Mentors

Thanos Anastopoulos is scriptwriter, director and film producer.  In 2004 his first feature film “Atlas – All the weight of the world” premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival. His second feature film “Correction” premiered at the Berlin Film Festival (Forum) and his third feature film “The Daughter“ premiered at the Berlin Film Festival (Forum). In 2016 his latest film “L’ultima spiaggia” (co-directed with Davide Del Degan) made its world premiere in the official selection of Cannes Film Festival.

Born in 1978 in Montargis, France, Philippe Barrière has a Masters in philosophy and formal logic at La Sorbonne University. Script consulting is way for him to combine his interest for analysis and his passion for cinema.

Over the past years, Philippe Barrière has had several relevant experiences in the field of script consulting such as head of the development for Mille et une Productions or, since 2010, as an independent script consultant.

After a PhD in Sociology, Erica Barbiani left the secluded academic world with a longing for storytelling. Plots, she suspected, were a better way to capture the audience’s attention. Since 2003, she has been producing films for Videomante, a company based in Italy. Her recent productions include THE SPECIAL NEED by Carlo Zoratti, co-produced with DETAiLFILM, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and winner of the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig, and THE GOOD LIFE, the first documentary of the Italian author Niccolo Ammaniti. She is co-writing the script of WISHING ON A STAR, by Slovakian director Peter Kerekes. Erica is a published author of two novels. Her latest work, Pericolo Gattino – an illustrated short story about a group of cats who enjoy crossing the streets unsafely – was just released in Italian bookstores. Erica is stepping away from production to dedicate herself full-time to writing and story editing. She can read scripts in English, French, Spanish and Italian, her mother tongue.

Helen Beltrame-Linné is a Brazilian screenwriter and script consultant with a wide artistic and corporate background. Helen graduated from Brazil’s most prestigious Law School and worked as a corporate lawyer for many years before giving in to her passion and attending Film Studies in Paris. She worked for years with Brazilian director José Padilha and his Rio de Janeiro-based production company Zazen, where she managed the private funding and independent distribution of the Brazilian all-time box office record, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (2010). In 2014, Helen was hired as CEO of The Bergman Center Foundation and festival director of the Bergman Week, both based on the island of Fårö (Sweden). where she also acted. Back to Brazil in 2018, Helen served as editor for the country’s largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo. Presently, her main focus is storytelling in fiction features and series, mostly in Brazil, the USA and Europe, where she has taken part in the TFL Script Lab and is currently a mentor in programs such as the Full Circle Lab and the Pop Up Film Residency. Her most recent works include the adaptation of Leonardo Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs, the Amazon series 5X Comedy and the reworking of Michelangelo Antonioni’s legendary script, Technically Sweet.

Julie Billy studied film in NYC and international co-productions at La Fémis’s Atelier in France and in Germany after working for Celluloid Dreams as a production assistant.
She has joined Haut et Court in 2010 and handled international co-productions such as Zero Motivation by Talya Lavie, The Kindergarden Teacher by Nadav Lapid and The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos as well as the production of A journey through China by Zoltan Mayer.

Daniel studied directing at the Danish alternative film school Super16. His short films have premiered in A-list festivals, with LARS AND PETER officially selected for Cannes in 2009 and BERIK winning the Grand Prix in Cannes in 2010. His debut feature THE WEIGHT OF ELEPHANTS premiered in Berlin in 2013. His second feature film LOVING PIA had its world premiere in Berlin in 2017. The two feature films were developed at Cannes Cinefondation Residence and Berlinale Residence respectively making Daniel one of the very few directors in the world, being selected for both. In 2019 Daniel completed his 3rd feature film HARPIKS, a co-production between Adomeit Film and Zentropa made with support from the DFI, TV2 and FilmFyn.

Nadja Dumouchel is currently engaged as a script consultant and tutor for several film labs. She is fully dedicated to the international art house film scene – accompanying a story’s process of gestation, its forming into worlds, words and images has become her main focus. As an independent story editor, Nadja is working with various filmmakers around the world on the development of their feature films and training international producing students on the intercultural aspects of scriptwriting (Filmakademie Ludwigsburg).

Giacomo Durzi has mostly been working as a scriptwriter for several production companies and for television networks. His experience includes credits as creative producer on feature films and as script consultant in many film productions. Currently he’s story editor and creative producer for SKY Italy, consulting on the development of the original production of tv series. 

He has teached screenwriting at the DFFB (Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin), IFS (International Filmschule Koln), MASPA-Università La Sapienza di Roma, and currently at Holden school of Torino, and works as tutor and script consultant for different film training programs.

Along with Çagla Zencirci, they form a directorial duo based in Paris and Istanbul, and they directed several short films in the Middle-East, Europe, Central Asia and Far-East, selected in more than 200 Festivals worldwide (Berlinale, Locarno, Rotterdam, Tampere, FIDMarseille, Clermont-Ferrand, etc.) and awarded more than 40 times.

