Panel Members

Vladimir Brnardić is a screenwriter, editor and director, born in 1973. After graduating with a degree in history from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in 1997, he has been working for the Documentary Department of Croatian National Television (HRT) as a journalist and editor. Vladimir is an author of contributions for TV Kalendar and associate on the documentary serial Prošlost u sadašnjosti. He wrote and directed 15 documentaries. Since 2016 he is has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Documentary Department at Croatian Television.

Born in Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1972. Lejla Dedić lived, studied and worked in London for 20 years. In 1997 she graduated in Media and Society at South Bank University in London. She has over 20 years of experience working in the media sector: production, post-production and broadcasting. She worked in BBC World Service Trust/Media Action that uses media and communications to help reduce poverty and promote human rights in developing countries. Since 2011, Lejla has been given a role of Producer at Al Jazeera Balkans.

Thierry gratuated in Journalism and Communication prior to mastering European Writing and Analysis at ULB Brussels. He started producing and directing radio programmes and documentaries before founding Ventes-CBAWIP-Sales in 1998, and Visible Film in 2014, an international pre-sales and sales company that financed six projects and releases 10 new completed films a year, focusing on one-off, feature-length for TV, with an accent on contemporary society, human interest, geopolitics, current affairs, and history mini-series.

Hanka Kastelicová is the Executive Producer of Documentaries for HBO Europe. Based at the Prague office, she works closely with HBO Europe’s production centres in Warsaw, Budapest and Bucharest, and is responsible for the development and production of HBO Europe’s documentary films. She earned a Master of Arts degree from the Faculty of Film and TV Documentary Department at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She continued her professional career in Slovenia, where she worked for more than 25 years as a documentary director and producer, and later as a Commissioning Editor and Head of Development of Documentary Programming. As an experienced and dedicated documentary filmmaker, she has been lecturing on documentary filmmaking and served as a moderator and participant on numerous industry panels and other documentary events.

In November 2009, Le Clef started a documentary distribution company, CAT&Docs. In January 2007, she joined Fortissimo Films as Senior Vice President – TV and Ancillary Sales from the Paris-based Doc & Co. Prior to this, she was with Films Transit International in Canada. She began her career at Unibelfilm in Belgium, promoting Belgian films internationally.

Katarina Zrinka Matijević graduated in 2002 from the Zagreb Academy of Dramatic Arts with a degree in Film and TV Directing. She also earned her Philosophy and Comparative Literature degree from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. In addition to writing scripts and directing documentary and feature films, she is a docent at VERN College of Applied Sciences where she teaches Introduction to Documentary Film Directing. Zrinka first gained public attention with her award-winning student film Duel (1998). Her first professional documentary On Cows and Men (2002, co-directed by Nebojša Slijepčević) has been screened at major international festivals such as IDFA, Munich, etc. In 2003, she filmed Peščenopolis. Her documentary A Two Way Mirror (2016) received an Oktavijan Award, and has been screened at a number of prestigious documentary festivals. Her first feature film, The Trampoline, premiered in the summer of 2016. After numerous screenings at international festivals, the film is used to educate staff at clinics for paediatric and adolescent psychology and psychiatry throughout Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Jarmila started her career as an Acquisition and Programme Manager for HBO/Supermax kids channel. After a couple of years working for a British distribution company, she decided to set up her own business focused on music production and international film distribution. Since 2013 she works as Head of Industry Office at Jihlava IDFF – the largest festival of creative documentary films in Central and Eastern Europe.

Leena Pasanen started her career as a journalist in 1988 at the Finnish News Agency, first as a reporter and later on as a political commentator from the Parliament house. In 1993 she joined YLE, Finnish Broadcasting Company, where she worked as a reporter, political commentator, subeditor and TV presenter for the current affairs magazine programme on YLE TV1.

After that she was the Head of Documentaries for YLE TV1 in 1999-2000. When YLE launched new digital channels, she was chosen as the Head of Programmes responsible for cultural, factual and fiction programmes in YLE Teema, a channel focusing on culture, science and education. She stayed with the channel until November 2005, when she started working as the Director of EDN, European Documentary Network in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2008 she returned to YLE in Finland as Coordinator of Programmes and at YLE Fact and Culture and later as Coordinator and Senior Advisor at YLE Media and Customer Relations. In 2011 – 2014 she worked in Budapest, Hungary leading the Finnish Institute and also serving as cultural attaché at the Finnish Embassy in Budapest. Years 2015-2019 she was based in Leipzig, Germany directing DOK Leipzig, one of the world leading film festivals for documentaries and animations.

