Tutors & Experts
Adelina Bichis
Adelina Bichis is an award-winning film editor based in London with feature, documentary and short film credits. Her films have screened at international film festivals like Tribeca, Rotterdam, SXSW, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Indie Lisboa and East End Film Festival.
Born and raised in Romania, she discovered her vocation early on. She took a BA in Film Editing and Sound at the National Film School in Bucharest, which led to a first job in the film industry as an assistant editor for Francis Ford Coppola’s film “Youth Without Youth”.
Adelina Bichis graduated the National Film and Television School in UK, where she completed with Honours an MA in Film Editing.
Anna Eborn
Anna Eborn was born in 1983 in Sweden. Her debut feature length and self edited documentary, Pine Ridge, was selected in the Official Selection at the Venice International Film Festival 2013 and won best Nordic documentary at the International Film festival in Gothenburg in 2014. Further films include Epifania, a hybrid/fiction which premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in 2016 and the feature-length documentary Lida, which premiered in competition at CPH:DOX 2017 and in the international competition at Visions du Reel 2017. Her latest film Transnistra won the VPRO Award during the 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and the Dragon Award of Best Nordic Documentary at Göteborg IFF 2019.
Brigid O’Shea
Brigid O’Shea has lived and worked in Germany and Europe since 2005. She started her career at the Berlin International Film Festival, where she worked for various departments including Berlinale Talents, Berlinale Co-Production Market and the EFM. She was the coordinator of the DOK Industry Programme from 2010 and was appointed head of DOK Industry in late 2014. She left this post in 2021 to establish the Documentary Association of Europe, to usher in a new generation of professionals and advocate on a pan-European level for documentary filmmakers. She has previously freelanced for many documentary institutions in Europe and also for production companies. She tutors across the globe on international co-financing and pitching as well as festival strategies and cultural management. She moderates and curates discussions and programmes on non-fiction filmmaking as an internationally-respected consultant with a wide and diverse network. Currently she serves on the advisory boards of B2B Doc and DMZ Docs.
Claudio Hughes
After living in Uruguay and Brazil, Claudio settled down in France where he has been editing and consulting for 25 years, as well as in Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Slovakia, England and the Netherlands.
He speaks English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Besides B2B Doc, Claudio has been a tutor at IDFA summer school, Cairo film festival, Dok Incubator, Docs Incheon Korea, Docs by the Sea Indonesia and Berlin Talent Campus.
His works were selected in Cannes, Locarno, Sundance, Toronto, Berlin and IDFA with two opening films: A Family Affair (2015) and Stranded (2008) that won the Joris Ivens prize for Best Documentary.
”Tutoring at B2B Doc is a pure joy! There is a lot of talented film makers and a lot of compelling and important stories to be told in the former Soviet republics. Helping to realizing these projects and helping to get them connected with the international industry is a really meaningful and rewarding job. It’s also very inspiring for me as a producer to take part of all those processes.”
— Hjalmar Palmgren
Hjalmar Palmgren
Hjalmar Palmgren has a background as Film Commissioner for documentaries at the Swedish Film Institute, Commissioning editor for doc’s om art and culture at Swedish public service broadcaster SVT and director of film funding at the Swedish Film Institute. Nowadays he spends his days as a lecturer, consultant and tutor in his own company Palmgren Vision and as a documentary producer at the newly established production company Docster.
Kasia Boniecka
Kasia Boniecka is a Polish award-winning film editor and documentary consultant based in Paris. Her documentary films have been screened and awarded in numerous prestigious international film festivals including: Sundance, IDFA, Dok Leipzig, Locarno Film Festival and Hot Docs. She received four individual editing awards for her short documentary OBJECT and the mid-length documentary film FIRST POLE ON MARS. She speaks Polish, English, German and French.
Kasia is a graduate of the Polish National Film School where upon graduation, she also taught editing and directing students for 5 years. As a Berlinale Talents alumnus, she contributed to the Visegrad Film Forum, Structural Constellations and dok.incubator workshops. She was also a part of the mentoring team during the “World from Dawn till Dusk” workshops, tutoring students from Georgia, Armenia and Turkey. She led editing workshops during the Golden Apricot Film Festival “Learn The Craft, Not The Software” and visual storytelling workshops at the Academy of Visual Arts in Kharkiv. She also collaborates with the Pitch the Doc platform as a story and editing consultant.
