This week’s special guest block will be documentary themed, with a panel of directors sharing their work experiences. We are honoured to welcome special guests, SERGEJ KRESO and FLOOR VAN DER MEULEN, to share their experience 'behind the scenes' when filmmaking abroad. Sergej will arrive straight (almost) from the airport, after nearly 3 years of shooting for his new long documentary 'HERE WE MOVE, HERE WE GROOVE'. He filmed everywhere, from Bosnia to Berlin, but which location was the most challenging? Director Floor van der Meulen recently directed the documentary 'THE LAST MALE ON EARTH' at an immense wildlife conservatory in Kenya. She joined the armed rangers on night patrols and created a successful film with a rhino in the lead. Curious? Come and listen to these award-winning directors share their incredible stories. This Q&A will be hosted by Britte Hermans (Creatief met Film).

MORE ABOUT SERGEJ

Sergej Kreso was born and raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and studied journalism at the University of Political Sciences. In Sarajevo he was very active in the New Primitives movement, an artistic movement including well-known names such as ‘The No Smoking Orchestra’ and ‘Elvis J. Kurtovic’. During the Yugoslav war in 1993, Sergej fled to the Netherlands, where he continued his career in filmmaking, journalism and music.

After a documentary trilogy about the war in 2011, he made ‘Coffee, Cake and Crematorium’, a film about the crematorium tourism between Germany and the Netherlands. This film marked the beginning of a new phase in Kreso’s work, reflecting on his personal fascination with human roots, identity and adaptability. These themes were explored in films like ‘Strange Folks’, about the power of language as a formative factor in gaining a new identity, ‘Asylum Seekas’, following young refugees who feel nostalgic towards their childhood spent in the refugee centers and ‘MijnstreekComplex’, in which a city’s coal mining history appears to still have a big influence on its young habitants. (source Halal - https://halal.amsterdam/)

MORE ABOUT FLOOR

After graduating from the Willem de Kooning Academy, Floor made her international debut as a documentary filmmaker in 2014 with Paradijsbestormers (Storming Paradise), followed by the successful short documentary 9 Days – From My Window In Aleppo (2016) which won the European Film Award for best documentary short and resulted in the follow-up story Greetings from Aleppo, made together with Issa Touma and Thomas Vroege. She made her debut as a fiction director in 2016 with In Vrijheid (In Exile) which was awarded a Golden Calf (aka Dutch Oscar) and she is currently developing her first fiction feature. This fall, her first feature-length documentary ‘The Last Male on Earth’ was released, a film about the last male Northern White Rhino.

In our OFFICIAL SELECTION, you can watch and meet the teams of:

DOWNWARD FACING DOGS

Directed by Karsten de Vreugd  | Live-Action | 11:23

When Mara hastily enters her yoga class she desperately tries to find her zen, only to find out her zen is at the end of letting out all her frustrations first.

AT FIRST SIGHT

Directed by Sjaak Rood | Animation | 16:10

A man and a woman drive straight towards one another. They hit the breaks just in time and come to a standstill, facing each other. They're both too stubborn to give way to the other. A life story begins.