Noor (2012), their first feature-length film presented at the ACID section of the 65th Festival de Cannes, Ningen (2013) premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013, and  Sibel (2018) premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and was awarded the Prize of the Youth Jury, the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the FIPRESCI Prize.

Katerina is a scriptwriter and script consultant for film and TV. After completing her studies in Psychology at the Athens University and Film at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU in 2002, she joined the programming team of the Thessaloniki Film Festival. She later moved on to work as commissioning editor for Greek broadcasters, as freelance script consultant on feature films and series, and as an expert for various European film and TV funding schemes.

Juraj Krasnohorský is a film producer based in Bratislava and a co-founder of Pop Up Film Residency. He lived for 14 years in Geneva, Bilbao and Paris where he studied physics, mathematics and film.
In 2010 he founded production company Artichoke and released his debut feature film as director Tigers in the City (2012). As a creative producer, he currently works on several animated, feature-length and documentary films. His co-produced short film Superbia (2016) competed at Semaine de la Critique in Cannes. He is an EAVE alumnus and head of the CEE Animation Workshop.
Among expected titles under his production aegis are a four-country stop motion animation Of Unwanted Things and People and animation White Plastic Sky.

Britta Krause is a script editor and director. She has been working as a tutor with emerging screenwriters for Kultburo Moscow, Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, Nipkow Programm, Berlin, and Nisi Masa’s European Short Pitch workshops. She was a script editor trainee at TorinoFilmLab’s Script&Pitch workshop in 2012 before joining the laboratory again in 2018 as trainer for FeatureLab. Britta is currently teaching Script Development Strategies at Filmakademie Ludwigsburg to students of the International Producing program as well as working one on one with writers and directors from all over Europe.

Domenico La Porta is the editor of Cineuropa, the online media focusing on the European audiovisual industry and available in 4 languages since 2002.

He is experienced as a journalist, script doctor and a transmedia author/producer and he has been involved with 40+ narrative projects for the last 15 years including academy awards nominees.

In 2014, he became the head of the Wallimage Creative fund in Belgium. Wallimage Creative is investing 1M€ per year in digital creation and transmedia storytelling.

In 2016, he was appointed director of the R/O institute, a project-based incubator for Narrative Intellectual Properties (NIP). The 8-months training programme is helping a new generation of storytellers to unfold their narratives across platforms (gaming, series, film, VR, comics…) while keeping their story world in check. Talents are also developing a tailored made business model that will position their NIP as a competitive ecosystem in the global market.

Aside from those complementary activities, Domenico frequently works as an international consultant in storytelling, audience mapping, creative funding and multi streams revenue models. He gives lectures around the world and teaches transmedia related courses in a master programme.

Teodora Ana Mihai was born in Bucharest, Romania, studied film at Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York. Upon returning to Belgium, she first started working in the industry as a script supervisor and assistant director, followed by a stint in the TV industry. Teodora is a member of the European Film Academy.

Her films take on the challenge of striking a balance between social relevance and audio-visual poetry. Among other things, the creative documentary Waiting for August was nominated for the European Film Awards in 2014, and in 2021, her La Civil, produced by her Belgian based company One for the Road bvba, in collaboration with Mexican writer Habacuc Antonio De Rosario premiered in the Un Certain Regard of the Festival de Cannes.

Benjamin Mirguet is an editor, consultant, director, and festival curator. As an editor, he was involved in films such as Batalla en el cielo (Carlos Reygadas), Meteora (Spiros Stathoulopoulos), 40 Days Of Silence (Saodat Ismailova), Dau (Ilya Khrzhanovski), Deadweight (Axel Koenzen), The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid… (Ben Rivers), Together Forever (Lina Luzyte), Rey (Niles Atallah), Memory House (Joao Paulo Miranda Maria), etc.

He has been involved as consultant editor for First Cut Lab since the very first edition in 2015. He designed a Trailer Workshop for the Istanbul Film Festival and was an editing tutor for Doha Film Institute’s Qumra.

Dénes Nagy was born in 1980 in Budapest. He studied film directing at the University of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE) in Budapest in the class of János Szász. As a guest student, he spent a year at the Berlin Film Academy (DFFB).

He has made several documentaries and fiction films screened at many significant national and international festivals. His short fiction Soft Rain was first presented to the international audience in Cannes at the 45th Directors’ Fortnight selection, while his documentary Another Hungary had its premiere at the 43rd International Film Festival Rotterdam. His debut feature film, Natural Light, was selected for the 71st Berlin Film Festival 2021 and awarded Silver Bear for the Best Director.

He lives and works in Budapest.

Michał Oleszczyk is a script consultant, story editor and film scholar based in Warsaw. He works as an Assistant Professor at Artes Liberales Department of the University of Warsaw and teaches Script Development at Warsaw Film School. He also works as Story Editor with Canal+ Poland. His writing on film has appeared at “Cineaste”, RogerEbert.com, and at Criterion Collection website.

