What Short Films Fight For (And How)

Panel Talk

Elahe Esmaili is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Her first film, The Doll (2021), was awarded Best International Short at Hot Docs 2021 and nominated and selected for prestigious awards like Critics Choice Awards, International Documentary Association (IDA), Student Academy Awards as well as more than fifty other festivals. In general, Elahe concerns herself with children’s and women’s rights and issues around it, as well as stories about successful women in the world who push boundaries and overcome these issues.

Born in Lebanon, Nicolas Khabbaz graduated in filmmaking and holds a Ph.D. in cinema, where he studied the cinema of small nations and the question of its identity. He is currently the artistic and programme director of Beirut Shorts and Batroun Mediterranean Film Festival, and a full-time professor at Notre Dame University focusing on “Independent Filmmaking” among other courses.

Sasha Prokopenko is a festival programmer, film curator, and translator based in Kyiv, Ukraine. For the past five years, she has been Head of Programming at the Kyiv International Short Film Festival. Sasha has participated in several film festivals as a curator, mentor, and jury member. She has also collaborated with the Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival and Ukraine’s first LGBTQIA+ film festival, Sunny Bunny. Since 2016, she has worked at the independent film distribution company KyivMusicFilm, which distributes films on art, music, and culture.

Anne Gaschütz is a festival organiser and programmer. She joined Filmfest Dresden in 2013 as part of the selection committee and became the festival’s co-director in July 2020. In 2021, she joined the Pardi di Domani selection committee at the Locarno Film Festival. She is also one of the initiators of Talking Shorts, an online platform that focuses on short film criticism. Gaschütz is a member of the European Film Academy.