BBB Preselection Committee 2026
The Preselection Committee for the 17th Balkans Beyond Borders (BBB) Short Film Festival brings together a diverse team of emerging filmmakers, visual artists, and programmers from across the region. Guiding this year’s curation under the central theme “Shift your gaze to the unseen,” the committee evaluates submissions focused on overlooked stories, marginal realities, and hidden perspectives. By highlighting narratives that challenge dominant ways of seeing, their selection aims to reveal silenced memories, alternative identities, and parallel experiences within the shared Balkan landscape.
BBB Competition Section Preselection Committee
Yagmur Canpolat (Turkey)
Yagmur Canpolat (Turkey)
Yagmur Canpolat studied Sociology and Cinema at Izmir University of Economics. While winning an award at the Adana Golden Boll Film Festival with her first documentary, she was selected for the FIDCampus Residency program with her second. Her films focus on the themes of everyday life, space, and memory. Her work continues to be screened at numerous film festivals.
Elena Gazi (Greece)
Elena Gazi (Greece)
Elena Gazi (b. 1999) is a Greek visual artist, filmmaker and animator whose practice bridges visual arts and cinema through autobiographical narratives, folklore, and the uncanny. Working across sculpture, installation, archival material, video art, and stop motion animation, she explores themes of memory, fear, transformation, and childhood.
Her sculptural and installation works have been presented in exhibitions across Greece and internationally.
She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Deree – The American College of Greece and an MA in Stop Motion Animation from BAU, College of Arts & Design in Barcelona. Her short stop motion animation documentary PRIKOSYMPHONO has been screened at international film festivals and received several awards. She has also participated in international filmmaking programs, including the FAMU International Summer Filmmaking Campus in Prague, where she co-directed the short documentary EVA. She is currently developing her new hybrid live-action and stop motion film, The Secret that Birds Keep, which was selected for the Drama International Short Film Festival (DISFF) Script Writing Residency.
Anthoniy Hristov (Bulgaria)
Anthoniy Hristov (Bulgaria)
Anthoniy is a Bulgarian director who graduated with a BA from Arts University Bournemouth in the UK, and an MA from the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Bulgaria. Apart from directing, he currently works as a coordinator and short film selector for DOCK International Documentary Historical Film Festival in Burgas, Bulgaria.
He has directed six postgraduate short films, both fiction and documentary, and has also worked on mixed-media projects combining live performance and 2D animation. His documentary work often focuses on marginalised communities, including Roma and LGBTQ+ people, while his fiction films explore the world of children’s imagination — how children grow up within the world of adults, and how they observe, interpret, and transform it through their own inner logic.
Across his work, Anthoniy is drawn to stories that shift the gaze toward voices, emotions, and perspectives often left unseen. He is interested in cinema as a space of empathy, curiosity, and quiet resistance, where the personal and the political can meet through intimate human experience.
Defne Erdogan (Turkey)
Defne Erdogan (Turkey)
Daphne was born and raised in Istanbul. After graduating from French Language Literature at Istanbul University, she began her professional journey in the wine industry, working as a sommelier. There, she discovered that her passion for sharing knowledge extends far beyond wine. What truly excites her is sharing cultures and experiences – especially those connected to her homeland.
After completing her Master degree in Tourist Guiding, she is currently working as a licensed tourist guide. Cultural diversity and the coexistence and interaction of different traditions, beliefs and communities have always fascinated her. Being a tourist guide has taught her to transform the richness hidden in everyday details into tangible stories, making the invisible visible and revealing the extraordinary within the ordinary, which strongly resonates with the theme of BBB’26.
In the meanwhile, also passionate about horror cinema, she worked as moderator and interview assistant in KORK Horror Film Festival in Turkey. It was also through this experience that she was introduced to BBB’25 held in Istanbul.
Sara Radusinovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Sara Radusinovic (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
After completing high school at the School of Arts, Sara enrolled in the Academy of Arts in 2015 in the class of Professor Predrag Velinović, FILM and TV directing. Her documentary film “Lost City,” which she directed in 2017, was the first confirmation of her love, her work, and talent, as it was shown at many festivals and received great reviews (VIVA, STIFF, SFF). That same year, as the only representative of film and TV directing students from Bosnia and Herzegovina, she went to the renowned FAJR FILM festival in Tehran, Iran. That year, the festival organizers organized the Talent Campus for the first time, attended by film and TV directing students from all over the world.
Her film “I’m Not Here” from 2019 won the Special Jury Prize in the competition for Bosnia and Herzegovina student films at the 25th Sarajevo Film Festival and was also well received at many festivals, domestic, regional, and European. Also, in 2019, she had the great honor to volunteer/work on the “KOSTI” project, and afterwards, she had the opportunity to work as the leader of extras and director’s secretary on the “HOTEL BALKAN” project, where she spent 8 months. After that, she returned to focusing on her studies and final exams.
