Marie-Monique Robin (born 15 June 1960, Poitou-Charentes) is a French TV journalist and documentary filmmaker. She generally issues books and documentary films together on the topics she investigates, in order to make more people aware of the issues she studies.
 
Her work has been recognized by numerous awards: the 1995 Albert Londres Prize for Voleurs d'yeux (1994), an exposé about organ theft; best political documentary award from the French Senate for Escadrons de la mort, l'école française (2003), her film about France's transfer of counter-insurgency techniques (including torture) to Argentina; and the Rachel Carson Prize for Le monde selon Monsanto (2008), her film on Monsanto and challenges to the environment from its products, including GMOs.
 
Marie-Monique Robin was born in 1960 and grew up in the Deux-Sèvres, where her parents were farmers. She studied political science at the University of Saarbrücken and graduated from university teaching journalism center of the University of Strasbourg.
 
After studying journalism in Strasbourg, she worked with France 3 for a time. Robin went to Nicaragua and worked in South America as a freelance reporter. She traveled to South America more than 80 times, including 30 times to Cuba. She reported on the Colombian guerrillas, and later worked for CAPA news agency.
 
Voleurs d'yeux (Eye Thieves), 1994, was the name of a book and a film based on it, related to her investigations of organ theft. After her film was shown at the United Nations, the USIA spokesman said that it was a lie. She was subjected to various pressures and personal attacks, but the following year in 1995, she was awarded the Albert-Londres prize for her film. However, the concession was suspended while the jury studied allegations of falsehoods after French physicians discovered that one of the children whose corneas the film said has been stolen still had them. After months of discussions, the commission decided to ratify the concession because they didn't find "bad faith".
 
Marie-Monique Robin subsequently left CAPA to work freelance. She is doing a report on Cuba for Thalassa, a French television program. Another project is exploring the rise in false allegations of pedophilia being made against teachers.
 
Robin made a 2003 film documentary titled Escadrons de la mort, l'école française (The Death Squads: The French School) that investigated the little-known ties between the French secret services and their Argentine and Chilean counterparts. (The next year she published a book on the same topic.) Specifically, she documented that the French transferred to Argentina counter-insurgency tactics which they had developed and used during the Algerian War (1954–62), including extensive use of torture and disappearances. The security forces later used them during the Dirty War (1976-1983) and for Operation Condor. She received an award in 2003 for the "best political documentary of the year" by the French Senate, in recognition of this work. Robin said in an August 2003 interview in L'Humanité: "[the] French have systematized a military technique in urban environment which would be copied and pasted to Latin American dictatorships". ...

​Želimir Žilnik (born in 1942; living and working in Novi Sad, Serbia) has written and directed numerous feature and documentary films which have reaped many awards at domestic and international film festivals. From the very beginning his films have focussed on contemporary issues, featuring social, political and economic assessments of everyday life (A Newsreel on Village Youth in Winter (1967), Little Pioneers (1968), The Unemployed (1968), June Turmoil (1968), Black Film (1971), Uprising in Jazak (1972).

The student demonstrations of 1968 and the turmoil that followed the occupation of Czechoslovakia are at the centre of Žilnik’s first feature film Early Works (1969) which was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and four prizes in Pula that same year.

After facing problems with censorship in Yugoslavia and after completing his next feature film Freedom or Cartoons (1972, produced by Neoplanta Film), Žilnik spent the mid-seventies in Germany, where he independently produced and made seven documentaries and one feature film, Paradise (1976). These films were amongst the first ever to touch on the foreign workforce in Germany, and they continue to be shown to this day at various retrospectives and symposiums.

Following his return to Yugoslavia at the end of the seventies, he directed a substantial series of television films and docudramas for TV Belgrade and TV Novi Sad (The Illness and Recovery of Buda Brakus (1980), Vera and Eržika (1981), Dragoljub and Bogdan (1982), The First Trimester of Pavle Hromiš (1983), Stanimir Descending (1984), Good Morning, Belgrade (1986), Hot Paychecks (1987), Brooklyn – Gusinje (1988), Oldtimer (1989), Black and White (1990) and other). These films received many awards at television festivals, both nationally and abroad.

By the end of the eighties Žilnik was making films through a cooperative production structure of television and cinema, all of them foreshadowing the growing tensions and looming political and social changes that were to affect the country: Second Generation (1984), Pretty Women Walking through the City (1985) and The Way Steel Was Tempered (1988).

Turning to independent film and media production in the nineties, he went on to make a series of feature and documentary films centering around the cataclysmic events in the Balkans (Tito among the Serbs for the Second Time (1994), Marble Ass (1995), Throwing off the Yolks of Bondage (1997), Wanderlust (1998). These films won top awards at national festivals (in Herceg Novi, Palić, Novi Sad and Sopot) and were screened at numerous international festivals. In 1995 Marble Ass won the prestigious ‘Teddy Award’ at the Berlinale.

