EDN Chairman Kees Ryninks, Director & Producer, The Netherlands

Kees Ryninks started working in documentaries as a free-lance sound recordist. From 1977 he was a student in direction and production at the National Film & Television School in Beaconsfield, England. After graduation in 1981 Ryninks worked as cameraman, independent producer and director for BBC, Channel Four and ITV. From 1990 he started to focus more on producing documentaries, six of which won major awards in Europe and America. In 1997 he moved back to The Netherlands and founded his own company Ryninks Films; productions include the award-winning films Romance de Valentía, Silent Witness, The Hunt, Lágrimas Negras, A Cry from the Grave and Two Loves.

Between 2001 and 2007 Ryninks was Head of Documentaries at the Netherlands Film Fund. In 2002 he initiated DocuZone; a project in which ten art-house cinemas were equipped with a digital set-up for weekly showing of documentaries. Within the 3 years of this experiment more than 70 Dutch and international documentary titles were released in those ten cinemas. In 2004 the DocuZone concept was expanded into CinemaNet Europe, a digital cinema network in 175 cinemas across 8 European countries. The initiative was awarded several MEDIA grants and run between 2004 and 2006. Its existence guaranteed more than 30 documentaries a pan-European release next to 120 domestically released digital films.

Kees Ryninks has been a regular tutor and panel member for pitching workshops in Barcelona, Bardonecchia, Lisbon, Buenos Aires and Santiago, amongst others. In March 2009 he started working as a free lance Producer & Director.

Email: kr_@If you can read this, please upgrade to a modern browser.euronet.nl

C. Cay Wesnigk, Director, Author, Producer, CEO of ONLINEFILM AG, Germany

C. Cay Wesnigk studied visual communication at the University of Arts in Hamburg. 1987 he founded the C. Cay Wesnigk Filmproduktion. Since then he has written, directed and produced several feature length and short films. Most of Wesnigk's films have been shown and some even awarded on festivals all over the world.

In 1995/96 Wesnigk worked freelance with an advertising agency specializing in new media and Internet where he was responsible for the development and production of Internet and multimedia presentations. Following this he decided to bring his new gained knowledge back to the film industry. In 2000, together with 120 other producers, directors and authors he founded the OnlineFILM AG as a public company to use digital technologies for the distribution of audiovisual content. He has worked as CEO of OnlineFILM since then. After riding the ups and downs of the dotcom crash, finally in 2007 the project Onlinefilm.org, a European web project to make it possible for filmmakers to very easily upload and offer there films for sale over the internet, was awarded a grant as a MEDIA pilot project and is now a functioning portal with +250 films online. As a European project, www.onlinefilm.org has partnered with production companies and dedicated individuals in countries such as Greece, Italy, Austria, Ireland, Slovenia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Wesnigk is also Vice President of AG DOK, Germany's largest community of independent producers with 800 members. And chairman of the board of VG Bild-Kunst, the German collecting agency for creative Artists and Producers of films www.bild-kunst.de.
Email: wesnigk_@If you can read this, please upgrade to a modern browser.onlinefilm.org

Alexandre Cornu, Producer, Les Films du Tambour de Soie, France
Since 1987, I have been producing short films and creative documentaries, around one hundred, treating most of all topics related to Art and Culture. Artist portraits and films related to great exhibitions in co-production with several museums like Orsay, Louvre, Rodin, Centre Georges Pompidou, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Art museums of Marseille, Nantes and Grenoble.
Since ten years now, we've been opening up our production to topics concerning society and have been encouraging the emergence of new authors.
I have been involved in several international co-productions like Novela at the Santa Casa, selected this week in Doc Lisboa - International competition. I've always a lot of pleasure to take part in EDN Workshops, as participant or tutor more often, a lot of pleasure to discuss with my collegues, to share some information and advises when I'm tutoring for La Fémis or Eurodoc.
Email: alexandrecornu_@If you can read this, please upgrade to a modern browser.tamtamsoie.net

