WANG Bing (China / Film Director)

WANG Bing was born in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, in 1967. He studied photography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, an industrial city where, years later, he would film West of the Tracks. From there he moved on to the Beijing Film Academy, where he discovered the work of Antonioni, Bergman and Pasolini. He especially admires Andrei Tarkovsky.

Through the 1990s he made a living working on various films as an assistant director or cameraman, but, feeling that the mainstream filmmaking and television world would not let him develop as he wished, he decided to start producing his own films.
In 2002 he made West of the Tracks, a nine-hour documentary about the decline of a vast industrial zone in North-East China. A first five-hour version was screened at the Berlinale in 2003. The final version, in three parts, premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was distributed in France in 2004.
Today, the film is considered both a masterpiece and a harbinger of the new possibilities opened up by the digital era. Since then, he has continued to work in the same mode, outside the system and always on highly challenging topics, such as the Anti- Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s (Fengming, a Chinese Memoir and The Ditch), extreme poverty (Man with No Name and Three Sisters), and life in a psychiatric hospital (‘Til Death Do Us Part).

In 2017 Wang Bing was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival for Mrs. Fang, and in 2018, Dead Soul was selected for the out of competition segment of the Cannes Film Festival.
In 2021, Le BAL in Paris mounted an exhibition entitled The Walking Eye, and the French Cinémathèque presented a retrospective of his films.
The 2023 Cannes Film Festival will present two new films by Wang Bing: Man in Black as a Special Screening, and Youth (Spring) in the Official Competition.

KUO Ming-Jung (Taiwan / Programmer, Producer)

Ming-Jung Kuo has spent much of her career in film festival management, programming and talent support initiatives. Her work as Program Director for Taipei Film Festival (2014-2018), carried a balance of showcasing new talent and introducing narrative VR programs as well as celebrating cinema heritage. She also partnered with Produire au Sud and launched PAS Taipei in 2015 to help reinforce script development, co-production and sales strategies. Having worked as the program consultant from 2017, she joined the Singapore International Film Festival in 2019, first as the Program Director before becoming Artistic Director. Between 2019 and 2021, she was on the selection committee for the Locarno Festival Open Doors. She set up Island X Pictures in 2022 and is developing feature films. In 2022 she joined Directors’ Fortnight as a consultant covering Southeast Asia and Taiwan.

Anocha SUWICHAKORNPONG (Thailand / Film Director)

Anocha SUWICHAKORN PONG is a filmmaker whose work is informed by the socio-political history of Thailand. Her films have been the subject of special focus screenings at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; TIFF Cinematheque, Toronto; and Harvard Film Archive.
Anocha founded the Bangkok-based production house, Electric Eel Films and co-founded the non-profit Purin Pictures. Through these organizations, she supports emerging voices in independent Southeast Asian Cinema. Anocha is a Prince Claus Laureate, DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Residency, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency recipient. She was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University from 2018-2020. Her latest film, COME HERE, premiered at Berlinale 2021. In 2022, Anocha directed her first live performance, FREETIME, commissioned by the Walker Art Center. She currently teaches film directing at Columbia University.

NAKAYAMA Kyoichi (Musashino Art University),

DAIGON Sayaka (ENBU Seminal)

FUJISAKI Itaru (Meiji University)