Cam Van Nguyen is a Czech-Vietnamese director who graduated from the rich-in-tradition FAMU school and currently lives in Prague. Her short films have been showcased at the Locarno, Toronto, and Rotterdam International Film Festivals, as well as the Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival. Cam Van Nguyen's animated short Apart (2018) was among the finalists of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Student Awards. Her latest short film, Love, Dad (2021), was nominated for the Best Short Film Award of the European Film Academy. It was screened at numerous festivals and won awards at London, Clermont-Ferrand, Toronto and other festivals. Cam Van Nguyen’s work is characterised by an expressive, inventive, and thoughtful approach to documentary animation, often exploring topics that are personally significant to her. She is currently developing her first feature film, which will combine live-action with animation.

Born in New Zealand, Carmen Gray is a film critic, arts journalist and programmer, who now calls Berlin home. Her writing covering a wide range of topics, mainly examining the cinema of Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus, has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Sight and Sound, Criterion, Art Review and Mubi. In addition, she is a contributing film critic for The Film Verdict. Currently, Gray works on the selection committees of the Berlinale’s Generation section and the Winterthur International Short Film Festival. She also regularly advises on projects at the editing stage for First Cut Lab, holds workshops on criticism and journalism for emerging writers and has been a jury member in over 60 different juries around the world.

Weghorn has been the Chief of Staff in the executive team of Tricia Tuttle, the new director of the Berlin International Film Festival, since this summer, focusing on strategic development. Having joined the Berlinale team in 2002, he initially worked in the Generation section as a co-director and programmer, later becoming a member of the selection committee also of the Berlinale Competition. For the last ten years, Weghorn managed the Berlinale Talents initiative for emerging film professionals, developing and strengthening a network of around 10,000 alumni. He holds a master’s degree in theatre, film and television sciences in Cologne, with a diploma thesis exploring the visual language of melancholy in film, and is specialised today in cultural policy and the development of sustainable film and festivals organisations.

Léo Soesanto, the lead curator of RIGA IFF International and National Short Film Competitions, is a Paris-based film programmer and journalist who has written for publications such as Libération, Les Inrockuptibles, Vogue Paris, Premiere, and Grazia. He has extensive festival experience having been part of the feature film selection committee for the Critics’ Week sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival between 2009 and 2015. He also chaired the short film selection committee from 2017 to 2021. From 2016 to 2020, he was a film programmer at the Rotterdam Film Festival, which is a mecca for auteur cinema.

Chantal Lian has been working in the film industry for more than 13 years, as a programmer and curator at major French festivals such as the Les Arcs International Film Festival and the Champs-Élysées Film Festival for independent cinema where she also established the US in Progress Paris programme to promote cooperation between the European and North American film industries. Lian is an experienced film distributor with experience at respected companies such as Wild Bunch and Sophie Dulac Distribution, where she worked on commercially successful independent films such as Love & Friendship (2016) and Menashe (2017). She has also worked at Oxbelly, a training course for screenwriters and directors.

It is the fifth year when Līga is a member of the pre-selection committee for the short film program at the Riga International Film Festival. She writes about short films for Talking Shorts. Occasionally she moderates Q&As and does various translation-related tasks for films and film festivals. Apart from that, she has also taken part in pre-selecting shorts for the Glasgow Short Film Festival.

Nanako Tsukidate is a film critic and a journalist for Nobody Magazine in Japan. She is also an independent programmer and consultant of Venice Days (Giornate degli Autori). She worked as a selector of short films for La Semaine de la Critique (2019-2021) and as programmer for the Hiroshima International Film Festival, in particular for the European films section (2015-2018). Nanako has been a part of the RIGA IFF Short film selection committee since 2022.

Chinese-born Qiu Yang studied directing at the Victorian College of the Arts in Australia. He has made both virtual and live-action short films, which have screened successfully at the Cannes Film Festival, Semaine de la Critique, the Venice Film Festival's virtual reality section and elsewhere. His graduation short film Under the Sun (2015) was selected for the Cinéfondation student film competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and his live-action short film A Gentle Night (2017) won the Palme d'Or in the short film section of the 70th Cannes Film Festival, making Yang the first Chinese filmmaker to receive this award.