Raffaele Brunetti, Director, Producer & CEO B&B Film, Italy

Raffaele Brunetti has been a documentary-film director and producer since 1987. He founded B&B Film, a production house based in Rome. The company develops and produces creative documentary films through co-production and broadcast agreements, ranging from social issues, to History, to environment. Raffaele Brunetti’s documentaries have been broadcast in more than 160 countries and have been awarded at several international film festivals. His latest film, Hair India, was selected for the official competition of IDFA (The Netherlands, 2008), Festival dei Popoli (Italy, 2008), Full Frame Film Festival (USA, 2009), Hot Docs (Canada, 2009), Prix Italia (Italy, 2009), as well as for other major film festivals and won the Ondas Award as best International Programme (Spain, 2009).

He is a member of the Foreign Press Association in Italy and he’s in the board of  Doc/it (Italian Documentary Association). He is director of the “Italian Doc Screenings”, Italian documentary showcase.

 Email: raffaele_@If you can read this, please upgrade to a modern browser.bbfilm.tv

Rea Apostolides, Producer, Anemon Productions, Greece

Rea Apostolides produces documentaries for the Greek and international market. She works for Anemon Productions in Athens, a company committed to fostering awareness and education, through audiovisual and media works.

Recent work as a producer includes A Game Must Go On (SKAI, BBC World), which follows a group of children fighting for the right to play football in their neighbourhood, A Place Without People (ERT, European Commission), which tells the story of the expulsion of the Masai from Serengeti in Tanzania and Sugartown: the Day After (2009, ARTE, ERT, Al Jazeera, YLE, TSR, TV3, CYBC), a story about environmental capitalism in Southern Greece.

Rea studied Ancient and Modern History at the University of Oxford. She was the researcher of Universal’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Asst. Producer for the BBC2/ERT-1 documentary Are you Captain Corelli?, which was BBC’s most watched arts programme in 2001.

In 2002, she received a NIPKOW scholarship and worked for MAJADE Filmproduktion in Leipzig, Germany and in 2008 received the Trailblazer Award at MIPDOC in Cannes.  She is currently the Deputy Head of the Board of Documentary Campus and a member of Storydoc.

Rea also co-organises monthly documentary screenings in Athens for CineDoc at the French Institute and has just written her first book for children. 

Email: rea_@If you can read this, please upgrade to a modern browser.anemon.gr

Steven Seidenberg, Independent Consultant, UK

With degrees in Chinese Studies from the universities of Illinois and London (School of Oriental and African Studies), and in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, I am an academic turned film-maker. After a brief career teaching at Oxford University I was seduced, in 1983, by documentary television.

I have worked as a freelance, within broadcasters (BBC and ITV) and, for ten years, as a partner in a medium sized independent production company (Café Productions). Like others in the profession, I started at the bottom and worked my way up from Researcher through Producer, Director, Series Producer and Executive Producer. My true love is, however, programme development.

These days I split my time between England and Asia. In the past five years I have worked on around 20 programmes/films variously in Singapore, China, Hong Kong and South Korea. Some are original productions but, increasingly, I have a side-line in ”fixing” (or re-versioning) other people’s programmes. This usually entails stepping into the editing suite and re-structuring and re-scripting the film. In Europe I am called a script doctor.  In Asia I am called a “preditor” (a producer-editor) or an editing director. 

When not making programmes I am active as a consultant and teacher. In 2010 I was Head of Studies at the peripatetic EU-funded Crossing Borders master-school (Shanghai, Leipzig and Guangzhou). The Dragon Forum (Warsaw and Krakow) and Greenhouse (Israel and Turkey) are other longitudinal training programmes with which I am involved. Shorter workshops for the KBI, Kocca and BCPF (Korea and Singapore), CNEX (Taiwan), among others, help keep me off the streets.

Email: steves_@If you can read this, please upgrade to a modern browser.silkmount.com