Deepa Dhanraj

Masterclass

Deepa Dhanraj is one of the most renowned and highly regarded Indian documentary filmmakers, who has been directing and producing films since the eighties. Her legendary works include “Something Like a War”, “We Haven’t Come Here to Die,” “The Legacy of Malthus,” 

“Sudesha,” “Nari Adalat,” and “What Has Happened to This City?” These films have been screened on artefr, @cbcdocs, and @sbs_australia

A lifetime achievement awardee at @iffkerala IDSFFK 2023, her films have been invited to festivals such as @idfafestival, berlinale, @dokleipzig, @kurzfilmoberhausen, filmsdefemmes,, @tamperefilmfestival, viffest, and @chifilmfest Deepa has been actively engaged in the women’s movement for over four decades, with a particular focus on political participation, health, and education. She was a founding member of Yugantar, a feminist film collective that produced notable documentaries highlighting women’s labor and their resistance against domestic violence. Her extensive filmography delves into various critical issues, including the violence and manipulation associated with population control programs, the establishment of Muslim women’s courts providing an alternative to patriarchal judgments issued by Sharia courts, and the emergence of Hindu majoritarianism. Guided by a strong passion for education, She has dedicated substantial effort to collaborating with government schools in developing tailored pedagogical approaches suitable for first-generation learners hailing from Dalit and Adivasi communities. She also shares her expertise by teaching video production to women activists and regularly delivers lectures on media theory, engaging with audiences in both academic and public forums.

Ben Rivers

Masterclass

Ben Rivers is a renowned artist and experimental filmmaker based in London, England. His work encompasses a wide range of themes, from exploring unknown wilderness territories to creating candid and intimate observational portraits of real-life subjects.

His filmmaking practice navigates the line between documentary and fiction. Often focusing on individuals who have distanced themselves from society, the raw footage serves as a foundation for Rivers to craft oblique narratives that imagine alternative existences in marginal worlds.

Rivers’s first feature-length film, Two Years at Sea, premiered in September 2011 in the Orizzonti section at the 68th Venice International Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Prize. His second feature, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, created in collaboration with American filmmaker Ben Russell, premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2013.

His filmography includes nearly 40 films and numerous exhibitions presented in galleries and art spaces. His recent film ´Bogancloch´ premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2024.

Rivers’s illustrious career has been honored with several awards, including the Tiger Award for Short Film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Prize at the 68th Venice Film Festival, the Robert Gardner Film Award, and many others.

Explore: Benrivers.com

Photograph Courtesy: Zunino Celotto/Getty Images

Payal Kapadia

Masterclass

Payal Kapadia, an FTII alumna, is a prominent voice in contemporary Indian cinema. Her debut fiction feature “All We Imagine As Light” won Grand Prix at Cannes, 2024. In 2021, “A Night of Knowing Nothing,” earned her the prestigious Golden Eye award at Cannes.

In 2017, her short film “Afternoon Clouds” was the sole Indian selection at the Cannes Film Festival, and featured in the Cinefondation section. Her experimental short film “And What Was the Summer Saying” premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2018, where it received the Special Jury Prize. It also garnered acclaim at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2018 and was honored as the Best Experimental Film at the Mumbai International Film Festival in 2020.

Her work delves into the less visible, often hidden realms of memory and dreams. It is within the realm of minor, fleeting feminine gestures that she seeks to uncover the truths that define her practice.

@allweimagineaslightfilm

R. V. Ramani

Guest Mentor

Spanning a career of 35 years, with over 25 films directed and many more as a cinematographer, R V Ramani has made an invaluable impact on Indian independent documentary practice. His one-man-army, impressionistic films have earned him global and national recognition, including India’s National Film Awards, 

Best Film at India’s National Film Awards, Best Film at the Mumbai International Film Festival, and the prestigious Bala Kailasam Award, among others. His notable films include “Oh, That’s Bhanu,” “My Camera and Tsunami,” “Santhal Family to Mill Re-Call,” “Brahma Vishnu Shiva,” “Saa,” and many more. His works have been showcased at significant festivals such as Yamagata, Busan, IDSFFK, Jeonju, and many others. Additionally, retrospectives of his films have been featured at festivals like documentArt in Germany, MIFF-India, and the Asia Pacific Triennale, among others. Prior to graduating from FTII with a specialization in cinematography, Ramani worked as a photojournalist. He has been teaching and mentoring generations of young filmmakers at various Institutions.

