EXPERTS

Katarina Krnacova is President of the Slovak Film and Television Academy and a voting member of European Film Academy. She is an EAVE graduate who represented Slovakia at Producers on the Move programme in Cannes. She was a Shooting Stars jury member at Berlinale IFF and is a frequent evaluator at international and national funding programs.

Katarina runs a film production company SILVERART based in Bratislava, Slovakia. It is focused on feature films and TV series, striving for eco-friendly, sustainable and diverse film productions on-screen and off-screen.

She produced LITTLE HARBOUR, the Berlinale Crystal Bear winner, and her line-up includes also the first Slovak film shot green STAND UP, German Film Critics winner SUMMER REBELS and a box office hit and the best European Children Film HOW I LEARNED TO FLY.

Focusing on international co-productions, her films were theatrically released in USA, UK, South Korea, Japan, Hungary, Germany or France, acquired by RTVS, NPO, HBO, Netflix, dafilms and screened at film festivals worldwide.

Unlike many creatives in continental Europe, Ioanina got into producing not from a love of arthouse cinema, but an obsession with TV series. She has never stopped watching shows and considers it an absolute privilege that she gets to make them now too.

While in her sophomore year at Pol Sci, Ioanina started working in series development for Media ProPictures. Later on, she also dipped her toe into marketing, while moonlighting at HBO as a translator, getting Romanian scripts into English for HBO’s UK commissioners. When a position opened up, she dropped everything to learn the ropes of production.

As head of HBO’s Original Production Department in Romania, Ioanina built up a healthy slate and creative-produced local dramas, docu-series and reality series – among them bubbly rom-com RUXX, hybrid shiny-floor and house-reality series One True Singer, and taut spy thriller Spy/Master, which world-premiered in competition at the 2023 Berlinale and aired on BBC4 in May 2024.

In May 2023, the month after HBO shut down its production arm in the region, Ioanina co-founded prod-co May One with Johnathan Young, formerly HBO’s VP Original Production in CE. May One’s first commission, SUBTERAN, a 6-part thriller for Netflix, premiered in January 2025 and placed in the top 10 across 69 countries.

Jani Pösö, the CEO of It’s Alive Films, is a producer and screenwriter. He wrote and produced his first theatre play in 1996, first short film in 2006 and feature in 2011 and first book in 2018. He co-founded It’s Alive Films with Teemu Nikki 13 years ago.

He has produced eight feature films and four TV-series, all of them internationally acclaimed. He is also behind It’s Alive Films’ multi-remade TV-format Mental.

He is best known for The Blind Man Who did not want to see Titanic (Audience award in Venice Film festival 2021), Mister 8 (Best series Cannes Series 2021), and short film All Inclusive (Cannes competition 2019).

His latest published feature film 100 Litres of Gold is currently in cinemas and his next TV-series Dorm No. 13 will premier in late April 2025. His company, It’s Alive Films, is known for distinguished style, and strong ethics. All It’s Alive Films’ productions are comedies or entertaining takes on something deadly serious.

Helen Lõhmus is an Estonian producer and director with a strong track record in both domestic and international productions. She began her career in television in 2004 but soon after expanded her passion for storytelling into film. In 2012, she served as a production designer for Walt Disney Company’s youth series After School. Later, she produced and worked as a production designer for Dearest Sister (dir. Mattie Do), a Lao-Estonia-France co-production that was nominated for an Oscar in 2017.

In 2024, after nearly a decade in the making, her directorial debut—Kelly: Someone Else’s Dream, a feature documentary exploring the dark sides of youth sports—premiered at Hot Docs. Her most recent production is the TV series Von Fock, an international co-production between Estonia, Latvia, and Italy, making it the highest-budgeted series in the Baltic region to date. It aired in early 2025 on the Estonian National Broadcaster, breaking audience records.

Lõhmus is currently completing the European Film Business and Law MBA at the Erich Pommer Institute.

Izabela Kiszka-Hoflik is a graduate of Adam Mickiewicz University and a cultural management program at the Warsaw School of Economics. She started her career as a press spokesperson for the Film and Art Festival "Lato Filmów" in Kazimierz. Between 2000 and 2005, she worked at the TVP Film Agency, where she gained valuable production experience in the film industry.

From 2005 to 2018, she was associated with the Polish Film Institute (PISF), where she served as the Head of International Cooperation and the Director's Deputy for Film Production. In these roles, she actively supported the development of Polish cinema, particularly focusing on international cooperation and film productions.

Since 2018, Izabela Kiszka-Hoflik has been running her own company, IKH Pictures Promotion/Production, specializing in the sales and production of Polish films. Her main areas of interest are debut films and international co-productions, which makes her an ideal partner for ambitious and innovative projects. She is also a member of the European Film Academy and the Association of Women in Film.

She currently joined the team of Watchout Studio, one of the leading independent production studios in Poland and is responsible for the development and production of new film and television series projects within the studio.