Malcolm Dixelius
Malcolm is a restless, creative person who loves good stories with an international reach. He draws from a long career that covers twenty odd years of journalism, half of that time spent in the Soviet Union and Russia as a correspondent for Swedish Radio and Television; then twenty five years of documentary filmmaking and TV production for the Swedish and international market in a variety of genres – all of that mixed up with writing, translations, lecturing, editing, tutoring and mentoring.
Malcolm thinks of himself as a master of learning from mistakes. He made so many of them in his first ten years of being a filmmaker that his first international success (“CCCP Hockey”) came as an unexpected surprise. After that he has won international awards as a producer for Homeward Bound, A Bitter Taste of Freedom and Women with Cows. Lately he is less engaged in production and more occupied with helping other people make fewer mistakes, or even turn mistakes into successful projects.
Monika Franczak
Screenwriter/script consultant based in Poland works internationally focusing on Eastern Europe.
Monika is not afraid of any kind film job: she writes fiction, TV series, consults documentaries and animations. While 7 months pregnant she worked as an assistant director for the first feature movie she had written, so you may easily call her really devoted to the cinema. As a consultant and screenwriter, she cooperated with the biggest Polish film production houses (Alvernia Studios and Platige Image) as well as with foreign ones (Film.UA Group - Ukraine). However even working for big shots she has a soft spot for the independent cinema and develops feature and documentary screenplays with producers and directors from that part of the movie business.
As a tutor on screenwriting and pitching technics she cooperated with Molodist Film Festival, Odessa Film Festival, Balkan Film Market, Terrarium program and last but not least with her beloved platform B2B DOC – Baltic to Black Sea Documentary Network.
"I believe in a good story as the key for every movie: feature, documentary or animation. The genre really doesn’t matter. Due to those beliefs what I look for in each project is a HEART - the initial motivation of the creator, the combination of emotions and the great storytelling. As from my B2B Doc experience filmmakers from Eastern Europe are in possession of unique stories which just have to be presented to the international audience. I'm more than happy to be a part of this process, especially coming from Poland, a country which successfully underwent the similar bumpy way of transition".
— Monika Franczak
Anastasia Kirillova
Anastasia Kirillova is an award winning international documentary filmmaker specializing in emotionally charged storytelling with a strong cinematic imprint.
Her documentaries have been screened at major film festivals around the world, with her latest film, Sleepers’ Beat, winning the Sheffield Doc/Fest Award for Best Documentary.
Of Russian-Swedish heritage, she trained as a director at the Royal College of Art in London. The UK, which subsequently became her second home, is where she also forged her film career - not only as a director – but also a creative force in film development. Specialized in writing and pitching film projects, she has an extensive track record of developing directors’ treatments and winning commissions alongside a wide range of established directors of fiction and documentary.
Max Tuula
Max Tuula is an Estonian producer born in Vladivostok, Russia. He has lived in Russia and Estonia, USA, Latvia, Serbia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Having a background in Political Science, he eventually switched to writing as a journalist about film, film industry and distribution. After a few years he started to collaborate with young filmmakers, dealing with different aspects of film production and distribution. These films participated in various festivals from Berlin to Abu Dhabi.
In 2012, together with his business partner Maria Gavrilova, Max founded the Tallinn-based production company Marx Film which became very well known for its political documentaries about the anti-Putin protest and leaders of the Russian opposition. A long-term partner of Marx Film was the celebrated Russian filmmaker Alexander Rastorguev. Their common collaborations participated in dozens festivals.
Marx Film’s 2017 film The Trial: The State of Russia vs Oleg Sentsov by Askold Kurov premiered at the Berlinale and traveled to festivals and venues across the globe and was acquired by the European Parliament. In 2018 How Big Is the Galaxy? premiered at IDFA and later received multiple festival awards in Russia, Europe and Asia, including Best Children’s Documentary from the European Children’s Film Association.
