ALAIN FLEISCHER (FRANCE)
Lives and works in Tourcoing, Paris and Rome. Having studied literature, linguistics and anthropology at La Sorbonne, Alain Fleischer taught in various universities as well as art, photography and film schools. He was laureate of the Académie de France/Villa Médicis where he resided from 1985 to 1987. He has written fifty or so works of literature published by Le Seoul editions, Gallimard, etc. He has also directed some 350 films of different genres (full-length fiction works, experimental films, art documentaries, etc.) selected and awarded in international film festivals such as Cannes, Venise, Locarno, Berlin, Montréal, Thessalonique.
As an artist and photographer, he had solo retrospective exhibitions in Holland, Spain, Italy, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Japan, Russia… His work was given a retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris in 2003 and 2004. Alongside this retrospective, a programme of films and exhibitions were shown in Paris at the Centre Pompidou as well as the Galerie de France.
At the request of the Ministère de la Culture, he created Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, of which he has been the director since its opening in 1997. Honorary Doctor of the Quebec University in Montréal. Honorary Doctor of Arts of the European Humanities University in Vilnius.
VIVI TELLAS (ARGENTINE)
Vivi Tellas is one of the leading references on the Argentinean theatre scene. Her curatorial inventions, Museum Project and Biodrama have had a strong influence on theatre production in recent years. She has been invited as a Visiting Professor to New York University for a semester; she directed the Sarmiento Theatre for eight years, where she developed the Biodrama Project, based on theatre and reality; and she has been the curator of stage arts for the Recoleta Cultural Centre. She often works in London, Dublin, Sao Paulo, Barcelona and New York.
Her work as a director always seeks the edge of the theatre institution, from the revolutionary staging of La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba) through to her experience with contemporary opera, staging the provocative John Cage. Some of her documentary theatre works are: Mi Mamá y mi Tía (My Mum and my Aunt); Tres Filósofos con Bigotes (Three Philosophers with Moustaches); Cozarinsky y su Médico (Cozarinsky and his Doctor); Escuela de Conducción (Driving School); Disc Jockey; Mujeres Guía (Guide Women); Rabbi Rabino (New York); O Rabino e seu Filho (The Rabbi and his Son) (Sao Paulo) and La bruja y su hija (The Witch and her Daughter).
ALEKSANDR BALAGURA (UKRAINE)
Graduate from Kiev University in the Department of History and Social Sciences (1981-1987). After working for a year as a professor of History and Social Sciences, he became an assistant director at the Ukrainian Documentary Institute in Kiev, where he has worked as a director of films and TV programmes since 1989. Since 1998, he has lived with his family in Genoa. As an independent filmmaker, he has directed 20 films that have participated in international film festivals in Kiev, Moscow, Paris, Torino, Lisbon, Tampere, Florence, Marseille, Mexico City, Brussels, Delhi, etc.
TOBY LEE (UNITED STATES)
Toby Lee is an artist, anthropologist, and Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She works across video, installation, performance and drawing, and her work has been exhibited at the Locarno Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, CPH:DOX, RIDM, Flaherty NYC, Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, among others. She has a PhD in Anthropology and Film & Visual Studies from Harvard University, where she was a member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. Her research interests include visual and media anthropology, the anthropology of cultural institutions, cultural citizenship, expanded documentary and cultures of surveillance and documentation.
She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Dan David Foundation, the Film Study Center at Harvard University, and the Flaherty Film Seminar. From 2012 to 2014, she was the Director of the Collaborative Studio program at UnionDocs: Center for Documentary Art in Brooklyn, NY. Her filmography includes Distance to Destination (2016), Single Stream (2014) and Royal (2007).
DANIELE DOTTORINI (ITALY)
He is a Film Studies Researcher at the University of Calabria, Film Programmer and Film Critic. His main interests lie in film theory and film truth. Since 2008 he has been the film programmer for the Popoli Festival in Florence and has organised several retrospectives on contemporary documentary (The Feeling of Being There. 1958-1964 - Seven years of Documentary Cinema (2009); Swimming in a Sea of Images: the Cinema of Isaki Lacuesta (2011); The Documentary and I. The Cinema of Andrés di Tella (2012); Images of the verb to love: The Documentaries of Mary Jiménez (2015); The Trades of Cinema: Homage to Sergio Oksman (2016).
Editor of Fata Morgana and member of the editorial board of Filmcritica, Sentieri selvaggi. His books include Per un cinema del reale. Forme e pratiche del documentario italiano contemporaneo (Udine 2013), the Italian edition of the film writings by Alain Badiou (Del Capello e del Fango. Riflessioni sul cinema, Cosenza 2009), and monographs on the cinema of David Lynch, James Cameron or Jean Renoir.