FILMMAKERS
Jonas Govaerts (Belgium) is a music video, television and film director based in Antwerp. He wrote and directed several award-winning shorts before making his feature debut Cub (Welp) which premiered at TIFF and brought him the Best Direction award at Sitges 2014. He is the author of cult Flemish TV series Monster! and Super8. His recent credits include the series Tabula Rasa, F*** you very, very much, and music videos for artists like R.A. the Rugged Man, A Winged Victory for the Sullen and Die! Die! Die! His second feature film H4Z4RD has been toring the festival circuit garnering awards as Best Action Film at Toronto After Dark Film Festival and Best Feature Length Film in the Órbita section at Sitges 2022.
Norbert Pfaffenbichler (Austria) lives and works in Vienna as an artist, filmmaker and curator. He is co-founder of VIDOK and Ianolin Studio and was involved in the Austrian abstract cinema which emerged in the 1990s. In 2002, he started working on his film series Notes on Film in which he deconstructs film history from an artistic view which he spices up with mathematical abstraction. He has been cooperating with several international film festivals and exhibitions such as the Vienna film festival, festivals of short films in Oberhausen, Tampere, Rotterdam, Vienna and others. In 2009 the VIS festival screened special programme for his work with Lotte Schreiber. More at www.norbertpfaffenbichler.com.
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Julia Witas (Austria) is an audiovisual artist currently studying Time-Based Media (MA) at the University of Art and Design Linz. Through media such as photography, film, sound and voice, she creates atmospheric visual and sonic worlds that are characterized by poetic fragility and raw immediacy. She performed in Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s 2551.02 – The Orgy of the Damned.
ACADEMIA
Dr Austin Fisher (UK) is Associate Professor of Popular Culture at Bournemouth University. He is author of Blood in the Streets: Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Cinema (2019) and Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western (2011), as well as editor of Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads (2016) and Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond (2016). He is also co-editor of Bloomsbury’s “Global Exploitation Cinemas” book series. More at www.austinjfisher.com.
Dr Russ Hunter (UK) is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University. His research focuses on Italian genre cinema, European horror cinema and genre film festivals. He has published on a variety of aspects of Italian and European genre cinema and is the co-editor (with Stefano Baschiera) of Italian Horror Cinema (2016). He is currently writing a book on Italian giallo and horror director Dario Argento. He has published in numerous film encyclopaedias and reference guides and works closely with a number of European genre film festivals.
Dr Alexia Kannas (Australia) is Lecturer in Cinema Studies in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia). Her research interests lie in the areas of cult cinema, performance, sound and cinematic place. She is the author of Deep Red (Columbia UP/Wallflower, 2017) and Giallo: Genre, Modernity and Detection in the Italian Horror Film (SUNY Press, 2020).
Dr Steve Jones (UK) is Assistant Professor in Media and Film at Northumbria University. His research principally focuses on sex, violence, ethics, and selfhood within horror film and pornography. He is the author of Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw, and his forthcoming book – The Metamodern Slasher Film – will be published later this year. More at www.drstevejones.co.uk.
CRITICS, CURATORS & PROFESSIONAL FRIENDS
Foto: Mercan Sümbültepe
Christoph Huber (Austria) is a curator in the programme department of the Austrian Film Museum, where he co-conceived several large retrospectives on genre cinema. He is the European editor of the Canadian film magazine Cinema Scope, and has contributed to countless other international magazines, books and homepages; he has co-authored (with Olaf Möller) books on Peter Kern and Dominik Graf. Ferronian.
Bernd Brehmer (Germany) is a film collector and member of the legendary underground cinema and collective Werkstattkino in Munich. He is also the co-founder, director and curator of UNDERDOX, the International Festival for Document and Experiment in Munich.
Doris Kuhn (Germany) is a member of the legendary collectively-run cinema Werkstattkino in Munich. As a filmmaker she was part of the ’80s S-8 movement in Germany, creating among others the short film Morgen (1984) and co-directing the omnibus feature Jesus – The Film (Jesus – Der Film, 1986).