Phil Jandaly
Phil thinks of editing documentaries as being a private detective, digging deep into his clients’ footage in search of narrative and meaning, and making cynical jokes along the way. Working as an editor and consultant out of Sweden, his projects have originated in places as far afield as Serbia, Kenya, France, and Korea, including award winning international productions like Prison Sisters, Killing Time, and Liberation Day. As part of the B2B Doc, EDN, and Documentary Campus teams he’s tutored and consulted on everything from pitching, to rough cuts, to the genius of sticky notes. Running his Storysmith blog, he features interviews with filmmakers and technologists, and covers industry events like CPH:DOX, Nordisk Panorama and IDFA.
With a focus on human rights stories, Phil has brought an acute, analytical approach to storytelling, helping creators get to the heart of their projects.
Srdjan Fink
Srdjan Fink is a freelance editor based in Amsterdam, a graduate of the Netherlands Film Academy, Amsterdam School of the Arts. With over 20 years of experience in the post-production industry, Srdjan has successfully worked on numerous film, television and video productions and has screen credits on many award-winning documentary films. He speaks English, Dutch, Russian and Serbo-Croatian language and is proficient in Avid, Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X editing software. During his career, Srdjan has worked with directors including George Sluizer, Jan van den Berg, Vuk Janic, Jiska Rickels, Saskia van den Heuvel, Sergej Kreso, Masha Novikova, etc. and for institutions such as Greenhouse Film Centre, Binger Filmlab and the International Criminal Court. Srdjan is a dependable, flexible team player who offers creative input and ensures successful post-production of your project.
“It’s thrilling to be part of the B2B Doc team of tutors. It connects me to a cinematic tradition that is very close to my heart, and to stories that urgently need to be told, from a rapidly changing region. It’s an opportunity to be of use to filmmakers reaching out to an international audience, within a framework designed to take creators from early stages through completion. It’s also a chance for us to learn story craft from one another and have tons of fun.“
— Phil Jandaly
Uldis Cekulis
Uldis Cekulis created the independent production company VFS FILMS almost 20 years ago and later won the International Trailblazer prize at MIPDOC in Cannes, which recognises the best documentary makers. He has worked on almost fifty creative documentaries and author-driven prime time TV projects both as a producer and sometimes as a cameraman.
Uldis Cekulis co-produced documentaries with Ukrainian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Russian, German, Italian, French, Greek, Icelandic, Finnish, Norwegian and Georgian production companies.
A member of the European Documentary Network and European Film Academy. Other activities include tutoring at workshops in Europe, Caucasus and India. Currently he is working on five feature documentary co-productions and two author driven original TV series.
Viktor Nordenskiöld
Viktor Nordenskiöld Director / Producer / Editor of 10+ documentaries; current feature THE FEMINISTER, award-winning short OUT OF THIS WORLD (Berlinale selection), National Geographic series MISSION: SAVE THE OCEAN. Before setting off on his own focusing on documentaries, he worked many years as a foreign news reporter at Swedish Television. He has filmed in some fifty countries around the world and is specially interested in identity, international relations, human rights and xenophobia. Seven years ago, he founded the production company FreetownFilms. Studied journalism (BJ) in Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. Master of Arts degree (MA) at the Stockholm University of the Dramatic Arts.
Salomé Jashi
Salomé Jashi [Tbilisi, 1981] is a documentary filmmaker and producer from Georgia. Her visual approach is minimalist, subtle, evocative, with particular attraction to details.
Her Taming the Garden [2021] premiered at Sundance and Berlinale Forum and was nominated for European Film Awards. Her previous film The Dazzling Light of Sunset [2016] was awarded the Main Prize at Visions du Réel’s Regard Neuf Competition and other festivals. Her earlier work Bakhmaro [2011] was nominated for Asia Pacific Screen Awards. All three films were produced in collaboration with Arte's La Lucarne. She has also made several shorts films and produced How the Room Felt [2021] which premiered at IDFA's International Competition.
Salomé holds an MA in documentary filmmaking from Royal Holloway, University of London [2006] as well as an MA in journalism from Georgian Institute of Public Affairs [2003] and BA in journalism from Tbilisi State University [2002]. Salomé Jashi was a fellow of Nipkow Scholarship in 2017 and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2020.
"Tutoring at B2B Doc has been awarding from the very beginning. The inspiring creativity, flat-hierarchy atmosphere, grit, openness and out-of-the-box professionalism give me hope for the future. Experiencing a project grow and take new turns during a couple of days collaborative work is a joy, looking forward to see when more of those must-be-told-stories find their wings."
— Viktor Nordenskiöld