Work-In-Progress Showcase

 She was born in Italy in 1975 and graduated with a degree in Cinema History at the University La Sapienza in Rome. She collaborated with Film Italia, the public agency in charge of promoting Italian cinema abroad, and curating national and international projects. She produced a few shorts and a feature film. She programmed and was a consultant for a few film festivals.

Since 2003, she has worked as Head of Programming at the Noir in Festival, the Italian film festival focused on the noir genre. After working at Giornate degli Autori (GDA)—the independent sidebar of the Venice Film Festival—as a programmer and head of programming since the very first edition, she was appointed as the new artistic director of GDA in 2020.  

Wanuri Kahiu is a filmmaker, speaker, and science fiction writer. Kahiu’s award-winning film “Rafiki” was the first Kenyan film to be invited to the Cannes Film Festival, and has since won multiple awards across the world. Kahiu is a cultural leader for the World Economic Forum, an advocate for Freedom of Expression, and an Afrobubblegum activist, championing the need for the creation and curation of fun, fierce, and frivolous African art. Kahiu is a director for “Washington Black” for Hulu/20th Century Fox, which completed principal photography in 2022—an adaptation of the book by Esi Edugyan. She directed the Netflix film “Look Both Ways” starring Lili Reinhart, Luke Wilson and Nia Long, released in August 2022, and is set to direct “Once On This Island” for Disney. Kahiu was named in Time’s “100 Next” in 2019.  

Haider Rashid is a writer, director, and producer born in 1985, of mixed Iraqi and Italian origins. He directed the feature narratives “Tangled Up in Blue” and “It’s About to Rain”; the feature documentaries “Silence: All Roads Lead to Music” and “Street Opera”; the short film “The Deep”; and the VR documentary “No Borders”. His films have won awards at Venice International Film Festival, Dubai International Film Festival, the Italian Golden Globes, and the Nastri d’Argento (Silver Ribbons), Italy’s oldest film awards. His latest feature “Europa”, was selected at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs—now Quinzaine des Cinéastes—(Directors’ Fortnight) section, where it won the Independent Critics’ Prize ‘Beatrice Sartori Award’. Among several other accolades, the film also won Best Director and Best Actor at the inaugural edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival, awarded by a jury presided by Academy Award winner Giuseppe Tornatore, and was selected as Iraq’s Official Entry for the 94th Oscars.