Bach is a Slovenian curator who has worked at the Animateka International Animation Film Festival for twelve years and, since 2023, has been selecting films for the main competition. She studied cultural theory in Ljubljana but is currently dedicating her professional career to animated film. In 2016, she was appointed president of The Elephant – Association for Film Education, an organisation dedicated to promoting animated film and educating young audiences. In 2017, Bach became a board member of the Slovene Animated Film Association (DSAF) and, a year later, joined CEE Animation – the Central and Eastern European animation association. Since 2022, she has been the managing director of the CEE Animation Workshop and, as of last year, a member of the association’s board of directors.

Harawe is an Austrian director, screenwriter, and producer of Somali origin. Born in Somalia, he has been living in Austria since 2009. He discovered his passion for cinema as he was studying at an art school in Mogadishu. Since then, he has made seven short films, screened at various festivals and awarded in Locarno, Clermont-Ferrand, Vienna and elsewhere. His shorts Life on the Horn (2020) and Will My Parents Come to See Me (2022) were made in his native Somalia. Harawe studied visual communication in Kassel and received the Outstanding Artist Award from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture last year. In 2024 his debut feature The Village Next to Paradise, addressing family structures, the phenomenon of Westernisation and Somali culture, was included in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes.

Schlüssel is an experienced cultural sector specialist, film curator and programmer from Germany, focussing on short films and talent development. She is a member of the Berlinale Shorts and Berlinale Talents Lab selection committees, as well as a pre-selector for The New York Times Op-Docs, and co-founder of the discussion and short film screening platform “shorts/salon”. Alongside this, Schlüssel works as a pitching mentor, consultant and moderator, and has served on the juries of several European festivals. She previously headed the film project development lab Short Form Station of Berlinale Talents and was the artistic manager of the contemporary art and design foundation Pictoplasma. She currently lives in Berlin.

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 15 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.

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). Tsukidate 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.

Born in Vilnius, Vytautas Katkus is a Lithuanian cinematographer and director. As a cinematographer, his projects range from movies to visual art. His latest film as a director of photography, Toxic (2024), won the Pardo d’Oro at the Locarno Film Festival last year. He has directed three short films: Community Gardens (Cannes, Semaine de la Critique, 2019), Places (Venice Film Festival, Orizzonti, 2020), and Cherries (Cannes Film Festival, 2022).