Whose Country?

Siam is a documentary and fiction filmmaker from Egypt. After a brief period studying psychology, he then studied filmmaking before working in the cinema industry in Egypt as an assistant director on narrative feature films. As a director, Siam has received several international grants in support of his film projects, including from Sundance, IDFA Bertha Fund, Catapult Film Fund, Hot Docs-Blue Ice Group Fund, and OIF, among others. He is a Berlinale and Durban Talent Campus alumnus and has also participated in various workshops and labs, including at Sundance Institute, IDFA Academy, Doc Campus and La Fabrique des Cinémas du Monde, where he presented his documentary film Amal (winner of a Robert Bosch Foundation Film Prize, a Docs-In-Progress Award at Thessaloniki and the AfriDocs Prize at Durban FilmMart). Siam’s cinematography can be seen in The Trials of the Spring and The Path (dir. Senain Kheshgi) – both films co-produced with ITVS.

Talal Al-Muhanna is a film and TV producer who develops documentary and fiction films with filmmakers of Arab descent. Films that he has produced have screened at numerous festivals internationally, won awards and have aired in Europe and the Middle East on TV5Monde, Aljazeera, Arte, ZDF, NRK, NTR, YLE, SVT, and DRK. Talal co-executive produced (with Artline/Paris) Rise of the Gulf, Beyond Black Gold (a.k.a. EMIRS) – one of the most-watched documentary series on French TV in 2014 - and script-edited the feature documentary version of the series. His Grand Prix award-winning arts documentary Disportrait was nominated by the Danish Film Academy for Best Short Documentary at the 2015 Roberts Awards in Denmark. Currently, he is also script editor and producer of the documentary Egyptian Jeanne d’Arc (winner SANAD prize at JCC Carthage 2015) and co-produced Lebanese documentary Room for a Man (supported by Screen Institute Beirut and AFAC). His projects have also been supported by Tribeca Film Institute (USA); Doha Film Institute (Qatar); Enjaaz (Dubai); Visions Sud Est (Switzerland); CNC & Rhone-Alpes Cinema (France); MDM film fund (Germany); and MEDIA/Creative Europe. Talal holds an MA in Film & Moving Image Production from Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK and a Certificate in Fundraising from New York University. He has served on film juries for Beirut Film Station and Talents Beirut and, in 2015, was selected as a Producing Fellow at the Center for Asian American Media.

For over 20 years, Bruni Burres has worked at the intersection of arts and culture and human rights as a festival director and curator, a media educator, creative producer and social media strategist. She is currently a Senior Consultant for Sundance Institute’s Documentary Program and is a consultant for Good Pitch and Chiledoc. She is also a senior program advisor for the Middle East Now Festival in Italy. From 1991-2008, Bruni was the director of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Bruni has been the co-writer and associate producer of Beyond My Grandfather Allende, which won the prize for Best Documentary in the Director’s Fortnight program of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.