Zdenka Gold was born in Zagreb in 1975. She graduated in Italian language and literature, Indology, and Portugese language and literature from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. She participated at a number of specialised film workshops, including EURODOC 2011, EAVE 2013, ACE 2015, and PRODUCTION VALUE 2016. After years of working on a number of theatre and film productions and film festivals, she founded the production company Spiritus Movens in 2016. The company specialises in producing independent films (fiction and documentary), and also organises cultural and educational events, co-productions, and service production. Zdenka also works with other production companies as executive producer. Films produced by Spiritus Movens have been screened and awarded at top festivals, including the official selection at Cannes (Sieranevada, Cristi Puiu), Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Murina, Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović, Caméra d’Or winner), official selection at Berlin (God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya, Teona Strugar Mitevska), and Venice International Film Festival, where Belladonna, directed by Dubravka Turić, won the Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film. Documentary films produced by Spiritus Movens are regularly screened at the leading film festivals in the region and sold to TV statoins.
Tomaž Pavkovič works as a videographer, director, journalist, producer, VJ, and multimedia artist. Since 2002, he has been working with the DZMP – Luksuz produkcija team, where he is a mentor to younger colleagues and the author of several short films, which were screened and also awarded at various domestic and international film festivals. Moreover, he mentors projects with vulnerable groups. He cooperates with the Roma association Romano veseli from Novo mesto. He has also led film workshops with young refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, among others. He used to collaborate with the Solo para Cortos (Barcelona) and Todos Somos Otros (Mexico City) short film festivals. He is also part of the crew of Luksuz Film Festival in Krško. Since 2013, he has been working as a film teacher at primary schools in Slovenia. Currently, he conducts film workshops focusing on natural and cultural heritage in Posavje and Dolenjska regions. Recently, at the FEKK – Ljubljana Short Film Festival, he won the award for the best Slovenian film for his work “Škatla”, where he creatively used found footage made by his dad.
Ljubo Zdjelarević is a producer and director, born in Nova Gradiška, Croatia, in 1981. He grew up in Zagreb, where he lives and works today. He graduated in History and Geography at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, and studied Film and Theater Production at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. He has been a member of the Cinema Club Zagreb for more than twenty years. In 2009, he founded the production company Kinoteka d.o.o., which produces various documentary, fiction, animated and multimedia projects, as well as music videos and TV commercials. He is a graduate of EAVE (European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs), generation 2012, and he participated in workshops such as Sarajevo Talent Campus, Insight-Out Potsdam, Motovun Film School, FEST Portugal, Cartoon Finance etc. He is a member of the Croatian producers association, the Filmmakers Association of Croatia, and the European Film Academy. The projects he produced include the feature film ZG80, directed by Igor Šeregi, a 2016 cinema hit, and he worked on the popular award-winning television documentary series for young people called Generation Y, which ran from 2010 to 2015, producing over 40 episodes in total. He co-produced an international television six-part documentary series Borderline (directed by: A. Verbeke, T. Gudac, A. Savchenko et al.), in cooperation with Off World (BLG), In Script (LTU), Urgh! (SLO), and Relation 04 Media (NOR). In cooperation with the design studio Šesnić and Turković, he created the permanent exhibition of the Faust Vrančić Memorial Center on the island of Prvić, and is the co-author of the multimedia exhibition at the Museum of Sinjska Alka. He is currently in pre-production with a feature film project Something stronger than me – the story of Dražen Petrović, written by Ivan Turković-Krnjak and directed by Danilo Šerbedžija.
Martha Otte, born in 1951 in California, USA, immigrated to Norway in 1974. Martha’s passion for selecting and presenting films for an audience was awakened when she joined the board of the Tromsø Film Club in 1993. She went on to become Chairman of the Board of the Norwegian Federation of Film Societies (1996 – 2002). She started working for the Tromsø International Film Festival (TIFF) in 1998 and became the director of the festival in 2004. Since she retired from that post in March 2020, she has continued to be professionally active in various roles, among others as lead film consultant at the regional level in The Cultural Backpack, Norway’s program for bringing art and culture to all pupils. She is also a co-owner of Backbeat Kaffe & Vinyl, one of only two record stores in Northern Norway.
