Imagining a Radically New Way to Curate
Kaleem Aftab is a film producer, festival strategist and critic. Internationally renowned for conducting engaging interviews, observing cinema trends and populating film festivals, he writes about film for major international publications and is frequently seen on television. Mr. Aftab authored the official Spike Lee biography, That’s My Story and I’m Sticking To It. He lives in London.
Bedatri Choudhury studied literature and cinema in New Delhi and attended graduate school in Cinema Studies at Tisch School of the Arts. She has worked extensively with documentary films, particularly in the areas of production, commissioning, and outreach. She is an editor and film critic, and loves to write on film and culture from a prism of feminism and post-colonialism. Her writings have been published in Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Buzzfeed, Mubi Notebook and Bitch Magazine, among others. She has worked with publishing houses, an advertising agency, a newspaper, documentary film outfits and a theater company, thereby developing a passion for intersectionality of all cultural products. An alumna of the NYFF Critics Academy, Sundance and SXSW Press Inclusion Initiatives, and National Critics' Institute, she lives in New York City. You can find her writing on www.bedatri.com
Faridah Gbadamosi is a pop culture obsessed lover of film working towards making the space more inclusive. In particular, her interests are in changing the space of tastemakers, both in what gets curated as well as who does the curating. She is currently the Director of Programming for Coven Film Festival, a festival that showcases the work of filmmakers from marginalized genders, Lead Programmer of OUTstream Film Festival, an online queer film festival and the US Indies Programming Fellow for the 43rd Mill Valley Film Festival. She was recently named as one of the fellows of the inaugural Film Festival Leadership Lab from the Film Festival Alliance and Full Spectrum Features.
Elma Tataragić (1976) is a scriptwriter, professor and festival programmer. She graduated Dramaturgy at Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts and obtained her Master of Science degree and PhD in Film and Literature. She has been with Sarajevo Film Festival since it was founded in 1995, where she now works as selector for Competition Programs and CineLink Industry Days.
She co-wrote short film FIRST DEATH EXPERIENCE (2001) and wrote and produced short NORTH WENT MAD (2003), both directed by Aida Begić. She has produced and co-written the feature film SNOW (2008) also directed by A. Begić, shown in the Semaine de la critique at Cannes Film Festival 2008, where the film won the Grand Prix. The film has been shown at over 80 festivals and won over 30 international awards.
She has been teaching screenwriting at Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts since 2002, now as a professor and Dean for International collaborations and scientific-art research. She is a member of European Film Academy and has published two books on screenwriting and also works as a script consultant.
In 2016 she completed her short fiction film I REMEMBER, which was screened and awarded at numerous film festivals. The feature film WHEN THE DAY HAD NO NAME (2017) directed by Teona Mitevska which she has co-written premiered in Panorama Special at Berlinale 2017. GOD EXISTS, HER NAME IS PETRUNYA, written by Elma Tataragić and directed by Teona S. Mitevska, has premiered at Berlin Film Festival Competition in 2019, while the film STITCHES, directed by Serbian director Miroslav Terzić and written by Elma Tataragić has opened in Panorama section. Both films are currently touring film festivals and winning awards including the Best Screenplay Award for Elma at Las Palmas Film Festival in Spain. She’s currently developing two new feature films and a new short experimental film.
She was General Secretary of the Association of Filmmakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the period 2001-2019 and in 2019 she was elected President of the Association. She is also head of all the programs in the Association of Filmmakers.
Paula Alvarez Vaccaro, born in Argentina, is an award winning journalist, scriptwriter, producer, and visual artist with over twenty five years of experience working in film, radio, printed media, TV and independent artistic practice. Based in England since 2000, she founded Pinball London in 2009, a production company based in London, UK, with an independent-cinema spirit at the heart to tell stories in all genres from an international perspective with a special emphasis on storytelling that focuses on gender, LGBT, human rights, immigration, minorities, class, and our planet. She has produced and/or written narrative and documentary features, TV series, and animated and narrative shorts in co-productions with the US, Latin America and Europe. She has worked with world known filmmakers such as Sally Potter (GINGER and ROSA), Emir Kusturica (MARADONA by Kusturica; ON THE MILKY ROAD), Guillermo Arriaga (WORDS WITH GODS), and with emerging talent such as Victoria Solano (SUMERCE), Ana Rocha (LISTEN), Agustina Figueras (BORA BORA), Edoardo de Angelis (MOZZARELLA STORIES), and Aaron Brookner (UNCLE HOWARD). As an artist her video art work has been exhibited at various European institutions including Barcelona's CCCB (Contemporary Art Centre) and The Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia.
Since 2004, she has provided training for filmmakers in Latin America and Europe in pitching, production, impact producing, gender and implicit bias in partnership with national and international organisations such as British Council, Eurimages, Circle Doc Accelerator, Montenegro Film Agency, FIDBA Buenos Aires, DocMontevideo, DocsSP, GoodPitch, Impact Lab DocsMx, Thessaloniki Forum, ProPro Austria, Los Cabos FF, BAM Bogotá, UNAM Mexico, and Documentary Campus.
Within Pinball London, she leads Pinball Audiences, providing impact producing consultancy, strategy and training. She is a Sundance Alumna, a mentor and member of EWA (European Women's Audiovisual Network), a member of the DPA (Documentary Producers Alliance), a UK member of the European Film Academy, and Vice-president of the European Producers’ Club, where she was the first woman to enter their board in 2018.