Mari Ørstavik

Mari Ørstavik is a director and actress based in Oslo, Norway. After graduating from The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles, it didn’t take long until she took the tools she had picked up in acting training and started using them for filmmaking. Her film work has traveled the festival circuit internationally, with her short film QUEEN winning multiple awards. In 2022 she is working as an episode writer and directing multiple episodes for the teen TV show VGS, which is premiering on NRK this fall.

Director's Village project | All I Want

We follow Ronja through her last hours at the hospital before she goes through an operation she feels will determine the rest of her life.

Adam Starsmark

Adam Starsmark is a writer and director based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has written and directed four shorts which have been screened at festivals worldwide and won several awards in Sweden. His latest, Let it Burn, was selected for competition at festivals such as Kortfilmfestival Leuven and Flicker’s Rhode Island. Adam graduated as a screenwriter in 2021 and is currently co-writing a feature film set to be shot in 2023.

Director's Village project | Bedside

19-year-old Alma, after high school, has started working at a nursing home. She accepts her colleagues' appreciation, not realizing the emotional challenge that will come with what she has put up on.

Wiebke Becker

Wiebke Becker studied directing at the Hamburg Media School, Germany. Her short films have been shown at international festivals and on public television. Her film Out of Joint was nominated for the German Human Rights Film Award. She is co-founder of the Hamburg-based film production company Knallrot Filme. Together with her colleagues, she produces films in a sustainable and diverse way - in front of and behind the camera.

Director's Village project | DILAN

17-year-old Dilan is racially insulted and beaten up at a tram station in the center of Berlin. Although many pedestrians stand around her, no one intervenes.

Lucas Brunelli Donnard

Lucas is a Brazilian filmmaker, born in 1991, currently residing in Germany. He holds a MA from the Internationale Filmschule Köln, among other degrees. He worked on several short-length film productions, some acclaimed internationally, such as the Brazilian dystopia Justiçamento, showcased at Cannes' Short Film Corner. Nowadays, he is the creative producer behind the Berlin-Cologne-based collective Pretty Good Ideas, developing many projects for cinema and television -- such as his prime-time television series debut as showrunner, DER GRUND UNTER BERLIN, supported by the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW.

Director's Village project | Filth

Despite an old man's best attempts to wash himself clean, years of moral corruption are about to overflow.

Catriona MacLeod

Catriona is an award-winning writer and director for theatre and film from the Isle of Mull. After many years as a cabaret performer, she made her first short Little Lark in 2021 through GMAC’s Little Pictures scheme. She was a Short Circuit Convergence screenwriter and a Glasgow Film Festival New Talent scheme mentee 2021/22. She is currently writing Mull Theatre’s winter show, which she will also direct.

Director's Village project | Kill me, Pay me

Three warehouse workers kidnap their billionaire CEO employer and hold her hostage in rural Scotland, sparking a global incident that will make them reevaluate their beliefs and galvanise the world.

Jamila Versi

Jamila Versi, a budding filmmaker and writer, based in Copenhagen via India, Kenya, and Bulgaria. She roots her work in community and resistance, and believes in the power of storytelling for transformation and transportation. In 2020, she started the film collective Kin Collective, which aims to get the stories of racialised perspectives on screen and bridge the gap of who is given access to filminstitutions and learning.

Director's Village project | My Shrunken Heart (and all that came after)

The story of Nusrat and Hassan, death and rebirth, love and pain.

Rosita Wolkers

Rosita Wolkers is a screenwriter that makes her directorial debut with her short film SUNSHINE MOTEL. She works with themes that arise from an intrinsic drive to tell powerful, human and often feminine stories that approach traumatic experiences from the sparkling gaze of a child.

Director's Village project | Pomegranate

A first-year law student is unwillingly pregnant and silently chooses to end the pregnancy. She suffers from the secret she carries. Will she remain silent or overcome her shame?

Nils Hanssen

Nils Hanssen had been working with the medium of theater and film since he was a child. After he performed a number of productions himself, he was accepted in the direction of scenography at the Toneelacademie Maastricht. After discontinuing this education, he set his sights on becoming a self-taught director. Not long after that he directed his first visual horror theater play "Delirium". In the years that followed he was mainly active as art director for several short films. He also co-directed the fully improvised film "Boundless". Recently he made his debut with the psychological horror/thriller "In Pieces". Nils mainly tells profound, personal, exciting and sometimes funny stories in which his focus is on purely visual imagery.

Director's Village project | Strike the Right Note

A clumsy recreational triangle player gets the extraordinary opportunity to be conducted by the greatest conductor in the entire world. Only the concert is on Friday the thirteenth.

Janneke van Heesch | Director

Janneke van Heesch obtained her Master in Film studies at the University of Amsterdam,
after which she graduated as a filmdirector at the Netherlands Film Academy. Since then,
she went on to direct commercials, short films, television series and feature films. Her track
record and versatility ranges from experimental, art house, comedy to children’s movies. Her
films were screened at Film Festivals worldwide and broadcasted in several European
countries. Next to this, she is working at the Netherlands Film Academy as directing coach.
She is specialized in script development and directing actors.

Sofia Norlin | Director

Sofia Norlin (Director, Sweden) lives in Paris, and has been working with film and theater in both France and Sweden since 1994. She also works regularly as a film educator for young people in Paris and as a teacher at Stockholm University of the Arts (formerly StDH). In 2011, Norlin was awarded a feature film scholarship from the Stockholm Film Festival, which then became her feature film debut, Ömheten (2013). Sofia Norlin is now working on a new feature film project that will take her through large parts of Europe. The film is co-written with Jean-Pol Fargeau, and has the working name Riviera.