Katharina Fiedler

Masterclass

Katharina Fiedler has been working as a freelance film editor since 2007, editing both national and international film and television productions. Among her most notable projects is The Wolves Always Come at Night, a hybrid documentary feature from Gabrielle Brady for which she served as editor.

The film was selected by Australia as its official submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the 98th Academy Awards (2026). It has screened at more than 70 film festivals worldwide and has received numerous awards. For her work on the film, Fiedler was also nominated for the Australian Academy Award for Best Editing.

From 2006 to 2011, Katharina Fiedler studied Film Editing at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg, where she developed her distinctive cinematic voice and refined her strong sense of narrative structure and dramaturgical precision. Since 2025, she has co-headed the Film Editing program together with Ann-Carolin Biesenbach.

Many of the films she has edited have been screened at prestigious international festivals, including the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the Tribeca Film Festival, Visions du Réel, and the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). These works have received numerous awards and international acclaim, reflecting the strong artistic vision and narrative precision that characterize her editing.

Her portfolio spans documentary, hybrid, and fiction films for both cinema and television. With her keen sense of rhythm, atmosphere, and cinematic storytelling, Katharina Fiedler has established herself as one of the leading film editors in the German-speaking and international film landscape.

Heejung Oh

Guest lecture

Heejung Oh is a prominent and dynamic producer of documentaries and fiction films and the founder of Seesaw Pictures (2017). She grew up in South Korea, and her life is divided between Seoul and Amsterdam/Paris. She is an alumna of EAVE, Eurodoc, Rotterdam Lab, and Berlinale Talents, and has been

invited to the selection committee of IDFA, Sheffield Doc/Fest, DOK Leipzig, and AIDC.

The films produced by her company include “Pearl of the Desert” (IDFA 2019) and “Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot” (Berlinale 2020), “Queer My Friends” (Hotdocs 2022), “Delivery Dancer’s Sphere” (IFFR 2023), and co-production titles such as “Nam June Paik Project” (Sundance 2023), “Dragon Women” (Vision du Réel 2022), and many more.
As a sales company, Seesaw Pictures represents “The One Who Runs Away Is the Ghost,” which was selected for IDFA International Competition 2021, and “About Love,” which received awards at many festivals, including Sheffield Doc/Fest 2018 and was acquired by POV and MUBI worldwide. She loves working with young and seasoned filmmakers who have artistic visions and powerful questions.

Katharina Pethke

Guest lecture

Katharina Pethke (Dr. phil. in art.) is a filmmaker based in Germany with a focus on documentary film. She studied Arts and Humanities and Visual Communication at the University of Hamburg before moving to the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, where she graduated with honors.

From 2012 to 2019, Pethke was a professor at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. Her latest film REPRODUCTION (2024) celebrated its world premiere at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival (Forum) and was awarded the Goethe Documentary Film Prize. In addition,

Katharina Pethke completed a scientific-artistic dissertation at the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF in 2024, in which she systematized portrait film and its formal possibilities for the first time.

Gugi Gumilang

Guest lecture

Gugi Gumilang is a documentary strategist, producer, programmer, and mentor working across international film festivals, industry platforms, and global documentary networks. Films he has produced and executive produced have screened at leading festivals including IDFA, CPH:DOX, Busan International Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Hot Docs, and many others.

As Programme Director of In-Docs, Gugi leads Docs by the Sea, one of Asia’s leading documentary industry platforms, supporting filmmakers in developing projects and connecting them with the international documentary ecosystem. He is also an International Programmer for Hot Docs and Associate Programmer for Feature Length at the Camden International Film Festival (CIFF), contributing to the curation of two of the world’s leading documentary festivals.

Beyond programming, Gugi mentors filmmakers on story development, rough cuts, and international positioning, and regularly contributes to international labs, forums, juries, and selection committees. He serves on the Executive Board of the Documentary Association of Europe (DAE), where he advocates for stronger international collaboration and more equitable opportunities for documentary filmmakers, particularly from Asia and other underrepresented regions.

Surabhi Sharma

Guest lecture

Surabhi has been an independent filmmaker making feature-length documentaries and short films since 2000. Her documentaries, fiction, and video installations engage with cities in transition using the lens of labor, music, and migration. Her works have been screened at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival,

Dubai International Film Festival, MAMI Mumbai Film Festival amongst others. Her film Bidesia in Bambai was nominated for Best Documentary at the 8th Asia Pacific Screen Awards. Her films have been recognized
and awarded at Eco-Cinema, Greece (The Ramsar-Medwet Award), Film South Asia,Kathmandu; Karachi Film Festival; and The Festival of Three Continents, Buenos Aires. She has also created video installations that have been exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London; nGbK, Berlin, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture and the 11th Shanghai Biennale.

