Mohsen MAKHMALBAF

Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf is one of the world’s most influential filmmakers and a founder of the Iranian New Wave Cinema. He has received over 50 awards at international film festivals for his work, including Gabbeh (1996), A Moment of Innocence (1996), The Silence (1998), Kandahar (2001), and The President (2014). His film Kandahar was chosen as one of “All-TIME 100 Movies” by TIME magazine, and A Moment of Innocence (1996) was selected as one of 10 best films of the 1990s amongst directors of international film festivals. As a filmmaker with great influence over Iranian cinema, Makhmalbaf has dedicated the last decade working towards the growth of Afghan and Tajikistani cinema and continues to do so tirelessly.

FUJIOKA Asako

Fujioka Asako has worked at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival since 1993. After working as a programmer, she became the director of the Tokyo office and is now serving as the vice-chair of the board. Since 2009, Fujioka began organizing film workshops around Asia as the head of Documentary Dream Center (DD Center), and in 2018 launched a filmmakers’ residency program called Yamagata Documentary Dojo. As a producer, Fujioka Asako has worked on multiple documentaries including Nude at Heart (2021), and continues to support documentary filmmaking practices, global conversations around Japanese films, and audience outreach.

LEE Soojung

Director Lee Soojung graduated from the Korean Academy of Film Arts, and was active in a film movement group in the late 1980s. Since the 1990s, she has worked as a director of television documentaries and as a producer of feature films. Her first feature Jinsuk & Me (2012) is a documentary which was inspired by the Hope Bus movement which supported the middle-aged female worker who began a high-altitude crane protest at a shipyard in Busan in 2011. Lee Soojung co-directed Cruel State (2015) which documented the year following the Sewol Ferry disaster, and was invited to numerous international film festivals including the Busan International Film Festival for her films Time To Read Poems (2016), Sister J (2020), Pull (2024). Notably, Sister J (2020), which documents the 10 years of a dismissed worker's struggle and life, received the BIFF Mecenat Award at the Busan International Film Festival 2020.