Guests 2021

Costa Rican-Swedish scriptwriter and director. She got a degree in Mime Performance in Sweden and graduated with a master’s degree in Film Directing and Screenplay. Former student of the Berlinale Talents, the TIFF Filmmaker Lab and the NYFF Artist Academy. Her short film FILIP won the award for Best Film under 15 minutes at the 2016 Palm Springs Shortfest. She is working on her second feature film, at the 2021 Torino ScriptLab. Her debut feature film premiered at Cannes.

Scriptwriter, director and cultural manager, specialized in audiovisual development and training programs. She has been living in Madrid for two decades. After several short films, she presents her debut feature, Crónica de una tormenta, at the Malaga Film Festival 2020 Official Competition and at many other festivals. She is currently working on her next project Todo lo que puedas imaginar.

Born in Alicante on September 10, 1940, she spent her childhood and teen years until she was 20 years old, in Equatorial Guinea. Cecilia Bartolomé, who developed her career in documentary and advertising cinema, made feminist, modern and fun cinema. She was a pioneer in addressing issues in her films that were socially and politically taboo, such as abortion, divorce, or Spanish colonialism, or current hot issues such as the Political Transition to democracy in Spain, for which she received multiple awards.

Manager, disseminator and cultural communicator, she is a member of the CortoEspaña Commission. She has been Head of press and communication for several productions and for the Madrid Film Festival for two years where she was also on the selection committee. She has a weekly section on a programme on a local radio where she talks about everything related to culture and especially the seventh art that she calls after her website, Paseando a Miss Cultura. 

She is the creator of the blog 'laqueta, Luces y Acción'. Since she was little, she has loved cinema and for the last three years she has been a member of the jury of the Golden Blogs, also participating in the Women Film Festival on their behalf as a jury. In 2020 she made her first short, "Alcor 2030", for a contest during confinement. She loves photography, traveling, she is enterprising, curious and active by nature.

Graduated in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country and as a violin teacher from the JC Arriaga Conservatory of Bilbao. She studied at the ‘Taller de Musics’ and at Pompeu Fabra University. She was awarded a scholarship to study at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, in the United States and was selected to participate in the Berlinale Talents.

Her first collaboration with Borja Cobeaga was nominated for a Goya The first time and the second one for an Academy Award Éramos pocos.

Journalist covering armed conflicts in Middle Eastern countries since 2011, she has lived in Jerusalem, Cairo and Istanbul. She collaborates with media such as Antena 3, El Confidencial and France24, and her line of research focuses on jihadist radicalisation and the repercussions of the war fronts on European security. Winner of the BBVA Leonardo Scholarship in 2018 and the Young Journalist of the Year Award from the Madrid Press Association in 2014, she has published an investigation on European jihadists in the book El infiel que habita en mí and Refugiados.

She studied Art History at the University of Barcelona, Film Directing at the Center for Film Studies of Catalonia and Narrative and Novel at the School of Writing of the Ateneo in Barcelona. She finished her studies to give voice to her family history linked to the Spanish political violence of the 20th century and to find ways of collective reparation beyond conflict and trauma. She started La Cigüeña de Burgos in 2014 and studied Process Oriented Psychology to support hers and other people’s search. In 2020 she managed to finish her self-produced debut feature.

Originally from the Mixteca Oaxaqueña, Ángeles Cruz is an actress, director and screenwriter. Her promising debut as a filmmaker and screenwriter was in 2012 with the short film La tiricia o como curar la tristeza with which she won the Ariel award for Best Short Film in 2013. In 2013 she wrote and directed the short film La carta, nominated for Best Mexican Short Film at the 2015 Ariel Awards.

Historian and film critic, he is the director of the magazine Caimán Cuadernos de Cine. Professor of History of Spanish Cinema at ECAM. Author of numerous essays, historiographical studies and monographs on various authors (Sam Peckinpah, John Huston, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Eric Rohmer, José Luis Borau, John Cassavetes, Iván Zulueta, Montxo Armendáriz, Wong Kar- Kai, Aki Kaurismäki, etc.). He is also the author of the book Encrucijada: cine, festivales, plataformas.

