Rada �e�ić

Rada �e�ić, born in Bjelovar, worked as a film critic and director of several short and documentary films in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1993 she came to the Netherlands and since then is based in Utrecht.

She established herself as a specialist for South Asian cinema and Eastern European film. �e�ić is a guest lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and works as a programme advisor for the International Rotterdam Film Festival and the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam.

She is also a programmer of Kerala Film Festival (India) and head of the Regional Documentary competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival.

Since the beginning of Jan Vrijman Fund (part of IDFA) that supports creative documentaries she is in a selection commity and since recently in Hubert Bals Fund (part of IFFR) that supports feature fiction films as well as in the Dutch Fund STIFO, that supports television coproduced creative projects. Her activities include involvement as a tutor in the Kopenhagen-based European Documentary Network which established itself as a organization for training and promotion of creative documentary films in Europe.

She is also a lecturer at the Dutch Institut for the film education. Recently she became a main programmer of the International Bukurest film Festival, Romania and a selector of the international docs. at the Sofia Film Festival, Bulgaria. �e�ić still works as a filmmaker (Room without a view, 1997, Soske, 2001, In Whitest solitude 2002) and a film critic (Skrien, Film Guide, Dox, Croatian Film Annual, Aitkens� Documentary Encyclopedia,  A Book 24 Frames ).

Olivier Delesse
Olivier Delesse was born in 1972 in Sarreguemines, France and graduated from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) in Paris where he majored in finance.

After starting his career as a financial analyst and as a business consultant for Deloitte, he finally embraced the movie industry. He worked as a film critic for filmfestival.com and launched delesse.com, a news and services website targeting movie professionals.

He is currently working on several projects ranging from film production to the organization of film festivals and of other cultural events in France and Europe.

Yorgos Karipidis

Born in Thessaloniki in 1946. He studied painting at the School of Fine Arts Arts and cinema at the Film Academy in Amsterdam. He worked for a while at SFB. He directed over 100 documentaries, mainly for greek television. Among them, two documentaries about the Nobel awarded poets Yorgos Seferis and Odysseas Elitis, as well as a film about the German army massacre at the village Hortiati. He directed two TV-films and a TV-series based on the Apocalypse.

In 2003 he organizes with the aid of the Greek Social Forum a week-long antiwar film festival in Athens, with a budget of 600� that was covered by ticket revenues. Twenty films were screened, among them: Gillo Pontecorvo�s �The Battle of Algiers�, Mario Monicelli�s �The Great War�, Luis Bu�uel�s �Land Without Bread�, Chris Marker�s �The Base of the Air is Red�, Freceric Rossif�s �To Die in Madrid�.

He has issued two short-story collections, �Diving Champion� (1992) and �Scorpio�s Dialect� (1998). He�s an article contributor in everyday and periodical press. Member of the four member editorial team of the magazine �Diagogi Miden� about cinema and other topics.

COMPETITION MEDIUM LENGTH FILMS

Michel Demopoulos

Born in Paris, he studies cinema, literature and linguistics in France.

He starts working as a film and television critic for the daily paper Avghi and for various publications. He becomes editor and later director of the prestigious film magazine Synchronos Kinimatographos(1975-1982).

 He directs the film L�Autre Scene (The Other Stage), a documentary on the shooting of Theo Angelopoulos� Travelling Players.

From 1981 to 1991, he is the director of acquisitions for the Greek Public Channel ERT and programmes the channel�s weekly cine-club.

Curator of the retrospective on Greek Cinema at the Centre Pompidou (Paris) in 1995.

Director of the International Thessaloniki Film Festival from 1991 to 2005. He currently works as executive consultant for fiction and co-production for ERT 

M�lanie Giard
Melanie joined the World Water Council in January 2002. In 2006, Melanie became Communication Officer at the WWC, in charge of overall communication activities, including newsletter publication, media and public relations, web development and coordination of projects such as the �Water & Film Event�, amongst others. She is also responsible for coordinating the activities of the 5th Forum Communication Committee, as well as developing other communications efforts related to the 5th World Water Forum that will be held in Istanbul in March 2009.

Her academic background includes both communications and languages: Following studies in Tourism & Geography, she acquired a master�s degree in 2002 in Applied Foreign Languages and technical translation in both English and Russian at the University of Provence. She also obtained a master�s degree in Information & Communication Sciences from the same University.

