2021 Virtual Festival Program Guests

isaac artenstein

Director – Challah Rising in the Desert

Artenstein has directed 10 films and has a similar number of production and writing credits. A graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles, he has taught courses on film production and the history of Mexican cinema at UC San Diego and the University of San Diego. Producer-Director Artenstein co-founded Cinewest Productions with his wife, Jude, over 20 years ago. They started the company to create and distribute documentaries focusing on the Americas and the Southwest. All of his movies have been released through Cinewest. He is now working on two new documentaries about the Jewish legacies in Arizona and El Paso, Texas.

Nancy buirski

Director –  A Crime In the Bayou

Director, producer and curator Nancy Buirski is the founder and was the director of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival for ten years. She produced five collections of Full Frame shorts with Docurama and a library collection of feature-length documentaries, The Katrina Experience. She was executive producer of TED’s Pangea Day Film Content. Buirski is a producer of Time Piece, the innovative cross-cultural anthology of Turkish and American shorts (directors, Albert Maysles, Alex Gibney, Nathanial Khan, Edet Belzberg and Sam Pollard, among others), Harlem Woodstock (director, Alex Gibney) and Althea (director, Rex Miller). Documentaries include The Loving Story (MJFF 2015), which received a Peabody and was shortlisted for an Oscar, By Sidney Lumet, and The Rape of Recy Taylor.

 

kamal hachkar

Director –  In Your Eyes I see My Country

Kamal is a French-Moroccan independent filmmaker. He was born in 1977 in Tinghir, Morocco and moved to France at an early age. He received a master’s degree in medieval history of the Muslim worlds at the Sorbonne and later became a history teacher. In 2012 he released his first feature documentary, Tinghir Jerusalem: Echos From the Mellah. The film won numerous awards at several international film festivals across the world.

 

Thorsten Klein

Director — Adventures of a Mathematician

Thorsten Klein is a Writer/ Director born in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Since 2005 he lives and works in Berlin. He is a German Film- and Television Academy Berlin alumni in screenwriting. Thor’s debut feature film as writer/director was Lost Place – the first German mystery- thriller shot in 3D and mixed in Dolby Atmos. He is the first German writer-director to receive a grant from the prestigious TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund for Adventures of a Mathematician. Besides the $75,000 grant the Fund provided Klein with professional guidance and support of his innovative and fresh take on science, mathematics and technology.

 

gabriel lichtmann

Director — La Estrella Roja (The Red Star)

Gabriel Lichtmann is a director and writer born in 1974 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He graduated as a Film Director from Universidad del Cine. He received various national and international awards and competed in many international festivals. His first feature film was Jews in Space. Lichtmann sees an increasing Jewish cultural influence in Latin American arts. He describes this as “a tone, a texture, a cadence.” The Director says “It is giving new local color to the Jewish tradition, without falling into caricature. The Americans use the term ‘bittersweet.’ Being Jewish is a sad comedy.”

MAYA SARFATY

Director — Love it was Not

Maya is an Isaeli filmmaker whose diverse body of work combines a deep sense for drama with unique cinematic abilities. She is a graduate of Tel Aviv University’s film department, decorated with Excellency by the Dean of the Humanities faculty, and graduated from the leading acting school in the country.  Love it was Not is her feature directorial debut after a few other shorts. This is a feature-length version of her own 2016 short The Most Beautiful Woman. It first premiered at the Docaviv & IDFA Film Festivals last year.

 

Hendrik Schäfer

Director – Double Income Kids

Hendrik Schäfer was born 1981 and raised in East Berlin. He has lived in the Netherlands, South Africa, Argentina, and has been in Israel since 2014. Until 2011, he was a freelance production manager for commercials and music promos. After that, he studied documentary directing at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg, Germany.  He holds the German National Academic Foundation scholarship and is a member of AG DOK & EDN. Double Income, Kids is his graduate film.

 

LENA VURMA

Producer — Adventures of a Mathematician

Lena Vurma is a Berlin-based, Swiss producer, Germany Film and Television Acadmey alumni, Eave Producers Workshop graduate, Film Independent and Tribeca Film Institute Fellow and Alfred P. Sloan grant winner. This award winning producer lives and works in Berlin and on the Isle of Skye. She won the Robert Bosch Foundation’s film award for her animation film THE LITTLE RED PAPER SHIP. The film is still broadcast on KIKA to this day. Currently she is co-writing/directing Leonora in the Morning Light and the tv series Incomers with Director Thor Klein. The projects benefit from Lena’s experience and knowledge of the international market, through her position as Head of Acquisitions at Filmwelt. Lena Vurma has been a Tribeca Film Institute and Film Independent Fellow and Alfred P. Sloan Prize winner.  In 2020 she completed the British film business leader program Inside Pictures and became the Program Delegate from Germany for the Zurich Film Festival. In 2021 she was on the Sundance Jury for the Sloan Film Prize. Lena Vurma also teaches regularly at the MET Filmschool Berlin.