Industry Days

Gilles Duffaut is a French sales agent, distributor and producer with more than thirty years in international sales and independent cinema. He is founder and managing director of Media Art, a French international sales and distribution company supported by Unifrance. His career began in Barcelona in 1996 with Tecnicamente Dolce, a sales company for short films, documentaries and series, before he ran the European Film & TV Market of Barcelona under the European Union's MEDIA programme and joined Silenzio Films in Spain, where he distributed or co-produced seventy features through 2011. He went on to found Axxon Films in France and Axxon Media in Belgium, and in 2026 launched Bluebox Films, a film coaching company. His catalogue brings together work by Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, Jafar Panahi, Abderrahmane Sissako, Manoel de Oliveira and Chantal Akerman. He was associate distributor on The Ants by Yassine Fennane (2025).

Iratxe Fresneda is a Basque filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, lecturer and researcher whose work blends audiovisual research with artistic practice. After a decade directing and writing for the Basque public broadcaster, she moved into independent cinema. A lecturer in Audiovisual Communication at UPV/EHU since 2004, she has been a visiting researcher at CUNY, the University of Nevada, Lund University and Toulouse II. Her acclaimed Trilogy of the Register explores identity, historical memory and migration, and exile, whether political, geographical, metaphorical or creative, runs through several of her major works. Her feature debut, Irrintziaren Oihartzunak (The Echoes of Irrintzi, 2016), focuses on creative exile: it brings Mirentxu Loyarte (1938–2025), one of the great pioneers of Basque and European cinema, out of obscurity. Forced into exile for political reasons, Loyarte spent decades away from her homeland and out of the public eye, and the film asks what it means for an artist to be cut off from her community and her own filmmaking. Tetuán (2022), the third instalment of the trilogy, approaches exile across generations. Through four true stories, including her father's own experience in North Africa, it travels from Almería and the Sahara to Tétouan and the Basque Country, redefining the ideas of refugee and exile and showing how the loss of one's roots transforms the identity and memory of those forced to move. Her films, which also include Lurralde Hotzak (2018) and Errotatiba (2024), have premiered at San Sebastián, FICX Gijón and ZINEBI and screened at Documenta Madrid, Cartagena and Cinequest, and the Trilogy of the Register received a retrospective at Arsenal in Berlin. She is a member of the Spanish Film Academy.

Sébastien Hussenot is a French producer with more than thirty years in the film industry. He began as a location manager before founding La Luna Productions in 1994, through which he has produced and co-produced over a hundred films, short films, features and documentaries, shown and awarded worldwide, among them the Oscar-nominated short Manon sur le bitume. His work is built on international co-production, notably with Tunisia, Lebanon and Ghana, and on support for emerging filmmakers. Recent titles include Sanki Yoxsan (Cannes 2024), Tsutsue (Cannes 2022), America, nominated for a César, and Les Enfants rouges (Red Path) by Lotfi Achour, which premiered in Locarno and won the Bayard d'Or in Namur and the Golden Yusr at the Red Sea International Film Festival. He received the PROCIREP Producer's Award in 2018, and is currently co-producing Ego Reach We All and Notre temps viendra.

Morad Kertobi is chargé de mission at France's Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC). Having managed several support schemes, among them funding for audiovisual programmes and for feature film script development, and having headed the CNC's Short Film Department, he now works on the accompaniment of emerging short film authors and their connection to the professional ecosystem. He also follows the question of the transition from short to feature filmmaking, and the CNC's international cooperation. He is the creator of Talents en Court, a scheme conceived to widen access and diversity in French short filmmaking.

Alice Kharoubi has worked in the film industry for more than twenty years, at the meeting point of programming, talent support and project development. A long-time member of the Festival de Cannes team, where her path has been closely tied to the short film and to the discovery of new talent, she is today Director of Film Programming at the Marché du Film, where she also created Cannes Makers, a programme accompanying the new generation of international sales professionals. Formerly head of Cannes Court Métrage, she has programmed short films for the Abu Dhabi Film Festival and contributed to the programming of Festival Tous Écrans in Geneva. She has been part of the Red Sea International Film Festival team since its first edition, where she now leads the Souk Talents and Souk Connections initiatives. She has also served as artistic director of a screenwriting residency programme. Regularly invited to support emerging filmmakers and identify new voices, she sits on a number of film and script selection committees. She is an EAVE alumna.