The breakdown of the system of values in post-transitional Central and Eastern European countries and the problems concerning refugees and migration in the new circumstances of an extended Europe became the focus of Žilnik's most recent films: Fortress Europe (2000), Kenedi Goes Back Home (2003), Kenedi, Lost and Found (2005), Europe Next Door (2005), Soap in Danube Opera (2006), Kenedi is Getting Married (2007), Old School of Capitalism (2009), One Woman - One Century (2011), Pirika on Film (2013), Logbook_Serbistan (2015) and The Most Beautiful Country in the World (2018).

Recently, Žilnik has been the subject of major career retrospectives at Cinemateca Argentina, 2018; Mar del Plata Int. Film Festival, 2017; Anthology Film Archive, New York & Harvard Film Archive, 2017; Ankara Int. Film Festival, 2016; DocLisboa, 2015; Arsenal, Berlin, 2015; Int. Film Festival, St. Petersburg, 2015; Cinusp, Sao Paulo, 2014; Thessaloniki Int. Film Festival, 2014, etc.

Since 2010, his work has been featured in programs of art galleries, museums and art institutes around the world (Documenta, Kassel, Germany; Sharjah Biennial, UAE; Venice Biennale, Italy; ICA London & Nottingham Contemporary, UK; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA; Museum Moderner Kunst, MUMOK, Wien, Austria; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, MACBA, Spain; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico, etc.

Alongside his ceaseless filmmaking and production work, Žilnik has been active in educational areas, as well: since 1997 he has been a mentor and executive producer in many international workshops for students from all over South Eastern Europe. Since 2006 he has been a visiting lecturer at film schools at universities in USA, Slovenia and UK.

​Enikő Eszenyi (11 January, 1961) is an acclaimed Hungarian actor, director, theater manager, and member of the executive board of the Hungarian Shakespeare Association. Her career in the theater is intertwined with working with Shakespeare and the Comedy Theater in Budapest, Hungary. During her theatrical carrier, she received more than 40 awards as an actor, director, and manager of the Comedy Theater.
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Enikő Eszenyi studied at the Theatre and Film Academy in Budapest, and graduated as an actress in 1983. After graduation, she joined the company of the Vígszínház theatre in Budapest, one of the most prestigious and biggest theatres in Hungary, performing at three venues. In 2009 she was appointed Artistic Director of the Vígszínház. The first production she directed was of Büchner’s Leonce and Lena at the Budapest Chamber Theatre, which received seven awards at the Hungarian Theatre Festival 1991 and remained in the repertoire for five years. The next year, she staged West Side Story, for which she received another Best Theatre Director award. Her next production, Kleist’s Katie of Heilbronn, was similarly well received by the critics and audience alike. Her first Shakespeare production was As You Like It at the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava in 1996, for which she was awarded the Best Director Prize at the International Theatre Festival in Nitra, Slovakia. Five years later she was nominated for the same award for her adaptation of Antony and Cleopatra, which she directed at the Slovak National Theatre. At the beginning of the 2000s, she directed Much Ado About Nothing both at the National Theatre in Prague and at the Vígszínház. Furthermore, she staged The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night in Prague. She continued to work abroad in 2003, when she staged István Örkény’s absurd play The Tot Family at the Bez Zábradlí Theatre in Prague. In 2005, she staged Lope de Vega’s The Dog in the Manger at the National Theatre in Prague. Owing to the international acclaim she had attained, she was invited to the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., where she staged Brecht’s A Man’s A Man in January 2004. In 2014, she staged David Ives’s Venus in Fur at the Arena Theatre in Bratislava and in 2015 Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in St. Petersburg. In the meantime, she continued to direct in Budapest, at the Vígszínház and the Pesti Színház. She staged the productions of Grumberg’s The Workroom, Ostrovsky’s Even a Wise Man Stumbles, Vinterberg-Rukov-Hansen’s Festen, Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro, as well as Fiddler on the Roof, McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County, which gained great critical acclaim and garnered success at the Hungarian Theatre Festival. In 2009, she staged Shakespeare’s Othello, the first production during her tenure as Artistic Director at the Vígszínház, which was also performed at the International Festival of Theatres in Seoul, South Korea. Her most recent Shakespeare production is that of Romeo and Juliet at the Vígszínház, which has been the most popular and most attended Shakespeare performance over the past few theatre seasons in Hungary. Moreover, she has staged Simon Stephens’s Punk Rock, Hanoch Levin’s Suitcase Packers (for the first time in Hungary), Nestroy’s Lumpacius Vagabundus and Péter Nádas’s play Encounter. As an actress, she has appeared in numerous lead roles in drama masterpieces, including as Lady Ann, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Rosalinda, Violet, Cordelia and the Fool (King Lear). Other remarkable performances she has given include those in the roles of Joan (Shaw: Saint Joan), Nastya (Gorky: The Lower Depths), Blanche (Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire), Margaret (Tennessee Williams: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Alison (Osborne: Look Back in Anger), Nora (Ibsen: A Doll’s House), for the latter of which she was voted Best Actress at the Hungarian Theatre Festival. Other notable roles are Annette (Yasmina Reza: The God of Carnage), Shira (Hadar Galron: Mikveh), the Actress (Ferenc Molnár: The Guardsman) and Shen Teh / Shui Ta (Brecht: The Good Person of Szechwan), for which she received the Best Actress in a Lead Role prize at the Hungarian Theatre Festival and the Hungarian Theatre Critics Award. She has appeared in more than 25 film roles, attaining acclaim on the part of both professionals and audience. In addition, she has had five solo evenings, which were great successes in Hungary. Eszenyi has received several Hungarian state awards. She is the holder of the Jászai Mari Prize, the Artist of Merit and the Kossuth Prize (2001), the most prestigious Hungarian state award. Furthermore, she has received the Hungarian Republic’s Order of Merit. In 2010, she was appointed Ambassador of Hungarian Culture. 