Cinephile, filmmaker and film critic, he has studied several courses in scriptwriting and filmmaking in person and online. He has written and directed more than 20 short and medium-length films, in addition to the feature film "El Amor es un Suicidio". Shortly after he founded the website "Universo Cinema", in 2020 and after collaborating in media such as "Séptimo Vicio" and "Cinemagavia", he joined the editorial team of "No es cine todo lo que reluce" where he currently works as editor and film critic.

Cecilia Felméri was born in 1978 in Cluj Napoca, she graduated from the University La Sapienza and completed a master's degree from the National University of Cinema I.L. Caragiale. Her short films competed at the Locarno International Film Festival, the Warsaw International Film Festival, the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, the DokLeipzig Film Festival, and the Transylvania International Film Festival, and won more than 20 awards.

Born in 1975, she graduated in Cinema History at the University La Sapienza in Rome. She collaborated with Film Italia, the public agency in charge of promoting Italian cinema abroad, curating national and international projects. She produced a few shorts and a feature film. She programmed and was consultant for a few film festivals. Since 2003 she has worked as Head of Programming at the Noir in Festival. After working at Giornate degli Autori (GDA) as a programmer and head of programming since the very first edition, in 2020 she was appointed as the new artistic director of GDA.

She studied at the Royal Conservatory of Madrid. Afterwards she was granted a Fullbright scholarship at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and graduated with Magna Cum Laude. With a scholarship from the Hungarian government, she studied the Kodaly method at the University of Esztergom. Her work has been performed by the Prague Symphony Orchestra, the RTVE Orchestra and the Ara Malikian Chamber Group. She has received the Goya Award and the Cinematographic Writers Circle Award for Best Original Score.

Belén García-Noblejas is the representative of China Women's Film Festival for the Focus China of the IV edition of the Women's Film Festival. With a Master's degree in International Relations from the Shanghai Foreign Studies University and coordinator of the cultural section of the Instituto Cervantes in Beijing between 2015 and 2018, Belén is currently a lecturer on the history and culture of China, India and Japan at the Francisco de Vitoria University in Madrid, as well as a manager of intercultural projects between Spain and Asia.

Master's degree in theatre, film and television and media. She studied communication and economics at the Ruhr University of Bochum, while she worked as a dramatic consultant in theatre projects. She is a film curator, press officer, and freelance journalist for IFFF Dortmund + Köln, Maren Kroymann, Kinofest Lünen, dokumentarfilminitiative, FIDENA, Gütesiegel Kultur, bobiennale, Deutsche Kinemathek, Kino @ Gefängnis, International Filmfest Bundeney-Norband, International Filmfestney, Emmunden-Norbandder Kultur. Kinos, German Short Film Awards, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, German Film Week Kabul, Goethe-Institute in Ankara and Kabul. In 2020 she co-founded the Wuppertal "Future Now" Women's Music Festival.

Audiovisual producer and entrepreneur. President of the State Association of Film Producers, member of the Board of Directors of the Spanish Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and teacher. Founding partner of Bowfinger, national and international producer. In recent years she has produced more than 25 blockbuster films such as Padre no hay más que uno. In 2021, she produced A todo tren, Destino Asturias, Llegaron de noche and Lobo Feroz. Her next projects are El Refugio, De caperucita a loba en sólo 6 tíos and Mamá está en Tinlink.

Composer, orchestrator and sound designer, she has created music and sound imagery for films, stage works, videogames and other audio-visual formats. She also possesses an extensive catalogue of concert works, both orchestral and electroacoustic. She has been nominated for her scores to awards such as the Jerry Goldsmith or Fimucinema.

Degrees in journalism and audiovisual communication (2017). She is a predoctoral researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid (2020-2024). Her field of study encompasses textual analysis, social media, and education. She is currently writing her PhD dissertation The image of the feminine in Sleeping Beauty. She has participated in international congresses such as; Almodóvar on the couch. Questions about cinema and gender and When the Body Speaks Itself. The Unconscious and Its Effects in Pain and Glory.

