Gone Wild (2001) for Animal Planet. His achievements in wildlife cinematography include the distinction of being one of the first to use 4K resolution for wildlife filming in India. He has won several national and international awards including the National Film Awards five times. He is a regular jury member of the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival and has also served as the jury chairman of the Indian Panorama Film Festival (2021).
Jayasree BHATTACHARYA
Jayasree BHATTACHARYA is an eminent theatre artiste and filmmaker. At the age of three, she started learning theatre from her paternal aunt, the renowned actress Keya Chakraborty. Her journey in cinema started as an assistant director to the filmmakers Buddhadeb Dasgupta and Rituparno Ghosh on the films Uttora (2000), Mondo Meyer Upakhyan (2002), Chokher Bali (2003) and Shubho Mahurat (2003) among others. As a filmmaker, she has directed several award-winning documentaries, shorts and one feature film. Her film Madur won the Best Film award at the Dhaka International Film Festival. She also won the Best Director award for her film Binisutarmala at the International Women’s Film Festival, Kolkata. Besides filmmaking, she has worked as a casting director on several international film projects including Sara Gavron’s Brick Lane (2008), Sangita Datta’s Life Goes On (2009) and Italo Spinelli’s Behind the Bodice(2010). As part of her theatre activity, she teaches at the National School of Drama (TIE) and has conducted several theatre workshops in the North East.
Mina RAD
Mina RAD is an Iranian-born and French-based documentary filmmaker, producer and journalist. She began her career as an award-winning political and cultural journalist for the BBC, RFI and AFP in various Central Asian countries. Since 2014, she has been the festival director of the Festival Après Varan in Paris, creating a global network of filmmakers inspired by the work of Jean Rouch. Her first film For Me the Sun Never Sets (2012) was awarded the prize for best documentary at the Cinema Vérité Film Festival in Tehran. Her filmography includes Persian Tales, Jean Rouch in Iran (2018) and The Future of the Past, Pierre and Yolande Perrault (2019). She is also the founder of World Cultural Diversity, which produces films of cultural and anthropological interest. Through the WCD, she has produced and directed Mr. and Mrs. Mafi (2022), which looks at hundred years of education in Iran, and Spirits, Forest and Rivers: Memories of Worlds from the Hupd’äh of the Amazon, which explores the worlds of the Hupd’äh community of the Amazon in collaboration with the ethnographic archives of Renato Athias.
Sanjit NARWEKAR
Sanjit NARWEKAR is a Mumbai-based National award-winning film historian, author, publisher and documentary filmmaker with more than four decades of cross-media experience in journalism, public relations, publishing and filmmaking. A former news editor of Screen (1980-1991), editor of TV & Video World (1994-95) and Documentary Today (2007-2012), he has also served on innumerable film selection committees and juries including the National Critics Jury, MIFF (2006) and the Cinema Writing Awards and the National Film Awards (1999). His passion for film history has manifested in more than (written and edited) books including Marathi Cinema In Retrospect (1995), which won the Suvarna Kamal for Best Book on Cinema. In 2020, he was awarded the Bimal Roy Memorial Award as a recognition of his priceless contribution to film scholarship. His work as a filmmaker includes the Films Division-produced India Unveiled (1998), Lavni Rupdarshan (2004) and Nations in Turmoil (2011). He is presently working on a history of Films Division tentatively titled Documenting India: The Legacy of Films Division.
Jean Pierre SAIRE
Jean Pierre SAIRE is a world-renowned French producer and director with an academic background in philosophy and theatre. He was initiated into the world of theatre at The Centre Dramatique de l’Est in Strasbourg. His foray into cinema began in 1970 with the direction of three prize-winning short films. Following this, he worked as an assistant director on the feature films of Serge Leroy, Roger Hanin and Liliane de Kermadec. After working on commercials, corporate programmes and the French Foreign Ministry’s cultural magazine show Aujourd’hui en France, which was shown on 180 channels around the world. As a producer of feature and documentary films, he has worked on over thirty films that have won awards at film festivals around the world including the Cannes Film Festival, the Academy Awards and the Venice International Film Festival. His productions include Indochine (dir: Régis Wargnier), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (1991); La Bonne à Tout Faire (dir: Melvin van Peebles), which was screened at the Critics’ Week at Cannes Film Festival in 1999; and Tosca (dir: Benoît Jacquot), which was the opening film at the Venice International Film Festival in 2001. He has also held executive positions in a number of influential production companies such as Incite Productions, Etamp, Septembre Production and ARTE.
Ashley RATNAVIBHUSHANA
Ashley RATNAVIBHUSHANA is a journalist, author, film critic and film society activist. He is the director of the Asian Film Centre (AFC) in Sri Lanka and the founding editor of the journal Cinesith. As the foremost interpreter of Sri Lankan cinema to the outside world, his scholarly publications on Sri Lankan cinema include Early Sri Lankan Cinema and Its Association with South Indian Film Industry (NETPAC & AFC, 2012). He is also the co-author of several important publications on the history of Sri Lankan cinema including An Incomplete Sentence – The Cinema of Dharmasena Pathiraja (NETPAC, 2009) and LJP – Lester James Peries, Life and Work (AFC, 2004). He is currently a board member and the jury coordinator for the Network for the Promotion of Asia Pacific Cinema (NETPAC). He is also a member of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) and the president of the Sri Lanka Federation of Film Societies. He has served as a jury member at several international film festivals. His work with film festivals includes his role as the executive coordinator of the Commonwealth Film Festival (2013) held in Colombo and as the Senior Asian Programmer for the second edition of the International Film Festival of Colombo.
Anant VIJAY
Anant VIJAY is a National Film Award-winning journalistand author from India. His career in television and print journalism extends across more than two decades with writings on cinema, politics of culture and literature. His weekly column has been running for twelve years in Dainik Jagran, a newspaper with one of the largest reader bases in the country. He has authored twelve books across genres including the well-received Bollywood Selfie, a book on the legends of Indian cinema. Other works include the best-selling Amethi Sangram and Marxwad ka Ardhsatya. A keen student of the Hindi language, he has organized literature festivals and served on Hindi literary bodies and editorial boards in active advisory roles. He has served on numerous jury and selection committees including as the jury chairman at the National Film Awards and the chairman of the selection committee of Konkani films at the International Film Festival of India (2019). He continues to be actively engaged with academia and educational institutes to train upcoming journalists and writers. Besides winning the National Film Award for Best Writing on Cinema, Anant Vijay is the recipient of the prestigious Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi Award and the Father Camille Bulcke Award.
Subhash SEHGAL
Subhash SEHGAL is a well-renowned film editor who has worked on more than two hundred and fifty films in the Indian film and television industry. As a student of editing at the Film and Television Institute of India, he received a gold medal in the subject. Following this, he joined the Bombay film industry where he worked on many important films including Waaris (1988), Ijazat (1987), Lekin (1991), Teri Meharbanian (1985) and Ek Chadar Maili Si (1986) for which he won the Filmfare award for Best Editor. He has won numerous National awards for his work in Punjabi cinema, namely Chann Pardesi (1981), Madhi Da Deeva (1989) and Kachehari (1994). As an editor, he has worked with leading filmmakers of Indian cinema such as Ramanand Sagar, Zia Sarhadi, Gulzar, K. Bapaiah, Ravinder Peepat and Sudhendu Roy among many others. His work as a director includes the films Pyar Koi Khel Nahin (1999) and Yara Silly Silly (2015). He also produced the series Ek Kahani Aur Mili, written by Gulzar, for Doordarshan. He is also a poet whose works have been prolifically published since he started writing in 2015.