Mentors

Sari Volanen is a Commissioning Editor at YLE. She started her career in television 30 years ago. Currently she produces mainly shorts and documentaries with Finnish independent film makers and producers.  She is in charge of the strand called New Cinema on YLE/Teema. She has participated EAVE –training in 1999, Eurodoc 2006 and Sources2 – Documentary Mentor training 2008, and has a Master's degree in Arts since 2016. She is also a board member of Tampere Film Festival.

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).

Igor Bezinović is a filmmaker born in Rijeka, which is now part of Croatia, but at that time belonged to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, before that partly the Kingdom of Italy and partly the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (and before that the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), before that the Free State of Fiume, before that the Italian Regency of Carnaro, before that Austria-Hungary… His films include The Blockade (Oktavijan prize for best Croatian documentary in 2012), Veruda (Oktavijan prize for best Croatian documentary in 2015) and A Brief Excursion (Big Golden Arena prize for best Croatian feature in 2017), along with many shorts of all shapes and sizes. His work has been shown internationally at events including IFF Rotterdam, DOK Leipzig, IDFF Jihlava, CPH:DOX, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Biennale of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean, Venice Biennale of Architecture (with Hrvoslava Brkušić for Pulska grupa), Museum of the Moving Image and the Guanajuato IFF. He graduated in film directing at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb and in Philosophy, Sociology and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. He is a member of The Croatian Film Directors’ Guild and the judo club Black Belt.