Paula Hernández studied at the Universidad del Cine of Buenos Aires; she was a fellow at the Berlinale Talent Campus. With her first feature film, Herencia, she won the First Feature Award at the INCAA in Argentina. Lluvia was awarded at the Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival and won Best Film at the Mannheim Film Festival. Los sonámbulos had its world premiere at the TIFF and was selected for the San Sebastian Film Festival.

Writer, director and co-founder of ToyBox Films, she has participated twice at the Berlinale Talents, at the BAFTA Guru Pro, at the BFI NET.WORK and at the Northern Film & Media. She is a member of the Time's Up / Rising Women, Primetime and Cinesisters UK. Along with Giannina La Salvia, she has co-produced, co-directed and edited 512 Hours’ a feature documentary about the same name exhibition by iconic performance artist Marina Abramovic.

After finishing her degree in Audiovisual Communication, she specialised in film directing by taking the 1-Year Filmmaking Program at the NYFA. On his return to the Basque Country he created the production company Gariza Films. Between 2010 and 2014 he wrote and directed five short films: Bicycle Poem, Kea, Next Stop: Greenland, Sormenaren Bide Ezkutuak and Larroxa. In 2015, he premiered his first feature-length fiction film Un otoño sin Berlín in San Sebastian. Since 2016, she has been working as a producer at Gariza Films. She has co-produced the feature films: Errementari, Vitoria, 3 de Marzo, Muga deitzen da pausoa, Fabricando mujeres and Una ventana al mar. And also two short films: Bayandalai: lord of the Taiga and Ya no duermo.

Margarita Ledo Andión was honored with the National Galician Culture Award by the Xunta de Galicia. She is a journalist, writer, communication professor, member of the Royal Galician Academy, filmmaker and a political and cultural activist. As a filmmaker, she made her directorial debut with the diptych formed by Santa Liberdade (2004), the first film in the original Galician version directed by a woman to be released in theaters, and Liste (2007). In 2012 she directed A cicatriz branca (2012), her first fiction feature film.

Konex Award 2021, Valeria Lois is a film, TV and theatre actress. She trained with Hugo Midón, Pompeyo Audivert, Ciro Zorzoli, Paco Giménez, Alejandro Catalán, Augusto Fernandes and Guillermo Angelelli. In theatre she has acted in La Mujer Puerca (Teatro del Mundo Award for Best Female Actress), La vida extraordinaria, La verdad, Invencible, Bajo terapia, Esplendor, Estado de Ira, Crónicas, Brecht, Cineastas, Dos Minas and Paraná Porá, under the direction of renowned directors. She has also participated in numerous films, including Historia del miedo, La larga noche de Francisco Sanctis, Anoche, Re loca, Los sonámbulos and Las siamesas.

María Macarro has a degree in Information Sciences and East Asian Studies. She has spent long periods of time in China, completing her training at the Beijing Film Academy where she acquired her knowledge of Chinese cinema. She has worked for more than 15 years as a television editor and is currently Coordinator of the Confucius Institute in Madrid. 

Since 1995, Amaia Merino has worked professionally as a film editor, having edited more than 25 feature films (co-writer in many of them). She is co-director, co-writer, co-producer and editor of the feature-length documentary Asier ETA Biok, winner of the Irizar Award at the San Sebastian Film Festival 2013, among other international awards, and commercially released in cinemas in Spain, France and Ecuador.

Cèlia Novis is a scriptwriter, filmmaker and journalist. In recent years she has written, produced and directed three feature documentary films: On Vampyres and other Symptoms (2007-2011, Spain) which competed and participated in several international film festivals (Sitges IFF, Documenta Madrid, BAFICI Argentina, FIFA Montreal, MARFICI, Off Screen Belgium, etc.); The Minorcans: 250 years of survival (2016-2018, USA & Spain) a documentary for television; and, finally, Once Upon a Place (2021, USA).

She is a film event organizer, a specialist in film promotion and a university professor. President of the Council of the Krakow Film Foundation, whose main objective is the promotion of cinematographic art and the support of Polish filmmakers and producers. She is the Head of the Programming Department of the Krakow Film Festival. She worked at a film distribution company, where she was responsible for film events and marketing. She is the CEO of the KFF Sales & Promotion agency, which she created in 2005 to reinforce the international promotion of Polish documentaries, animations and short films. She has been a member of the jury at many festivals.