​Sylvestre CLANCIER, born in Limoges (France) 1946, is poet and essayist. As teen ager he was a follower of Surrealism and Grand Jeu, and participate to “avant-gardes” movements: TXT, Generation, Textruction during the sixties and early seventies. His poetry has been translated in many languages. He has published more than thirty books and created with painters many artist’s books. His recents poetry books are: Anima Mia, Dans le noir & A travers les âges, Corps à Corps, Le Témoin incertain. La Source et le royaume, Par ces voix de fougèrers qui te sont familières , published by La rumeur libre. His essay, La Voie des poètes,  brings new focus on Artaud, Daumal, Michaux and others famous french poets. He is honored in many anthologies. An essay, Le Voyage et la Demeure, about his poetry world as been written by Christine Bini and published by L’herbe qui tremble in 2016. He was, for years, PEN Internationa board member and is yet chairman emerite of French PEN, president of Mallarmé Academy and Poetry House in Paris.

Kostadin Kostadinov, born on March 22, 1990, in Strumica, is a dedicated leader known for his active involvement in the public service.
 
In 2017, Kostadinov created history by becoming the youngest Mayor in Europe, managing Strumica Municipality for 10 months. Starting from 2017, he continued making impact at the National level as an MP at the Macedonian Parliament, contributing to important historical decisions, particularly related to Macedonia's Euro-Atlantic future.
 
Motivated by his belief in Regional development and European principles, Kostadinov was elected as Strumica's Mayor in 2021. Since taking over the Mayor’s Office in October 2021, he has actively worked to drive progress in the Municipality of Strumica.
 
Kostadinov's tenure has seen notable achievements in economic development, infrastructure enhancement, and community welfare. His dedicated leadership underscores his commitment to the people and the future of Strumica, making him a dynamic and proactive force in local governance.
 
Led by the premise "From the heart for Strumica | Од Срце за Струмица", Kostadinov creates policies for an inclusive and multicultural Municipality, perhaps one of the few in Macedonia. In this manner, Strumica Municipality's year-round cultural calendar reflects the commitment to nurturing and promoting the arts.
"Strumica Carnival", "International Art Colony", "International Festival of Chamber Theater: Risto Shiskov", "Festival of Aphorism and Caricature", "International Film Festival AsterFest", "Strumica Open Fest", "Festival of Traditional Folk Songs and Serenades: Under the Towers of Strumica"; "Get EXITed" and some more, are the events that provide a platform for local and international artists to showcase their talents and contribute to the cultural richness of Strumica, making it a City that truly comes alive with the spirit of creativity and tradition.
 
In addition, in the long-term strategy for progress and development of the Municipality, one of the main focuses is dedicated to Regional development of Strumica, according to the principle of equidistance. In this direction, the international cooperation achieved with Greece and Bulgaria dominates in several fields. The Municipality of Strumica keeps permanent social relations with these neighboring Countries, while showing remarkable results.

​Mr. Cvetan Pandeleski, a distinguished and accomplished individual, was born on the 27th of May, 1954, in the picturesque city of Ohrid. From an early age, he displayed a remarkable intellect and an unwavering determination to succeed. After completing his secondary education in Ohrid, he pursued higher studies at the prestigious Faculty of Economics in Skopje, where he honed his skills and acquired a deep understanding of the economic landscape.

