Katja Colja
director
Katja Colja was born in Trieste and is now based in Rome. After graduation, she worked as an author and director for RAI, gradually making her way into the film industry. As a screenwriter for cinema and TV, she worked with a host of Italian directors and screenwriters, while making a number of documentary and short films. Rosa, her feature debut, was shown in the official competition of the Shanghai IFF (2019) and at Bif&st in Bari. The film won the Vesna Award for Best Screenplay at the Festival of Slovenian Film, and the Awards for Best Film and Best Director at California Women’s Film Festival and K3 Film Festival. Colja is currently working on her second feature film and a TV series.
Siniša Gačić
director
Siniša Gačić (1980) received a bachelor’s degree in TV and Film Editing and a master’s degree in Film Directing from the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television in Ljubljana. Both feature-length documentaries he has made so far went on to receive Vesna Awards: A Fight for for best Feature Film in 2014, and Daughter of Camorra for Best Documentary in 2019. Gačić has worked for the Slovenian national TV since 1999, currently collaborating on various projects as director.
Matic Majcen
film critic, journalist and editor
Matic Majcen is a film critic, journalist, and editor. He collaborates with a range of media outlets, writing reviews for Večer daily, reporting from film festivals in Cannes, Venice, and Berlin for the Slovenian national broadcaster RTV’s online news website MMC, and working as the editor for film for Dialogi Magazine. Majcen finished a PhD with a thesis on Slovenian post-independence cinema, and engages in film education, lecturing in schools and cultural institutions across the country. He is the author of Slovenski poosamosvojitveni film: institucija in nacionalna identiteta (Slovenian Post-independence Cinema: Institution and National Identity, 2015) in Kubrickova Odiseja v vesolju (Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey, 2018). In 2009, he launched ‘Image-Music’, a project exploring the history and theory of music videos. He also heads the music video competition programme of the Ljubljana International Film Festival.
Polona Petek,
lecturer and theoretician
Polona Petek is a film researcher at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and a professor of film teaching at the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television, Ljubljana. Petek received her PhD in Cinema Studies from the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Echo and Narcissus: Echolocating the Spectator in the Age of Audience Research (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), and co-editor (with Nil Baskar) of Fenomenologija filma: tradicije in novi pristopi (The Phenomenology of Film, Slovenian Cinematheque, 2014). Her articles have been published in journals such as Studies in European Cinema, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, and New Review of Film and Television Studies. Petek’s recent work centres on transnationalism and mobility in cinema, with a special focus on the role of women in Slovenian and other European cinemas.
Maja Sever
actor
Maja Sever graduated from the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television, Ljubljana, in 1986. Since 1993, she has worked for the Slovenian National Theatre Drama in Ljubljana, appearing in more than 80 roles, and collaborated with other Slovenian institutionalised companies, puppet theatres, and independent productions. In 1999, she was awarded a Borštnik Award for Best Actor for her role of Susannah in Barker’s The Europeans. Sever is the author and director of children’s play Peter Klepec or How to Become a True Hero. She frequently collaborates with Slovenia’s National Radio, in film and TV productions, and translates and adapts animated series for dubbing, where she also serves as actor and director. In 2015, Sever won an award from the Association of Slovenian film and TV translators for her translation of the animated series The Jungle Book.