Doctor in Philosophy, professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid and co-director of a master's degree in screenwriting. She has participated in books such as Cine documental en América Latina, Cinéma et Révolution o El cine documental. Una encrucijada estética y política Inquisiciones contemporáneas al sistema audiovisual. She has been a programmer for Documenta Madrid and for the Granada International Film Festival. She participates in a research project on the Latin American ICAIC Newscast.

Degree in Psychology (UPCO, Madrid), Master in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, (UCM, Madrid). Master in Psychoanalysis and Theory of Culture, (UCM, Madrid). Currently, the coordinator of the psychotherapy program at FUNDHOS, aimed at people at risk of social exclusion and is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She is the author of a dissertation on the Ethics of psychoanalysis in clinical praxis (UCM Philosophy, Madrid) and has different publications on human rights, feminism and migration.

She is a journalist, feminist and comedian. Throughout her career, she has written in media such as El País, Vogue, Esquire, Marie Claire and Glamour. As a comedian, her monologue Feminismo para torpes has brought her great success with audiences in theater and it also gives name to a series of videos for the newspaper El País in which she, from a humorous perspective, criticizes sexist roles and behaviours of our society. Nerea has recently published her first book Feminismo para torpes and participates in the Movistar + TV show Las que faltaban.

Writer and director of short films screened and awarded at numerous festivals and museums around the world. Malpartida Fluxus Village was her first feature film. The film, dedicated to the German artist Wolf Vostell and his Fluxus Museum in the small Extremaduran town of Malpartida de Cáceres. The film toured more than 30 international festivals and won important awards. Karen her first feature film, premiered at the official section of de European Cinema Festival in Sevilla. María has been highlighted as a new emerging talent by Variety magazine.

Nathalie Poza trained as an actor at the Cristina Rota School. She has worked hand in hand with directors such as Alejandro Amenábar in Mientras dure la guerra - Goya 2020 nomination for Best Supporting Actress-; Icíar Bollaín in La boda de Rosa -Biznaga de Plata for Best Supporting Actress award and Goya award-; Manuel Martín Cuenca in Malas temporadas –nominated for the Goya award for Best Leading Actress–; and, with Mariano Barroso in Todas las mujeres - nominated for Goya for Best Supporting Actress–. She received her first Goya for Best Leading Actress for No sé decir adiós, directed by Lino Escalera.

Graduated in Management from ESCAC. He co-founded the online platform Filmin and manages the Atlántida Film Fest, is a producer, scriptwriter, teacher and director of documentaries. He was Editorial Director at the independent film distributor Cameo. He was vice-president of EUROVOD, the first European association in charge of distributing online cinema that works in the 28 countries of the European Union. He has been a jury in the festivals of Berlin, In-Edit and Sitges.

Spanish scriptwriter and director, she graduated with a master’s degree in Script from Columbia University. 10,000KM, her first film as a co-screenwriter, became the winner of the Malaga Festival and the Goya for Best New Director. Since then, she has co-written Petra, Els dies que vindràn and Costa Brava, Lebanon. As director, she has premiered her first feature film, Libertad, at Cannes 2021 and will open the official SEMINCI competition.

Composer, orchestrator and sound designer, she has created music and sound imagery for films, stage works, videogames and other audio-visual formats. She also possesses an extensive catalogue of concert works, both orchestral and electroacoustic. She has been nominated for her scores to awards such as the Jerry Goldsmith or Fimucinema.

She graduated in Information Sciences and holds a master’s degree in "The Bussines of Television" from New York University. She develops her career at Canal +, now Movistar +, where she is Responsible for Spanish cinema. She was a curator at the 2008 project Culturas and a member of the Evaluation committee of the animation call of proposals for both Feature Film Development and Feature Film Production at the Call of the Fund for Cinematographic development of Colombia, FDC, in 2015.