Sophia Menni is a Moroccan creative producer at La Prod, working with acclaimed directors on international co-productions. In 2018 she co-produced Amussu, a documentary on a Moroccan village's revolt against a polluting silver mine, which won the Jury Award at Final Cut in Venice in 2019 before reaching audiences at Hot Docs and IDFA. Her work is guided by a search for new narrative forms and a commitment to cinema that is bold in both form and content. She is currently in late development on Le Refuge by Talal Selhami (Atlas Workshops 2024, Frontières 2025) and the animated short The Bride of the Rain by Driss Ouaamar (Atlas Station 2025). She is also a member of the Tamayouz foundation.

Linda Mutawi is an award-winning Jordanian-Swedish producer of Palestinian origin with more than twenty-three years in the international film industry. She is co-founder of Fikra, a Stockholm-based company producing politically resonant films between Scandinavia and the Middle East. A long-time collaborator of Tarik Saleh, she produced Eagles of the Republic, which premiered in Competition at Cannes, won Best Film at the Guldbagge Awards and was Sweden's submission to the Academy Awards. Before moving into independent production she was Head of Production Services at Jordan's Royal Film Commission, where she helped launch the Jordan Film Fund. She is a 2026 Producers on the Move participant, an EAVE alumna and a graduate of the PGA Diversity Workshop.

Bertrand Rouchit is Deputy Director (Directeur délégué) of the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, the world's largest event dedicated to the short form, and has spent more than a decade working for independent cinema and the international circulation of short films. Within Sauve qui peut le court métrage, the association behind the festival, he leads cultural programming with a particular focus on young audiences, arts education and local exhibition networks, among them Passeurs d'images and Circuit-court. He also sits regularly on the pre-selection committee for the festival's National Competition. His work centres on access to cinema and on building the next generation of audiences, and he is a frequent consultant and jury member on the international festival circuit.

Romain Ruef is Operations Director at Atlantis Studios Marrakech, where he oversees all post-production, dubbing and localization activities for feature films, series and documentaries delivered to international broadcasters and platforms, including Netflix, Disney, Canal+ and BBC Studios. Trained in cinematography and film technologies at ESRA, he began his career on set as a Director of Photography in France and Southeast Asia, working on feature films, short films and advertising campaigns, before taking on the artistic direction of a Vietnamese television channel. He later joined Hiventy North Africa, part of the TransPerfect network, as Technical Director and Head of AI Development, where he helped structure the regional dubbing and post-production hub. Today, his role focuses on the studio's overall development, from team organization and production workflows to the development of new business activities and partnerships, while also integrating AI tools into traditional post-production pipelines.

Moustapha Sawadogo is a Burkinabè producer and cultural administrator working across project development, production and the support of African filmmakers. Trained in Arts and Communication at the University of Ouagadougou, he began in the cultural sector as an administrator and artist manager, working with musicians including Yeleen and Smarty, and running the La Termitière choreographic development centre in Ouagadougou. He joined Racines Productions in 2012 as production manager and graduated from EAVE in 2018. He produced the feature Duga, Les Charognards by Abdoulaye Dao and Hervé Éric Lengani, in official selection at FESPACO 2019, and was production manager on the series Black & White by Moussa Sène Absa, a JEM Productions title broadcast on France 3. He sits on selection committees and juries for IDFA, Sheffield DocFest, STEPS and Pitch au Féminin. Since 2021 he has headed FESPACO's Ateliers Yennenga: Yennenga Academy, Yennenga Coproduction and Yennenga Post-production.

Daniela Stephan is a Lebanese writer-director and photographer working between London and Beirut. Her films carry a rebel voice, exploring identity, intergenerational trauma and coming of age against a backdrop of historical and socio-political upheaval. She earned her BA in Filmmaking at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) before moving to the United Kingdom for an MA in Filmmaking at the London Film School. Her short film Mummy Blue won Best Director in Tokyo in 2022. The Sun Sets on Beirut (2022), which returns to the port explosion, travelled to more than twenty international festivals, among them the Tampere Film Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur and the Marché du Film in Cannes, and is featured on the curated platform Short of the Week. She is currently developing her debut feature, Underbelly, alongside several international short film projects.

Muhammad Taymour is an award-winning Egyptian producer, director and video artist born in 1985. In 2020 he produced I Am Afraid to Forget Your Face, directed by Sameh Alaa, the first Egyptian film to win the Short Film Palme d'Or at Cannes. Drawn to abstract, surreal and conceptual forms, his own multidisciplinary work explores time, memory and nostalgia; he directed the experimental documentary Patterns from the Sun (2019). After producing with Alexandria's Fig Leaf between 2018 and 2020, he founded the Egyptian Film Producers Club in 2021 to train and connect emerging independent producers, and launched Chaos Films in 2022 as a hub for short cinema. He lectures on film production at The Knowledge Hub Universities in Egypt and programmes short films for El Gouna Film Festival, where he previously headed the CineGouna Film Market.