Leena Pasanen is a film expert, consultant, and tutor, and the Artistic Director of the Mente Locale Film Festival in Italy. She is the former Artistic Director of DOK Leipzig (Germany) and the Biografilm Festival (Italy). She has also served as the Director of the European Documentary Network (Denmark), Director of the Finnish Cultural Institute in Budapest (Hungary), and as a TV presenter, Head of the Documentary Department, and Head of Factual Programming at the Finnish public broadcaster YLE.
She has been a regular expert and tutor at several training programmes and markets — for example, Documentary Campus, EsoDoc, WEMW, and EAVE — and has served as a jury member at numerous international festivals, among them Sundance and IDFA.
She is also a farmer and wine producer, and works as a sales expert at the Marc de Grazia Selections wine agency in Florence, Italy. She has three horses, three dogs, and a donkey.
Mara Tamkovich is a Polish-Belarusian screenwriter and director. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she moved to Poland to study journalism at the University of Warsaw and later graduated in film directing from the Warsaw Film School and the Wajda School. For almost ten years, Mara worked as a journalist for independent Belarusian media broadcasting from Poland.
Her films focus on socially relevant topics deeply connected to reality and have been presented at numerous festivals in Poland and abroad — including the Chicago IFF, Torino Film Festival, Minsk IFF, and FEST – New Directors | New Films Festival — receiving over 30 awards.
Her first feature, Under the Grey Sky, premiered at the Tribeca Festival and, among others, won the Best Debut Award at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia. Mara is a member of the Polish Directors’ Guild and the Belarusian Independent Film Academy.