Mentors

John Appel
John Appel studied Classical Literature at the University of Amsterdam and graduated from the Netherlands Film Academy in 1987. He directed more than 50 documentaries for cinema and television. He developed a personal style in documentary filmmaking, close to his partici-pants, based on what he calls ‘emotional research’. His films won many international awards, a.o. the IDFA Award for Best Feature Length Documentary for She Believes in Me (1999).3-3(2003) was nominated for Best European Documentary. In 2009 he won the IDFA Award for Best Dutch Documentary for The Player. Wrong Time, Wrong Place was the opening film of IDFA 2012. Voices of Holland (2018), was awarded the Critics Award. He is a guest lecturer at UBB University of Cluj (Romania). He gives masterclasses and mentors workshops all over the world and acts as a jury member in major festivals like IDFA, Karlovy Vary, Visions du Reel, ZagrebDox. As a producer he worked with renowned Peruvian/Dutch filmmaker Heddy Honigmann.

Hans Robert Eisenhauer
After more than 20 years at ARTE and the German broadcaster ZDF, Hans Robert moved to Berlin and started a new career as independent producer with his production company Ventana-Film, focused on international coproduction of documentary films, including cultural and current affairs TV programs. Ventana’s German-Syrian coproduction, Return to Homs by Talal Derki had its world premiere at IDFA 2013 and received the Grand Jury Award for the best international documentary film at the Sundance Film Festival 2014. Hans Robert continued working with Talal Derki on his second feature-length documentary film Of Fathers and Sons, which won the Grand Jury Award at Sundance 2018 and was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary 2019. Recently he has been working on several coproductions with British and Norwegian partners. Children in Ukraine has been broadcast recently at ITV and ARTE.

Moderator: Nebojša Sljepčević
Nebojša Slijepčević is a screenwriter and film director from Zagreb, Croatia. He has directed numerous creative documentaries (Srbenka, Gangster of Love, Something about Life, Real Man’s Film, In 4 Years, Of Cows and People). His films have been shown at many international festivals, including IDFA, Hot Docs and Karlovy Vary Film Festival. His most successful film Srbenka has won more than 20 festival awards and it has been shortlisted for European Film Awards. Nebojša is an artistic director for documentary film at production company Zagreb film and a lecturer at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb.