Year‑Round Audience Engagement: From First Screen Encounters to Lifelong Loyalty
Audience development today is a 365‑day per year undertaking: it stretches from film‑literacy workshops in classrooms and neighbourhood pop‑up screenings to online film clubs, touring programmes, and cross‑festival streaming platforms, weaving connections that outlast any festival week. This session asks when the real work of cultivating audiences should begin—childhood immersion, teenage discovery, or adult lifelong learning?—and how to make each stage efficient under tight resources. Panellists will weigh the trade‑offs of investing in flagship programming, sustaining year‑round outreach, and joining networked initiatives that pool content, data, and expertise across multiple festivals, while examining metrics that satisfy funders and sponsors without compromising artistic integrity or local relevance.
SPEAKERS
GABRIELA ŠITEK
Director of Education / Programming, Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival | PL
VETON NURKOLLARI
Festival Director, DokuFest | XK
ASJA KRSMANOVIĆ
Head of CineLink, Sarajevo Film Festival | BA
MODERATED BY
TIME
Monday, August 18th, 2025
10:00 – 11:00 (CET)
LOCATION
Festival Garden
Gabriela Šitek
Gabriela Šitek, PhD, is Director of Education / Programming at the Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival and a curator and coordinator of educational projects dedicated to high school and higher education students, and programmes dedicated to film history, women's film, archives, and avant-garde cinema. She was a participant of the Living Archive Residency at the Arsenal–Institute for Film and Video Art EN in Berlin in 2022.
Veton Nurkollari
Veton Nurkollari is Artistic Director of DokuFest, which he co-founded in 2002 with a group of friends. DokuFest is Kosovo's largest cultural event and one of the most important short and documentary film festivals in Southeast Europe. He is also one of the curators of DokuPhoto, an annual showcase of documentary photography that runs in tandem with the film festival.
He is a member of the Cinema Eye Honors selection committee, a New York City-based organization that recognises and honours exemplary craft in non-fiction filmmaking. He is also one of the founding board members of the Albanian Cinema Project, an initiative that brings awareness, attention, and assistance to the plight of the Albanian National Film Archive.
Nurkollari regularly curates film programmes and sits on juries at various film festivals, and is currently involved in coaching and mentoring young documentary filmmakers from Kosovo.
He is a member of the European Film Academy and the European Cultural Parliament.
Asja Krsmanović
Asja Krsmanović is a scriptwriter and dramaturg with over a decade of experience in festival programming. Since 2011, she has worked for the Sarajevo Film Festival, first as coordinator and then manager of the Competition Program. In 2017, she became the programmer for the Student Film Competition. Since 2022, she has coordinated the Network of Festivals in the Adriatic Region. From 2019-2023, she led a film literacy program at the Obala Art Center. In January 2025, she was appointed Head of CineLink.