Surabhi is Associate Dean for the Arts and Creative Practices and Associate Professor of Practice of Film and New Media at New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE

 

HÀ Lệ Diễm

Screening & Talk

Lệ Diễm HÀ is a director, producer, and cinematographer from the Tày community of northeastern Vietnam. Her debut feature documentary, Children of the Mist, follows a teenage Hmong girl navigating the fragile threshold between childhood and adulthood in northern Vietnam.

The film premiered at IDFA, won the Best Directing Award, was shortlisted for the 95th Academy Awards, and later achieved a successful theatrical release in Vietnam with over 40,000 tickets sold. It has since been distributed internationally across North America, Europe, and Asia. She is a Sundance Documentary Film Program Grantee.

Alongside her filmmaking practice, Lệ Diễm is committed to supporting Vietnamese independent cinema. She serves as Project Manager of Varan Vietnam, an independent filmmakers’ collective focused on documentary production, training, and distribution. Since its founding, Varan Vietnam has supported nearly 80 documentary films by around 60 directors, including acclaimed works such as Madam Phung’s Last Journey, Finding Phong, and Children of the Mist.

She is also the co-founder of Doccicada, an initiative that organizes free workshops in screenwriting and documentary project development for emerging Vietnamese filmmakers.

Lệ Diễm has served as a jury member at several international film festivals and is currently a member of feature film selection committees for international festivals.

As a producer, she is currently leading the development of Dear Sơn An, a feature fiction project directed by Kim Quy Bùi. The project was selected for the Focus Asia – All Genres Project Market 2026 in Udine, Italy, and has received development support from Goethe-Institut Hanoi and the Purin Film Fund, Thailand, with a German co-producer attached. The project is currently seeking additional international co-production partners, financing, and market opportunities.

 

Ekta

Screening & Talk

Ekta co-founded Maraa, a media and arts collective in Bangalore, in 2008. She works as a practitioner, researcher, curator, and facilitator on issues of gender, labour & caste in rural and urban contexts. 

She has also been making films on labour, migration and cities since 2009. Her films focus on the inner worlds of workers in the context of migration which includes Absence and Missing Days, both of which have travelled widely across international festivals. She also co-founded a theatre group called Freeda, led by survivors of sexual violence to tell stories on her own terms, around her beauty, freedom and desire. She is currently working on a film about life in a mining zone in Central India, where we witness the disappearance of a forest, its people and an entire civilization.

Dr. Kinshuk Surjan

Screening & Talk

Dr. Kinshuk Surjan is an Indian filmmaker and researcher based in Bhopal and Brussels. His work seeks to reimagine rural cinema, utilising a reciprocal process to explore narratives often overlooked by the urban-centric mainstream.
He holds a PhD in Arts from VUB and ULB. Surjan’s filmography includes POLA (National Student Film Award winner) and THE FLANDRIEN, which won the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) Wildcard.

His debut feature documentary, MARCHING IN THE DARK, premiered at CPH: DOX 2024 winning special mention and has since received several international awards.

@marchinginthedark

Lipika Singh Darai

Mentor

Lipika Singh Darai is a director, writer, and editor based in Odisha. Trained in sound recording and design from the FTII, Lipika left the Mumbai film industry around 2013 to make her own films in her home state where she belongs to the Ho indigenous community.
 Despite Odisha having a limited scope in independent filmmaking at that time, Lipika has thrived with her films earning multiple National Film Awards and festival participation worldwide.
 
Her credits as director include socio-cultural feature documentaries Some Stories Around Witches (2016) and Backstage (2021), educational short The Waterfall (2017), and as editor The Sound Man Mangesh Desai (2017). Her recent documentary Night and Fear (2023) premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in its Ammodo Tiger Short competition. Lipika is developing her debut fiction feature Birdwoman which has received the Hubert Bals Development Fund 2023.
 

Arya Rothe

Guest mentor

Arya Rothe is an independent filmmaker from Pune, India, and co-founder of NoCut Film Collective. Her debut feature-length documentary film A Rifle and a Bag (2020, India, Romania, Italy, Qatar) won the Special Mention of the Jury at the 2020 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in the in the Bright Future Competition.

The film received support from prominent documentary funds, including the DMZ Docs Fund, Creative Media Europe, Netherlands Film Funds, and others.

