Farnoosh Samadi was born in Iran and graduated of multimedia arts from Fine Art Academy in Rome, Italy. She started her career as a filmmaker at the Iranian Youth Cinema Society and after that she made several video installations. Her films have been screened at film festivals around the world. She is also a scriptwriter for several short films which among them “More Than Two Hours” directed by Ali Asgari has had a great success. This short film was nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes 2013 and a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival. After that she wrote another short film for the same director called “The baby”
which was premiered in Venice Film Festival. She is also co-writer of a feature film with Ali Asgari which was developed at Cinefondation Residence cannes and the film screened in Venice film festival 2017 (orizzonti). Her first short film as co-director and co-screenwriter is a short film called “ The Silence” was nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes 2016 and her second short film as director called “Gaze” which has its world premiere in competition of Locarno Film Festival 2017 and already is qualified for Oscar 2018. She was the jury president of Lucania Film Festival in 2016 and Arcipelago in 2107 in Italy and in 2018 She became a member of the Oscar Academy.

Marija Milovanovic is a cultural manager and curator based in Vienna (Austria). In 2018 she co-founded LEMONADE FILMS, a film festival distribution agency with focus on short and VR films as well as mixed media projects. She was co-manager of the Vienna Shorts Agency which was founded in 2015 with the aim to present short films in a broad national and international context. Since 2008 she’s is working for Vienna Shorts, Austrias only Oscar® qualifying film festival where she’s head of the international competition Fiction & Documentary and in charge for the Vienna Shorts Academy, the industry programs. Since 2018 she’s part of the selection committee at Go Short International Short Film Festival Nijmegen. She worked with Some Shorts, a film festival distribution agency based in Nijmegen (Netherlands). Marija curated several (film- and video)programs for national and international festivals and museums. Among them are the Museum of Natural History Vienna, Frame[o]ut, Lentos (Art Museum Linz), L’Alternativa Filmfestival (Spain), Go Short Filmfestival (Netherlands) and the very popular Cat Video Festival Vienna, which is also touring internationally. Marija studied theater-, film- and media science at the University of Vienna and graduated with a thesis about the development and programming of film festivals with focus on short film.

Wouter Jansen is the owner of the sales and festival distribution company Square Eyes. He worked as the head of programming at the Go Short – International Film Festival during the first 10 editions. In 2013 he started Some Shorts, which changed to Square Eyes in 2019, which specializes in having outstanding non-mainstream films find the audience and recognition they deserve. With Square Eyes, Wouter represents bold, author-driven features and shorts, and collaborates closely with the filmmakers to devise bespoke festival distribution and sales strategies. This has resulted in a small catalogue of films premiering at prestigious festivals and winning multiple awards over the last few years like main prizes at Cannes, TIFF, Berlin, Locarno and Clermont-Ferrand.

Wouter has been giving lectures at schools like Le Fresnoy, HEAD Geneva and Netherlands Film Academy as well as moderating and leading workshops at festivals like IDFA, Warsaw FF, True/False, Winterthur, VIS Vienna Shorts and others. He is a Berlinale Talents alumni.