Michal has served multiple times as a screenplay evaluation expert at Polish Film Institute and Polish regional funds; between 2013-2016 worked as the Artistic Director of Poland’s largest festival of Polish films, the Gdynia Film Festival.

He is a guest script consultant at Screenplay Atelier and StoryLab.pro, two of the leading screenwriting workshops in Poland, as well as chief programmer for the ViSTa Lab workshop. He has been awarded the Polish Film Institute Award for Best Polish Critic, the Jan Machulski Honorary Award for the continuous support of independent Polish Filmmaking, as well as Krzysztof Mętrak Award for Best Young Polish Critic.

Kallia Papadaki is a professional author, screenwriter and script doctor and works as the commissioning editor for the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation. Her first feature script for the Penny Panayotopoulou’s Greco-German coproduced film September won the International Balkan Fund Script Development Award in 2010, received a Nipkow scholarship in Berlin. The film premiered at the official competition of the 48^th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. In 2020, she co-wrote the mini-series 42 C which premiered on the Cosmote TV cable platform. Her second feature script Wishbone is a Greek-French-German-Cyrpiot coproduction scheduled to be filmed in February 2022.       

 She teaches scriptwriting in the Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos and creative writing in the post-graduate department of the Metropolitan College.

Following cinema and literature studies in Paris and Rome, Laura Piani started her professional life as a documentary director. She studied scriptwriting at the Conservatoire Européen d’Ecriture Audiovisuelle in Paris and graduated in 2011. She works as a script consultant for different productions company and she teaches scriptwriting at l’ESRA and at CEEA in Paris where she lives. She’s currently working on a romantic comedy produced by The Bureau and co-writing 2 épisodes of Walkyries, a french and german coproduction serie produced by Banijay

Giovanni has worked since 2002 in development and production of over 20 documentaries and shorts in Italy and UK. He also directed (2011 Ilaria Alpi Award) and this expertise help him to understand and relate productive and artistic needs. At the end of 2011 he took the head of Kino produzioni and changed the core business of the company from TV service production to development and production of cinematic stories with emerging directors. He also founded in Rome with other 50 professionals a small theater/bistrot, Il Kino. From then he is also experiencing being a distributor and a vendor.

Jani Pösö, the CEO of It’s Alive Films, is a producer and screenwriter. He has produced 5 feature films and 3 TV-series, all of them internationally acclaimed. Jani wrote and produced his first theatre play in 1996, his first short film in 2006, his first feature in 2011 and his first book in 2018. He is also behind It’s Alive Films’ multi-remade TV-format Mental. Jani has also produced music, theatre and events, established two advertising agencies and overseen a fashion brand.

Polish writer & director Agnieszka Smoczyńska made her feature debut with The Lure (2015) in which she experimented with musical & horror film genres. The film brought her dozens of awards around the world, incl. Montreal, Porto, Chicago, San Francisco, Sitges and at the Sundance Film Festival, where she received the Special Award for “unique vision and design” and was released via prestigious Janus Films and Criterion Collection in the US.
At the invitation of the Sydney Film Festival, Variety, and the European Film Promotion, Smoczyńska took part in the “European Cinema: Ten Women to Watch” program. Winner of the Global Filmmaking Award funded by the Sundance Institute.
Her second film Fugue (2018) was invited to the prestigious competition La Semaine de la Critique at the 71st Festival de Cannes and won several statuettes around the world.
Her English-language debut Silent Twins with Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance has been selected for Un Certain Regard section of the 75th Festival de Cannes.

Joëlle Touma started writing screenplays in 1998. At that time she was also a TV host and an actress in Lebanon. She then became the Beirut correspondent for the French daily Libération and the Belgian daily Le Soir, also working as a fixer in Lebanon with several media outlets. Since 2006, she has been dedicating herself only to writing screenplays. She has worked with Ziad Doueiri (Lila says 2004, The Attack 2011 and The Insult, nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2018) and Rachid Bouchareb (Just Like a Woman 2011). She also wrote for Le Bureau des Légendes, a French series produced par Canal+.

Pinelopi Valti is a production designer and art director, known for Strella by Panos X. Koutras   (2009), Xenia by Panos X. Koutras (2014),  THE SON OF SOFIA by Elina Psykou (2016) and THE TAILOR by Sonia Lisa Kendermann (2019).

Sebastian Winkels was born in Kleve in 1968 as the fourth of five children. He is a director, cameraman, editor and dramaturge of observational documentaries. His short and feature films, such as 7 Brüder or Talking Money (2017), have received numerous awards and been shown at international festivals.
Sebastian Winkels teaches and develops training programs for creative documentary films. Since 2006 he has been working as a tutor for international documentary film forums. He is part of the FirstCutLab team as an editing consultant since 2019.