Her short documentary film Casa da Quina (2015) had its World Premiere at DocLisboa and won the Special Mention Jury Award at the International Film Festival FILMADRID in Spain. Her short film made in Hungary, Daughter’s Mother (2018) had its world premiere at the 61st Dok Leipzig Film Festival. She graduated in 2016 from the DocNomads Master Course. Before DocNomads, she studied at FAMU – National Film School of the Czech Republic.

Mehdi Jahan

Guest lecture

Mehdi Jahan is a filmmaker and educator from Guwahati, Assam. His work challenges conventional image production methods by drawing from regional oral storytelling traditions. He creates a sensorial aesthetic that blends personal and collective histories, resulting in a cinematic language akin to poetry and dreams.

Mehdi’s films have been featured at prominent international and national festivals and exhibitions. These include events in Brazil, Moscow, Spain, Italy, Peru, Romania, and India. He has also taught film studies and direction at institutions like Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute and Seamedu Media School.

In 2023, his work was featured in his first retrospective at the Millennium Film Workshop in New York. Mehdi is the recipient of the 2023 Berlin Fellowship in the Film and Media Arts category, awarded by Junge Akademie, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

 

Mukul Haloi

Guest Mentor

Mukul is a filmmaker and educator from Assam. his works dwell between sensorial exploration and reflection on the socio-politics of his homeland. He is an alumnus of the Film and Television Institute of India, Docnomads European Masters, Berlinale Talents, Locarno Filmmakers Academy,

and the University of Delhi. He’s also a fellow of the Erasmus Mundus scholarship, Early Career Fellowship-TISS, and Nagari Film Fellowship-Charles Correa Foundation. His notable works include ‘Tales from Our Childhood,’ ‘Letter to Home,’ and ‘Days of Autumn´, which have received numerous awards, including the ‘Bala Kailasam Memorial Award,’ ‘Best Short at IDSFFK,’ and ‘Best Short – Cinema Experimenta,’ among others.

His films have been showcased at renowned film festivals such as the Locarno Film Festival, Yamagata Film Festival, Mumbai Indian Film Festival, Arkipel Jakarta, Curtas Vila do Conde, and many more. He has been teaching film through numerous online and offline workshops and at various Indian universities, including short courses at FTII and Ashoka University.

Sachin

Mentor

Sachin is a Rajasthan-based filmmaker whose practice engages with oral histories, folklore, local knowledge systems, and socio-ecological realities through nonfiction and experimental cinematic forms. Coming from an agrarian family, Sachin is deeply invested in exploring rural landscapes,

agricultural practices, ecological memory, and their interconnectedness with cultural and environmental transformations. He is an alumnus of DocNomads, Interaction Serbia, Taiwan Pitch, SUPVA Rohtak, and the Central University of Rajasthan. His films have been screened internationally at festivals including IDFA, Vision du Réel, DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, IFFI Goa, Dharamshala International Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, MAMI and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, among others.

Sachin’s filmography includes several nonfiction and experimental films across directing, cinematography, editing, and producing. His recent feature project was part of Vision du Réel´s Development Lab 2026. Alongside his filmmaking practice, he works as a visiting faculty member and workshop facilitator at institutions including Ashoka University and State University of Performing and Visual Arts, while continuing to work through initiatives such as rohī collective and Rajasthan Film Collective to foster conversations around regional cinema and community-based film culture.

Siddhant Sarin

Mentor

Siddhant Sarin is a national award-winning filmmaker & educator from India. A co-founder of Docustan, his films explore the quotidian lives of people through observational methods. With an intimate and delicate approach, he traverses the interplay between individuals’ internal and external worlds.

He received support from the Asian Cinema Fund (Busan), Docedge, EIDF, and the Lithuanian Film Centre for his national award-winning film ‘Ayena (Mirror)’. His films ‘Ayena (Mirror)’, ‘Mum’, and ‘A Happy Place’ have earned acclaim at festivals such as the Krakow Film Festival, Guanajuato, Fipadoc, DOK.fest Munich, DokuBaku, IDSFFK, , Kino Pavasaris, among others. He represents his production company Téh Films, which brought together the world’s first Indian–Lithuanian–South Korean co-production team for his debut feature ‘Ayena (Mirror)’. ‘Ayena (Mirror)’ is showcased on Channel 4 (UK), Asian Docs (Japan) and DAFilms worldwide. A scholarship graduate of the DocNomads Master’s Program, he previously studied cinematography at DFFB (Berlin) and FAMU (Prague). Before pursuing filmmaking, he completed his law degree at the Government Law College, Mumbai. He envisions author-driven works that are both reflective and socially resonant.

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