Ji.hlava Academy is an educational, networking and inspiring platform open to emerging filmmakers in non-fiction contemporary cinema.

Head tutor in 2021

Khavn / Philippines
filmmaker, composer, writer

Khavn is the director of more than 203 films − 52 features and 151 short films. He is also the composer of 40 albums and author of 8 books. His poetry and fiction have won in the Palanca Awards, the Philippines’ foremost literary award. He has served in the jury of various film festivals such as the Berlinale, Clermont-Ferrand, CPH:DOX, Jeonju, Bucheon, New Horizons, Dok Leipzig, & Ji.hlava IDFF. Khavn has exhibited at the MoMA, MAXXI, Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, National Museum of Singapore, & Venice Architecture Biennale. He has lectured at the Berlinale Talent Campus, Bela Tarr’s Film Factory, Goethe Institut, & the Danish Film Institute. Khavn has curated programs for the Viennale, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, & the Sharjah Biennial. Selected retrospectives of his films were presented in Rotterdam, Pesaro, Dokufest Kosovo, Sao Paulo, Taiwan, Film Mutations Zagreb, and Oberhausen among others.

Guest speakers

Peter Kuplowsky is a film curator, content producer, writer, and hat enthusiast based in Toronto. Since 2005, he has established a career championing genre cinema and outsider art both as the co-host of the Laser Blast Film Society — a monthly film series celebrating eccentric film — and as a programmer at various international film festivals, including Toronto After Dark, Fantastic Fest, and the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness programme. Kuplowsky is also a producer, whose credits include Manborg (11), the segment “Z is for Zygote” from the anthology film The ABCs of Death: Part 2 (14), The Interior (15), The Void (16), and Your Mother and I (16).

Soudade Kaadan is a Syrian director, born in France. She studied theater criticism at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Syria and filmmaking in Saint Joseph University (IESAV) Lebanon. Her films have screened at several venues nationally and internationally and have received international awards. Her first feature fiction film THE DAY I LOST MY SHADOW was awarded THE LION OF THE FUTURE award for best debut film in Venice Film Festival 2018, and the jury prize for directing at LA Festival and has been screened in several festivals: TIFF, BFI, Busan and IFFR. Her recent short film Aziza won Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2019.

Olaf Möller is a freelance writer and programmer. He is a critic for various international film magazines (Film Comment, Cinema Scope, Sight & Sound among others) and a consultant for several film festivals (including Il Cinema Ritrovato, International Film Festival Rotterdam and I mille occhi) as well as film museums and archives. He is an adjunct Professor for Film History and Theory at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture of Aalto University (Helsinki), and has co-written and published a variety of books on cinema. In 2016 he co-curated the Locarno retrospective Geliebt und verdrängt: Das Kino der jungen Bundesrepublik Deutschland.