Maria Ruggieri (consultant/correspondent: China)

She graduated in Chinese language and literature from the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice in 1998 with a thesis entitled Sun Yu: A Director in China in the Thirties. She continued her film studies at the Beijing Film Academy (1998-2000) and was a consultant for film festivals and cycles in Italy. Her articles on contemporary Chinese film, and in particular on the directors of the Fifth and Sixth Generation have appeared in film magazines in Italy.

Babak Karimi (consultant: Iran)

Babak Karimi, film editor, was born in Prague in 1960 from an Iranian family, and moved to Italy in 1971. He has collaborated with many directors including: Abbas Kiarostami, Babak Payami, Pasquale Scimeca, Costanza Quatriglio, Vera Belmònt, Mehrdad Oskouei, and Maurizio Zaccaro. He has taught film editing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, the Istituto per le Arti e le Scienze dell’Immagine (L’Aquila) and the Barbarano Film School. He has written the dialogues and Italian subtitles for dozens of Iranian films, including films by Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf, Panahi, Jalili and others.

Alëna Shumakova (consultant/correspondent: Balkans, Eastern Europe and territories of the former Soviet Union)

Alëna Shumakova, born in Moscow, has lived in Italy since 1991. She graduated from the Università di Urbino and became specialized in film at the Institute of Cultural Studies in Moscow. From 1998 to 2000 she collaborated with several Russian theatre institutions and with the Festival dei Teatri in Santarcangelo. She continues to translate and review works by contemporary Russian playwrights and screenwriters, including Rezo Gabriadze and Ivan Vyrypaev (UBU finalist), and Aleksandr Sokurov. She is dedicated to Soviet cinema, as the curator for several film cycles and retrospectives. From 2000 to 2004 she was responsible for the Italy-USSR collection at the Cineteca di Bologna, the largest collection of Soviet films in the West. Since 2004 she has been the consultant/correspondent for the Venice Film Festival for films from Russia and the former Soviet republics; with Marco Müller, she was the curator of the 2006 retrospective dedicated to Soviet musicals. Since 2004 she has been pursuing a specialization in Soviet propaganda film and is preparing a book on Russian multiscreen film. She is finishing her Ph.D with Professor Kirill Razlogov (the author of many books including a prestigious History of Russian film) at the Institute for Cultural Research in Moscow.

Mikiko Tomita (consultant/correspondent: Japan)

Mikiko Tomita also continues the work she has successfully accomplished from 2004 to 2007; born in Karatsu, Japan, she began her career as curator for the Nippon Audio-Visual Library. In 1989 she was one of the founders of the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival. She has been a guest curator for the National Film Centre in Tokyo, was a restoration intern at the UCLA Film & TV Archive and researched early Japanese films for the Gosfilmofond in Russia. She has programmed and organised many retrospectives in Japan, including the Lenfil’m Retrospective and the Robert Bresson Retrospective. She has been a film consultant and correspondent for many international film festivals such as Rotterdam, Locarno and the Festival Cinéma du Réel.

Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan (consultant: USA)

Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan (Torino, Italy 1961). A film writer and curator specializing in American cinema, Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan has been a resident of New York City since 1985. Her work has appeared in such major Italian publications as Ciak, il manifesto, Specchio (La Stampa), Panorama, Marie Claire and Amica, as well as Film Comment and Cahiers du cinéma. Among her books are monographs devoted to John Carpenter, George Romero, Walter Hill, John Milius, Robert Aldrich, Clint Eastwood and William Friedkin. Her most recent publication is “John Landis” (Darkhorse Press, 2008). From 1998 to 2002 she was the US correspondent for the Venice Film Festival. From 2003 to 2006 she was the co-director of the Torino Film Festival. She has curated special programs devoted to various aspects of American film for Italy’s most important festivals (including Torino, Pesaro, Rimini, Bellaria and Verona), some of which have toured to the Cinématheque Française,  the Museum of Moving Image in New York and the Melbourne Film Festival.

Margherita Di Paola (correspondent: USA)

Margherita Di Paola (Catania, Italy 1978) studied Social Science and Cinema at the University of Rome (Roma Tre), and at the Los Angeles Film School. Active since the year 2000 in the production, and post-production of independent movies and documentaries, both in Italy and in the United States, since 2005 has lived and operated in Los Angeles (CA).