Frano Mašković was born in Dubrovnik. He graduated from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. He is a permanent member of the Zagreb Youth Theater ensemble. He has received various awards for his work on film, television and in theater, of which we highlight the role of Hamlet he played at the Dubrovnik Summer Festival. His most recent film roles are that of the antagonist in the film called Mayday, which had its premiere at Sundance, a role in a film called About The Beginning which has yet to come out, and a part in a children’s Christmas film called Kapa, a Croatian-Slovenian co-production directed by Slobodan Maksimović. He portrayed extremely notable roles in the films The Eighth Commissioner, Lada Kamenski, Trampoline and My Grandpa Is an Alien.
📸 Mare Milin
Dario Lonjak was born in 1987 in Karlovac. Since 2000, he has been a member of the Karlovac Gymnasium Video Club, and later on he became one of the founders of Cinema Club Karlovac. In 2006, he enrolled in the Film and TV directing program at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb and made a number of short fiction films and documentaries, like the award-winning documentary Srećko, about Srećko Vučić, a famous and unusual man from Karlovac. He graduated from the Academy of Dramatic Arts in 2012, after which he worked as an assistant on many feature films (Metastases, Vegetarian Cannibal, Number 55, etc.). In 2017, together with the writer and producer Velimir Grgić, he founded Pulsar Production, which initially produced commercial videos, music videos, TV and web advertisements, and later on documentaries and fiction films shown and awarded at numerous Croatian and foreign film festivals, among which are Riječki orao about Gabriele D’Annunzio and his adventure in Rijeka and Armor on Four Rivers, a short documentary about improvised armored vehicles and weapons from the beginning of the Croatian Homeland War in the Karlovac area. The action comedy Savages is his debut feature film.
Nemanja Ćeranić was born on January 31, 1990 in Inđija, where he currently lives. He enrolled at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, the Editing Department, in 2010. He has a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree. He has made three short fiction films: “Poslednje veče doktora Jesvila/ Harboring Radovan”, “Stočar/Farmer” and “Soba Smrti/In the Deathroom”, a medium-length documentary “Saša Đorđević” in collaboration with Intermedia Network, a feature film “Lihvar/ Loan Shark” and two TV shows: „Švindleri” and “Grupa”. Filmography: Harboring Radovan (2012), director and editor; Farmer (2013), director, screenwriter and editor; Rđava Medalja (2013), editor; Voz (2014), editor; Saša Đorđević, documentary (2016), director and editor; In the Deathroom (2016), director; Volja sinovljeva (2017), director; Loan Shark (2021), director. TV shows: Grupa (2018), director; Švindleri (2019), director; Kljun (2021), editor. The film „Stočar/Farmer“ has been featured in various Serbian and international festivals: Cinema Zone in Vrnjačka Banja as part of Lovefest 2013 – the audience award; Scena Fest – Inđija, 2013; Dukafest – Banja Luka, 2013; Tuzla film festival 2013; Filmanak (Serbian film days) – Stuttgart, 2013.
(Zagreb, 1980) has a degree in Art History and Slovak Language and Literature from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. She has worked for the Hulahop production company since 2012, where she took part in the production and distribution of various documentary and fiction films (Nije ti život pjesma Havaja, Lijepo mi je s tobom, znaš, Dnevnik Diane Budisavljević, Betonski spavači), as well as the distribution of feature animated films. She has been the producer of the World Festival of Animated Film – Animafest Zagreb since 2015. She has participated in the work of juries and selection committees of a number of festivals in Croatia and abroad and she coordinates the international network of animation festivals CEE Animation Festival Network.