She is an Afghan writer and director based in Kabul, where she studied at Atelier Varan. She directed her first feature film, Wolf and Sheep’ at just 20 years old and with the help of Cinéfondation in 2010, being the youngest director selected so far. She won the Best Director Award at the Directors' Fortnight in 2016. Her second feature film, The Orphanage, is the second part after Wolf and Sheep in a series of 5 autobiographical films. It was presented in 2019, in the Directors' Fortnight and won the Best Film Award at the 2020 Madrid Women's Film Festival.

Lucía Salas is the co-editor of the magazine La vida útil, a programmer at the Punto de Vista Festival and Woche der Kritik, a teacher at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, a collaborator in Con Los Ojos Abiertas and Jugend ohne film. As part of LaSiberia Cine she has co-directed Implantación and Los Exploradores. She studied Image and Sound (UBA), Aesthetics and Politics (CalArts) and is currently preparing a PhD in Communication at UPF.

Independent filmmaker and producer, founder of the production company Alba Sotorra SL, based in Barcelona. Her films, all created under a gender-conscious perspective and with a link to the social and political reality of the moment, have premiered at multiple recognized international festivals. As outstanding projects, she has directed the documentary feature film Game Over, which received the 8th Gaudí Award from the Catalan Film Academy; Comandante Arian, nominated for the Gaudí Awards for best documentary in 2019; and The Return: Life after ISIS selected at the SXSW, Hot Docs, Berlin Human Rights, Zurich, Warsaw, Sheffield, Thessaloniki and at DOCS Barcelona, where it won the Audience and Young Jury awards.

He holds a PhD in Communication from the Universidad Autónoma of Barcelona and is a professor at the Universidad Carlos III. He has collaborated in specialized magazines and since 2000 he writes for Fotogramas. He was a critic for El País and is the author, among many others, of Joaaquim Oristrell: el oficio en plural and Realismo, compromiso, poesía. In 2008, he was curator of the anthology Stories in common. 40 years/50 films of ibero-American cinema. He has been a jury member at, among others, the Locarno, Turin and San Sebastián festivals. 

Film and television director, producer and scriptwriter. He graduated in Economics and Business Administration and in Journalism. He has participated in the direction, production and scriptwriting of ‘Los Serrano’, Torrente 2: Misión en Marbella and El espinazo del diablo. He has been Coordinator of special programs for Canal Plus, Content director for Paramount Comedy, critic for Fotogramas magazine and El País and Creative Executive of original programming for HBO Spain.

He started out as a photographer, publishing in Glamour Magazine, GeoPlaneta and other independent publications. His first short documentary film was Green Water. In the United States, he worked as a cinematographer and programmer for Arclight Hollywood. Influenced by auteurs such as Wong Kar-Wai and Kim Ki-Duk, he moved to China and focused on analogue photography. He directed the cinematography for Lisa Zi Xiang's A Dog Barking at the Moon. He has just released his feature directorial debut: Ombligo.

Master’s in film and Philosophy from King's College, and pre-doctoral researcher and professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. She collaborates in the coordination of the Master in LGBTIQ + Studies at the UCM. Her thesis focuses on the representation of queer desires, bodies and identities in Latin American cinema. She has published various articles and chapters on queer cinema, LGBTIQ + television and women's cinema.

Born in 1974, Fernando Zamácola Feijóo holds a degree in Economics and Business Administration, an MBA and a Master in Project Management. He is a certified evaluator in the EFQM model of organisational excellence and in Long Life Learning Programme projects of the European Commission. He has dedicated most of his professional career to the management of European projects and to the world of consultancy in talent management and organisational culture projects for large organisations. Since 2019, she has been directing the Miguel Delibes Foundation with the challenge of contributing to generate reflections in society on the issues that concerned Delibes, mainly the rural environment, nature, childhood and equal opportunities.

Chinese director and screenwriter. In Beijing she graduated in Economics and studied independent cinema. She studied filmmaking at the MFA program from the New York Film Academy. Her feature film debut, A Dog Barking at the Moon won a Teddy Jury Award at the Berlinale. After a tedious fight against censorship, her film was banned in her home country. She is currently preparing her second feature film, Barcelona Graffiti, by Acorn Studio.