A devoted family man, Mr. Cvetan dedicated his life to the well-being of his loved ones and the pursuit of excellence in his professional endeavors. Fueled by a strong work ethic, he embarked on a remarkable career journey that saw him achieve remarkable milestones in the field of economics.

In 1989, Mr. Pandeleski founded "CIP Product," a company that quickly made its mark in the market through its wholesale and retail trade operations. Under his astute leadership, the company soared to great heights, earning accolades and recognition for its outstanding performance. In 1996, "CIP Product" was ranked among the top four most successful companies in Macedonia.

In 1998, Mr. Pandeleski made a significant acquisition by purchasing "Tutun AD," one of the largest companies in the Republic of Macedonia. As the executive director, he steered the company to new heights, overseeing its operations in Lottery games, trade, and distribution. His visionary approach and strategic decision-making ensured the continued success and growth of the organization.

In 2003, Mr. Pandeleski joined "Pelisterka AD" as the executive director, where he embarked on a transformative journey. Through his strong leadership, he spearheaded the modernization of the factory and expanded its market reach. Today, "Pelisterka" stands as one of the most successful companies in Macedonia, renowned for its premium products. Notably, it became the first Macedonian water brand to obtain an export license to Europe, with "Pelisterka water" being enjoyed in over 18 countries worldwide.

Since 2010, Mr. Cvetan Pandeleski has held the esteemed position of chairman of the board of directors at "ZK Pelagonija AD Bitola." This leading agricultural company has thrived under his guidance, witnessing significant investments in various sectors. The company has made notable strides in renewable energy, with the construction of biogas plants generating 6 MW of electricity. Additionally, modern farms with a capacity of 2000 cows, the establishment of the "Zdravje Radovo" milk and dairy products factory, and the introduction of state-of-the-art American machinery have further solidified the company's position as a trailblazer in the agricultural sector. As one of the largest shareholders in the company, Mr. Pandeleski's influence and expertise continue to shape and drive its success.

Mr. Cvetan Pandeleski's remarkable journey exemplifies a man of vision, determination, and unwavering dedication. His contributions to the economic landscape of Macedonia and his commitment to excellence in every venture he undertakes serve as an inspiration to aspiring entrepreneurs and leaders alike.

It is a great pleasure to address the esteemed audience of the SEE FF-Paris-Berlin-Washington 2024 Southeast European Film Festival. For years, the SEE festival has succeeded in showcasing the best of Southeast European cinema to Western Europe and America. Beyond celebrating talent and promoting film professionals, the SEE Film Festival bridges differences, elevates, connects, and fosters mutual learning. In these times of social and political divisions, culture—where dialogue and exchange are inherent—serves to unify society, encouraging cohesion and better understanding, sparking new ideas and forging stronger connections. A vibrant, evolving culture supports its members and invites others to join.
 
Together, we can achieve small victories that lead to a true cultural revival, establishing a deserved place for culture in every country and society.
 
Once again, Montenegro is represented at the SEE festival with both feature and documentary films. This year, the festival will also present the award for best documentary film, named after the renowned French documentary filmmaker Frédéric Rossif (1922-1990), who was born in Cetinje.
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The first feature film with a Montenegrin theme, "There Is No Resurrection without Death," was produced by the Italian company Sangro Film and premiered on April 14, 1922, at the Volturno cinema in Rome. In March 1949, the Film Production Company "Lovćen-Film" was founded in Cetinje, and in May 1951, it released its first film, a documentary report "Congress of Sportsmen." In October 1955, "Lovćen Film" produced Montenegro's first feature film, "False Emperor," which was also the first historical film in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. 
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This year, we proud to celebrate the anniversary of Montenegrin Cinemateque, and in that context, one of the most remarkable Montenegrin (Ex - Yugoslavian) films “Fourteenth Day” by Zdravko Velimirovic from 1960 will be featured in the SEE FF program. This film was originally selected into the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. In July 2021, the film was shown in the Cannes Classics section at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
 
Film is not only a crucial cultural segment but also a developmental resource and a national brand. Our goal is to enhance the visibility and status of Montenegrin cinema, ensuring it has the future it deserves. The Ministry of Culture and Media is dedicated to legislative changes in the cultural field and will work to increase Montenegro's international presence through stable, continuous action. We are committed to supporting young cultural creators, providing them with a stable future, and fostering cultural creativity. 
 
With deep appreciation for your achievements since the festival's inception in 2011, and for future accomplishments, I congratulate you on your continued success and wish you a successful festival!