(1977) is a Croatian film editor. He has edited dozens of documentaries, many of which have been screened and awarded at various film festivals in Croatia and abroad. He has edited eleven feature films, including Put lubenica/The Melon Route, Metastaze/Metastases, Duh babe Ilonke/The Little Gypsy Witch, Ljudožder vegetarijanac/Vegetarian Cannibal, Kauboji/ Cowboys, Pismo ćaći/A Letter to My Father. He has won three Golden Arenas at Pula Film Festival for editing in 2012 (for Pismo ćaći/A Letter to My Father), 2015 (for Imena višnje/ Ungiven; with V. Lažet) and in 2017 (for Agape) and three awards for editing at the Croatian Film Days in 2007, 2008 and 2009. He has been an associate for documentary film workshops at the “Dr. Ante Peterlić” School of Media Culture for 16 years.
Irena is an independent artist, screenwriter, and playwright and, in a less formal capacity, an educator in screenwriting. As a screenwriter, she aims to try her hand at as many forms and genres as possible. As such, she has written for soap opears (Zabranjena ljubav), sitcoms (Bitange i princeze), TV dramas (Dobre namjere), educational TV shows (Laboratorij na kraju svemira), three feature films (Bankirke, Duh babe Ilonke and Moj dida je pao s Marsa), as well as a variety of less silly titles. She is the originator of the Palunko screenwriting workshops, which have come of age, so to speak, seeing as they have been taking place for eighteen years. She has also had the pleasure of being one of the founders of the Croatian Screenwriters and Playwrights Guild – SPID. When she isn’t telling stories, she draws them – her preferred form is web illustration. She finds that form extremely liberating because anything she messes up in the digital form can be easily fi
Mato was born in 1978 in Zagreb, where he lives and works as a film editor and a teacher of film editing. He obtained his degree in Film Editing from the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb in 2001. As a student, he started working as an Assistant Editor at various film and TV productions, while gradually finding additional work in film and sound editing. He has worked on short and feature films, documentary films and series, TV dramas, experimental projects, and various projects such as educational or presentation films as a film and sound editor. In 2010, he was awarded for his work at the 57th Pula Film Festival, receiving the Golden Arena for Best Film Editing for his work on the film Forest Creatures. He has taught several film editing workshops. In 2003 he co-founded a small post-production studio with some colleagues (Banana postprodukcija d.o.o.). Since 2006, he has also taught at the Film Editing Department of the Academy of Fine Arts, where he also contributed to the development of the curriculum, as a two- time Vice Dean of Studies and once as the Head of the Department. In 2010, he initiated, together with Davor Švaić and Jarek Kaminski, cooperation between his department and the Lodz Film School (Poland). This project has developed into an international film editing workshop, which has since included the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
Sydney has 40+ years experience in the film industry where she currently is a trainer/ educator and consultant with producers planning festival and sales and financing strategies and with countries interested in bringing U.S. producers and production companies to their locations for filming coproductions. She began her career as the first woman in international distribution in 1975 when she was hired by 20th Century Fox International and moved into acquisitions from 1978 to 1988, progressing from short film company Pyramid Films, to docs for ABC Video and Films Inc, and to feature film distributors Lorimar Pictures and Republic Pictures. In 1988, Levine created FilmFinders, the industry’s first database, designed for acquisitions executives in distribution and sales as well as festival programmers needing to track new films worldwide for acquisition. In 2006 FilmFinders merged with Withoutabox and together they were acquired by IMDb in 2007. She left to establish SydneysBuzz in 2009. She has taught international film business at Chapman, UCLA Extension Film and Business Schools, The New School of Social Research, Deutsche Welle Akademie, Binger Institut, Cannes Producers Workshop, Berlinale Talents, and frequently moderates panels and seminars. She lives in Los Angeles, California and Berlin, Germany and travels extensively on the international film circuit. In addition to her native English, she speaks French, German and Spanish.