Kostas Vassilakis

Born in Patra. He studied Biology and got a master�s degree in Zoning. He has given lectures about the protection of the environment and has participated in numerous environmental studies.

For ten years he was the director of the Hellenic Ornithological Society, and after that collaborated with many environmental organizations, participating in all major campaigns for the preservation of greek nature.

He was employed at the Greek Parliament at the Directorate of Parliamentary Committees and worked as an official secretary of the Special Permanente Environment Protection Committee.

He�s a member of the Board of Directors of the Elliniki Etaireia (The Hellenic Society for the Protection of the Environment and the Cultural Heritage) as reprehensive of the European Environmental Bureau since 2004. Furthermore, he�s a member of the institutional framework council since 2004 and the author of the book �Elafropatita� that was published by the Elliniki Etaireia.

Maher Abi Samra

Maher Abi Samra graduated with a degree in Dramatic Arts from the Lebanese University in Beirut and Audio-Visual Studies at the Institut National de l�Image et du Son, in Paris. He has worked as a photo-journalist for Lebanese dailies, Agence France Presse and Reuters. He has directed several documentaries, including �Women of Hezbollah� (2000), �Shatila Roundabout� (2004), �Mariam� (2006) and �Merely a Smell� (2007). Short videos include �Building on the Waves� (1995) and �My Friend� (2003).

 COMPETITION SHORT LENGTH & GREEK  FILMS

Fred de Haas

Fred de Haas started his career at a Dutch advertising agency. He got involved in cinema management when he was asked by a Dutch cinema chain to assist them in the building and operating of new cinemas in Belgium, where he stayed for 13 years as managing director and film programmer.

Returning to Amsterdam, he continued working in cinema exhibition till he moved on to distribution accepting an offer by 20th Century Fox Film to become their marketing manager for The Netherlands. After 4 years he moved to Columbia pictures in the same capacity.

In 1989 he was offered the function of managing director of the Holland Film Promotion Foundation. Since 1995 he operates as an independent consultant for producers and film festivals. In 2000 he initiated and organized the Holland Film House at the Cannes Film festival.

He created Doc�s for Sale, the documentary film market for IDFA. He did the same with a videotheque for the Children's Filmfest Cinekid in Amsterdam. He organizes and coordinates the Holland Film Meeting at the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht. He is working as a P.R.- and communications advisor for a Charity created in 1927 by the Dutch film industry.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is a writer and arts administrator from Kenya. She studied film production in Cape Town South Africa. Through this, she found her passion was for �the story�. She studied screenwriting.

She was the producer on an award winning student production �Good to the very last drop�. Yvonne was one of seven selected to participate in a groundbreaking screenwriting initiative -the African Script Development Fund. Under the guidance of mentors from all over the world, she developed two screenplays, one of which, Kit Luanda was optioned.

She later chose to explore how visual narratives can support the numerous social development initiatives in Africa and undertook a master�s degree in media for development at the University of Reading, UK. Yvonne also ventured into the literary world and met with some success. She has received awards for her different short stories, two of which have been optioned for film.

One of the stories, �The Knife Grinders Tale� was just been released in the U.S. to some acclaim and an award. It is a short film produced and directed by R.L Hooker (USA). From 2003 to 2005, Yvonne was the Executive Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival, the foremost regional film festival and one of the most scenic and important events on the African arts calendar.

Elli Paraskeva
She was born and raised in Rodos. She studied dance at Rallou Manou�s Professional School of Dance. She participated in many dance performances in Greece and abroad with the dance troupe �Greek Choreodrama�, where she was one of the main members. At the end of 1970 she founded the first Dance School in Rodos, one of the first in regional Greece, a school she is still the head of.

She had master courses at the Royal Academy of Dancing in London, and she participated in seminars at The Place (1997-1979). She attends the learning program M.B. Leventhal Dance Therapy Training Model (1994-1997) and gets a diploma in Dance-Movement Therapy.

She is a founding member of the Greek Branch and a member of the International Dance Council of UNESCO. She is a member of the Greek Association of Dance Therapists and a member of the Royal Academy of Dancing. She has choreographed for the Regional Theatre of Rodos, the National Theatre of Northern Greece, the Dodekanesan Theatre, the Municipal Theatre of Rodos, the Symian Theatre and other theatre troupes.