Aliki is a Johannesburg-based South African documentary filmmaker and photographer. After completing her MA cum laude, in 2015 she started her own documentary production company, Elafos Productions to champion women’s stories, recognising the need to emphasise complex and strong roles for women both in front of and behind the lens. Her photojournalism has been featured in Al Jazeera Online, she has lectured at post-graduate symposiums and has been referenced by Pulitzer winner Greg Marinovich in his book Murder on Small Koppie. Aliki is currently heading up the Impact and Advocacy team in the newly formed Sisters Working In Film and Television Organisation. Strike A Rock is Aliki’s first documentary feature film, and was one of six projects chosen to pitch at Bertha's Good Pitch Kenya in 2016

Sedika Mojadidi is a documentary filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. She works as an independent producer and camera person for television and film. Her credits include: Motherland Afghanistan, (Independent Lens/ITVS) and Condoms and Conflict, (Guardian Mutlimedia) as well as television projects for ABC News, A&E, and Discovery.

Matthieu Rytz is a producer, curator, photographer and director. A visual anthropologist by training, his passion for photography and ethnology has led him across the globe to photograph cultural and human diversity over the past ten years. His photographs, as well as those he has commissioned, have been exhibited internationally. He strives to bear witness to complex human stories and focus especially on the relationship between Man and Nature. He specializes in photographic installation and is currently working on a multidisciplinary project using film, still images and virtual reality - whatever best serves the story. He recently produced, filmed and directed his first feature film, Anote’s Ark, a documentary dealing with the realities of climate justice and migration. It premiered at Sundance 2018.

Alexandria Bombach is an award-winning cinematographer, editor, and director from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her feature-length documentary ON HER SHOULDERS follows Nadia Murad, a 23-year-old Yazidi woman who survived genocide and sexual slavery committed by ISIS. ON HER SHOULDERS premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival where Alexandria won Best Directing in the US Documentary Competition. Her first feature-length documentary, FRAME BY FRAME, follows the lives of four Afghan photojournalists who are facing the realities of building Afghanistan's first free press. The film had its world premiere at SXSW 2015, went on to win more than 30 film festival awards and screened in front of the president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani. Alexandria continued her work in Afghanistan in 2016 directing the Pulitzer Center-supported New York Times Op-Doc, AFGHANISTAN BY CHOICE – an intertwining portrait of five Afghans who must weigh the costs of leaving or staying as the country's security deteriorates. In addition to her feature documentary work, Alexandria’s production company RED REEL has been producing award-winning, character-driven stories since 2009.

Leonard Retel Helmrich was born in the Netherlands in 1959. He graduated from the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in 1986. Leonard shoots as well as directs all his own films and is best known for a philosophy and approach he calls “Single Shot Cinema” which involves long takes with a camera orbiting the subjects. Above all in his films it is the framing and movement of the camera that captures and leads the emotions of the audience. 

Mohammed Ali Naqvi (Mo) is an internationally celebrated filmmaker, whose work has won over forty prestigious awards and honors, including a Special Emmy, two Amnesty International Human Rights Awards, and a Grand Prix from the United Nations Association Festival. He has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, a Cinema Eye Honor, and the UNESCO-FELLINI Prize. He is also an alumnus of top festivals including Toronto, Sundance, Tribeca, Berlin, and Busan, and an American Film Institute and National Endowment of the Arts Fellow.

Sadaf Foroughi is an Iranian-born, Montreal-based filmmaker. She began her artistic career in 2003 by creating and producing short films, documentaries and video art. In 2005, she was selected to participate in the Berlinale Talent Campus as a writer/director. Foroughi graduated with an MA in Film Studies from the University of Provence, and obtained a degree in film production from the New York Film Academy. 

Chris is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and the founder of Little Ease Films. He has spent the last nine years making his first feature documentary A Cambodian Spring, which won the Special Jury Prize for International Feature Documentary at Hot Docs 2017 and Best Documentary at the Brooklyn Film Festival 2017. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian newspaper and in 2014 produced an award-winning undercover investigation into slavery in the Thai fishing industry. His work has taken him as far afield as South Sudan, Burma, the Philippines, Laos and Thailand. He is currently developing an animated feature film about slavery in the Thai fishing industry, and a Virtual Reality computer game about slavery and migration.

Born in 1942, Raymond Depardon has directed twenty feature-length films and more than fifty books of his photography have been published. Depardon’s oeuvre is regularly the subject of major exhibtitions and film retrospectives, from Paris to Bogota.

Daniel McCabe is a New York based photographer and director. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN among others. This Is Congo is Daniel’s first feature-length documentary.