In January 2020 she took over the direction of Biografilm festival in Bologna, Italy. Biografilm festival focuses on current European creative, character driven fiction and documentary films and biopics. She has been a regular expert, tutor and lecturer at several training programmes, for example EDN, Discovery Campus, EURODOC and Television Business School. She was a EURODOC 1999 graduate and a member of the international advisory committee at Hot Docs. She has also been a board member of IDFA Forum, INPUT and the Bonnier’s Journalistic Award in Finland and served as a jury member at several international festivals, among others Sundance and IDFA. 

Andraž Pöschl is the Editor of Documentary Programme, Department of Culture and Arts Programme, TV Slovenia. He began to work for the Slovenian national TV station 20 years ago and spent most of the years working as an author of doc- umentaries. Later he became the editor in charge of Documentary Programme. Between the years 2011 and 2015 he was Editor-in-Chief of Culture and Arts Programme. He is also a member of different commissions and juries both inside and outside TV Slovenia.

Rada Šešić is a festival programmer, film lecturer, critic and film director. Head of the documentary competition at Sarajevo FF and co-head of the Docu Rough Cut Boutique-SFF. On the selection committee of the IDFA official competition. Head of Last Stop Trieste at WEMW. On the selection committee of the DOHA Film Fund.

Lectures and is a mentor at the Master of Film at the Netherlands Film and TV Academy in Amsterdam. Taught South Asian cinema at the University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Media and Culture for eight years. Director of the Eastern Neighbours Film Festival launched in The Hague 13 years ago. Selector of the DOKUart festival in Bjelovar. On the EFA documentary jury. Documentary mentor and consultant at various international workshops/pitching sessions in Europe and Asia. She was a lecturer at the Dutch Institute for Film Education (NIF) and advisor at STIFO, where she evaluated Dutch documentary projects for six years. Member of the board of the Balkan Documentary Center and NETPAC. Lived in India and taught two semesters at the Srishti Institute, Bengaluru. Lectures at the Croatian Film Association’s “Dr. Ante Peterlić” School of Media Culture. As a film critic, she collaborated on the book of Dina Iordanova (UK), as well as on Aitken’s Encyclopaedia of the Documentary Film, writing several parts on Eastern European Documentary authors. She also collaborated on 3 books in India: on directors Bimal Roy, Mani Kaul and Girish Kasaravalli. Regularly publishes her writings on cinema in Dutch publications Skrien and Filmkrant, USA Animation Magazine, Croatian Hrvatski ljetopis and Bosnian Sineast.

Directed several short films in Yugoslavia, a. o. LAM ARABI (1990), was assistant director to Vesna Ljubić’s fiction feature films, in the Netherlands directed four films – Room without a view (1997), Soske (2001), In Whitest Solitude (2002), On the Way to School (2007). Her films were screened at 60 festivals, won awards and are archived by MoMA, New York, and EYE, Amsterdam.

Harry Vaughn is a Programmer for the Sundance Film Festival, specialising in US and world documentary features. At the festival, he also leads a Talent Forum initiative that introduces world documentary filmmakers to American film industry representatives. He is a Consulting Programmer for Sundance Institute’s Catalyst Forum and he began his career at the institute in 2011 as an intern and reader for the Feature Film Program, International. Aside from his work at Sundance, Harry is on the board of Dirty Looks, a platform for queer film, video and performance, and he is also a Consulting Programmer for Frameline: San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival. His previous work includes: Senior Programmer for Outfest Los Angeles, Programmer and Coordinator for NewFest in New York and Outfest Fusion. He holds a Master’s degree in Arts Journalism from the University of Southern California and is a Los Angeles native.

Želimir Žilnik was born in 1942 in Niš, and he is living and working in Novi Sad, Serbia. He has written and directed numerous fiction and documentary films which have garnered many awards at national and international film festivals. He is one of the pioneers of the docu-drama genre. From the very beginning his films have focussed on contemporary issues, featuring social, political and economic assessments of everyday life: Newsreel on Village Youth, in Winter (1967), Little Pioneers (1968), The Unemployed (1968), June Turmoil (1969), Black Film (1971), Uprising in Jazak (1973). Žilnik’s fiction debut Early Works (1969) won the Golden Bear at Berlinale and four awards at Pula Film Festival. In 1995 his film Marble Ass won the prestigious Teddy Award at Berlinale. ZagrebDox has screened Žilnik’s films Logbook Serbistan (2015), Pirika on Film (2013) and Europe Next Door (2005), which won the Big Stamp. He was an International Jury member at ZagrebDox 2019. Žilnik’s latest films are The Most Beautiful Country in the World (2018) and Among the People: Life & Acting (2018).