Heleen Gerritsen has been the Artistic Director of the Deutsche Kinemathek since June 2025. In this role, she is also responsible for the “Retrospective & Berlinale Classics” section of the Berlin International Film Festival. Born in Eindhoven in 1978, she studied Slavic Studies, Eastern European History and Economics in Amsterdam, and Russian Philology in Saint Petersburg. After beginning her professional career in film and television production, she went on to become the festival director of dokumentART in Neubrandenburg from 2014 to 2016, and of goEast in Wiesbaden from 2017 to 2025. Her expertise in Central and Eastern European cinema, commemorative culture, and immersive storytelling also feeds into exhibition concepts, interdisciplinary discussion series, and publishing projects.

Born in Kinshasa, Alain Kassanda left the Democratic Republic of the Congo at the age of eleven to go to France. After studying Communication Sciences, he threw himself into Parisian cinema life, first as a curator of small film series, then as the programmer of an arthouse theatre in the Paris suburbs for five years. During a stopover in Ibadan in southwestern Nigeria from 2015 to 2019, the hustle and bustle of the metropolis inspired Kassanda to make his debut film, “Trouble Sleep”, winner of a 2020 DOK Leipzig Golden Dove. The feature film “Colette and Justin” (2022) was followed by his first feature-length documentary “Coconut Head Generation”, which was awarded the Grand Prix of the Paris Cinéma du Réel festival in 2023.

Producer Annie Ohayon-Dekel develops feature-length documentary and fiction film projects, mainly under the umbrella of the Paris-based production company Les Films du Poisson and 24images Production, based in Le Mans. Her work is part of an international co-production dynamic that connects France, Japan, Taiwan, Afghanistan, Palestine and Israel through film projects. Ohayon-Dekel’s recent credits as a co-producer include “The First 54 Years – An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation”, presented by Avi Mograbi at the Berlinale Forum in 2021 and at the Hommage dedicated to him at DOK Leipzig. With 24images Production, she collaborated on “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” (2025) by Sepideh Farsi.

Japanese documentary filmmaker and author Kazuhiro Soda, who has lived in New York for more than thirty years, was born in Ashikaga in Tochigi Prefecture in 1970. He learned the basics of directing at the School of Visual Arts in New York and has since developed his own cinematographic language in eleven feature-length documentaries. With “Campaign” (2007), “Mental” (2009), “Inland Sea” (2018), “Zero” (2020) and, most recently, “The Cats of Gokogu Shrine” (2024), Soda has presented a majority of his works at the Berlinale, with “Zero” receiving awards not only in Berlin but across the world. Soda is also internationally successful as an author of books, especially on the nature and potential of documentary film.

Since 1983, US-American film producer Jim Stark has been helping renowned representatives of independent cinema including Jim Jarmusch, Gregg Araki and Alexandre Rockwell to realise their artistic visions. His collaboration with Mexican colleague Nicolás Celis in the latter’s production company Pimienta Films in Mexico City has expanded his portfolio to include contemporary Latin American cinema. Among other projects, Stark and Celis were instrumental in the production of the multiple award-winning documentary “Tempestad” (2016) by Salvadorean-Mexican filmmaker Tatiana Huezo. He was also part of the extended production team of Ruben Östlund’s celebrated satire “Triangle of Sadness” (2022).

Betina Kuntzsch completed her degree in Book Design from the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) in 1988 with a video project. Her passion are animated documentaries, a medium she uses to look at the GDR’s past from different perspectives and tell female outsiders’ stories. In a long-term media archaeology project, she collects, scans and revives historical animation film loops from the period around 1900, so-called Laterna Magica Films. Kuntzsch processes these in short films such as “Spirit Away” (2015), for which she received a Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig. Her installation video drawings are presented at exhibitions and in public spaces, her films are screened at festivals across the world.

Aneta Ozorek is the Artistic Director of the Kaboom Animation Festival, which annually presents innovative film and XR works in Utrecht and Amsterdam. She has extensive experience as a curator and organiser of film events, education workshops, exhibitions and festivals in the European market. Orozek is head of the Short Films Pitching section of the CEE Animation Forum in Plzeň, which is dedicated to promoting upcoming young artists and brings together talents from 17 Central and Eastern European countries. She is also a member of the board of the REX Animation Film Festival in Stockholm, the AniMela Festival in Mumbai and the Emile European Animation Awards Association. As a tutor, she accompanies the development phase of film projects.

Jonatan Schwenk, born in 1987, is a director, writer, animator, producer and sound designer. His short films have been screened at major international festivals and won multiple awards. Prizes for “Sog” (2017) include the Cristal d’Annecy for the Best Graduation Film, and “Zoon”, which premiered at Sundance in 2022 and travelled to more than 150 different festivals, received the Lotte Reiniger Promotion Award for Animated Film at the 2023 Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film. Schwenk is a graduate of the University of Art and Design Offenbach, was a guest student at the Kunsthochschule Kassel and is a Berlinale Talents alumnus. He occasionally teaches workshops and has taught at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, among other places.

Maike Mia Höhne has been working with the medium of film as an author, director, curator, producer, and lecturer ever since her studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Havana and the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión in San Antonio de los Baños. From 2007 to 2019, she was head of the Berlinale Shorts section of the Berlin International Film Festival and in 2019 took over as artistic director of the Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg. Together with Lilli Thalgott, Höhne runs the Pinkmovies company which produces, among other things, the ARTE television magazine “Court-circuit”. Her directorial works are distributed by the Berlin-based Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art e.V. and the Kurzfilm Agentur Hamburg.

After an apprenticeship as a concrete worker and jobs as telegram messenger and in youth cultural work, Gerd Kroske, born in Dessau in 1958, studied Cultural Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin and Directing at the Film and Television Academy “Konrad Wolf” in Potsdam-Babelsberg. He was a writer and dramaturge at the DEFA Documentary Film Studio from 1987 to 1991. From 1991, he has worked as a freelance writer and director and from 1996 also as a producer with his own studio, realistfilm. He has received numerous awards, including a 2012 Leipzig Golden Dove for “Heino Jaeger – Look Before You Kuck”, and was honoured with retrospectives at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna in 2020 and the Zeughauskino of the German Historical Museum in 2024.

Ines Weizman is a Professor of History and Theory of Architecture and head of the Architecture PhD programme at the Royal College of Art in London. She is the founding director of the Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA), an interdisciplinary research collective comprised of architectural historians, filmmakers and digital technologists, and a member of the advisory board of the Forensic Architecture research agency at Goldsmiths. Weizman’s extensive published works include the essay “Before and After: Documenting the Architecture of Disaster” (2014), co-authored with Eyal Weizman, and the anthology “Dust & Data: Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 Years” (2019), which she edited on the occasion of the Bauhaus anniversary.