Inclusive Programming Beyond Quotas: Curatorial Vision Meets Operational Reality
Achieving genuine diversity onscreen is as much an editorial challenge for programmers as it is an operational one for festival organisers. With finite slots, tight budgets, and competing audience expectations, selectors must weigh the artistic merit, representational balance, and market viability of films, often with incomplete data and unequal access to emerging talent pools. On the organisational side, scarce resources, legacy partnerships, and structural constraints can undermine even the most ambitious programming mandates. This session charts the pressure points, from scouting costs and submission fees to subtitling and marketing, and asks how transparent criteria, shared risk and long‑term talent development can turn ambition into measurable results, defining where curatorial freedom ends, where institutional duty begins, and how festivals can pool their efforts to spread opportunity more evenly across the global film landscape.
SPEAKERS
STEFAN IVANČIĆ
Selection Committee Member, Locarno Film Festival | RS
HELDER BEJA
Festival Director, Doclisboa | PT
MATHILDE HENROT
Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder, Festival Scope | FR
ASJA KRSMANOVIĆ
Head of CineLink, Sarajevo Film Festival | BA
MODERATED BY
TIME
Monday, August 18th, 2025
12:30 – 13:30 (CET)
LOCATION
Festival Garden
Stefan Ivančić
Stefan Ivančić is a film director, producer, and festival programmer. His short films have been selected for many international festivals, among them the Festival de Cannes, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, FID Marseille, the San Sebastián and Toronto International Film Festivals, and Visions du Réel. Among other films, Ivančić produced Ognjen Glavonić’s fiction feature THE LOAD (2018), which had its premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, and Stefan Djordjević’s WIND, TALK TO ME (2025), which was presented in competition at Rotterdam. He is a member of the selection committee of the Locarno Film Festival, programs the Belgrade Auteur Film Festival, and teaches at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. Ivančić is a member of the European Film Academy.
Helder Beja
Hélder Beja is the Director of Doclisboa — International Film Festival. As an author, editor and programmer, he has worked in journalism, literature and cinema. He co-wrote the feature film Global Project (to be released in 2025) and the TV series The Cowboy (2024). He's currently working on the script for a new feature film. He has written film and literature reviews and articles for various publications in Portugal, Macau, Hong Kong (China), Brazil and other countries. In Asia, where he lived for almost a decade, he co-founded the Macau Literary Festival, serving as its programme director for seven editions (2012-2018). He was also the editor-in-chief of several publications and the coordinator of the European Union's Jean Monet Program. Hélder Beja is one of the organizers of the biennial Asia Pacific Writers & Translators conference. He holds a degree in Communications and a postgrad in Anthropology.
Mathilde Henrot
Mathilde Hernot was born in 1975. She holds a diploma from the HEC Business School, a BA in Chinese from INALCO, a BA in philosophy from Paris Nanterre University, and an LLM in literary and artistic copyright law from the Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas. She worked for eight years as Director of Sales at MK2, where she also handled acquisitions. In 2010, together with Alessandro Raja, she founded Festival Scope Pro, a benchmark online service for film professionals that allows them to watch on demand films from more than ninety of the most prestigious international film festivals. In 2016, the duo launched Festival Scope, which focuses on providing catch-up screenings of festival selections for film lovers worldwide. The same year saw the start of a collaboration with ARTE to create ArteKino, which presents the work of emerging and confirmed European talents online and in cinemas to audiences in Europe.
Hernot also founded Maharaja Films, a production company whose line-up includes THE STRIFE OF LOVE IN A DREAM by Camille Henrot, who won a Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2013 for her video installation GROSSE FATIGUE; Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s SMUGGLERS’ SONGS, which was presented in the Official Competition at the Locarno Film Festival and won the Jean Vigo Prize in 2011; Yorgos Lanthimos’s ALPS, which won the Best Screenplay award at the Venice Film Festival; and Camille Henrot’s SATURDAY, which was presented at the Palais de Tokyo Carte Blanche in 2017. From 2018 to 2024, she was a member of the selection committee of the Locarno Film Festival, where she was Deputy Artistic director from 2021 to 2024. Since 2024, she has been a member of the selection committee at the Berlin International Film Festival. She has been a curator of the Kinoscope programme at the Sarajevo Film Festival, and since 2022 she has sat on the selection and organisation committees of the Villa Medici Film Festival in Italy.
Asja Krsmanović
Head of CineLink