From May 2021 to August 2022, she worked as a realisator at a local Television, meanwhile working on her graduation film “WHEN YOU FORGET JULY,” and graduated in July 2022. Her graduation film premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival and was selected at various festivals in Serbia, Montenegro, Russia, Bulgaria, Spain, Turkey, and has been awarded seven times so far.
Currently, she is pursuing a master’s degree in filmmaking at ELTE University in Budapest, while last year she was a part of Sarajevo Talent Campus 2024.
Stratis Alvanos (Greece)
Stratis Alvanos (Greece)
Stratis Alvanos was born in Kastoria, Greece, in 2001 and is a filmmaker, photographer, and final-year undergraduate student at the Department of Audio & Visual Arts of the Ionian University. His work focuses on documentary cinema and experimental forms of storytelling, exploring themes of place, memory, and cultural identity. His films have been screened at international festivals including OpenEyes Filmfest Marburg (Germany), RIFF – Rome Independent Film Festival and Laceno d’Oro (Italy). His recent films, Tiny Fountain / Мала Чешма (2024) and winter’s return’s (2025), have received awards and distinctions at Greek film festivals. Alongside his artistic practice, he has worked as a cinematographer, camera operator, and production assistant on documentary, fiction, and television productions. He was also a member of the Preselection Committee of the Balkans Beyond Borders International Short Film Festival 2025.
Vid Merčun (Slovenia)
Vid Merčun (Slovenia)
Vid Merčun is a Slovenian independent filmmaker and multimedia artist. He graduated in Media Production Engineering from the Institute and Academy of Multimedia in Ljubljana in 2013. His first short film Happy Ending Story (2013) was selected for the Ljubljana International Short Film Festival in 2014 and screened at several international festivals, receiving the Country Best Award at the International Open Film Festival in Dhaka (2016).
In 2021 he completed his debut feature film Desire in You, which premiered at the Festival of Slovenian Film and has since received more than 20 awards at international film festivals, including Best Indie Feature Film at the Art Film Awards (Skopje, 2022), Rome Indie Film Festival (2023), and Anatolian Film Awards (Istanbul, 2023). He often works as a one-man-crew, taking on multiple roles including directing, writing, producing, cinematography, editing, and sound design. His work is characterized by introspective storytelling and explores themes of love, loss, the human condition, and personal transformation.
Enxhi Rista (Albania)
Enxhi Rista (Albania)
Enxhi Rista was born in Albania on 4 September 1994, and at the age of 19 she moved to Romania to study film directing. In the period 2013–2014, she learned Romanian in Cluj at Babeș-Bolyai University, after which she continued her studies at UNATC – National University of Theatre and Film, in the Faculty of Film and TV Directing. She later completed a master’s degree in film production, and in 2023 she defended her PhD thesis titled “Poetics and aesthetics in Albanian and Balkan cinema.”
Her work as a director includes commercials, music videos, and short films such as Dry and Water, Padre, Capoeira, Realscope, and He loves my eyes. The latter, a short documentary, received numerous national and international awards, including the Gopo Award for Best Short Documentary in 2020. Over the 10 years she spent in Romania, she worked as director, producer, and script supervisor on more than 100 film projects.
She has focused her research and creative work on Albanian cinema and its relationship to the broader Balkan context. It is also reported that in 2024 she published a book on Albanian cinema in the Balkan context, further extending her academic and critical work in the field.
Phaedra Damianou (Greece)
Phaedra Damianou (Greece)
Phaedra Damianou recently completed her thesis on traditional animation (cel animation) at the Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering, University of the Aegean, located in Syros. She is passionate about the art of animation, from its technical craft to its unique storytelling possibilities.
In her free time, she enjoys watching animated short films and finds it fascinating how effectively a short film can explore complex topics within a brief time—often using visuals that defy the laws of physics and logic. This deep appreciation inspires her desire to serve on the preselection committee for this year’s festival.
BBB AI Section Preselection Committee
Dimitris Argyriou (Head of Preselection Committee - Creative AI)
Dimitris Argyriou (Head of Preselection Committee - Creative AI)
Dimitris Argyriou is a filmmaker and festival curator holding a Master of Arts from the Ionian University and the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin). He has directed 11 award-winning short films that have screened at over 1,000 international film festivals, as well as two feature documentaries: Lights Out, Berlin! (limited theatrical release in Germany) and Memories of Occupation & Dialogue for the Future, which is officially used as educational material in German schools. His latest work is an innovative 3D animated short, created for the V-Museum Corfu, and presented daily as part of the museum’s permanent program. Dimitris is an alumnus of Berlinale Talents, Sarajevo Talents, and the Cork Film Festival Campus. In 2012, he founded the NewBorn Short Film Agency, where he serves as CEO, specializing in festival strategy, distribution, and international sales for short films. That same year, he launched the NewBorn Short Film Festival in Berlin, where he continues to act as festival director. In 2020, he expanded the agency’s scope by establishing its production arm, NewBorn Filmproduktion, focusing on the development and production of innovative short and feature-length films. Previously, he co-founded and directed the Greek Film Festival in Berlin, and has programmed for festivals such as Interfilm Berlin, Aegean Film Festival, and Shortcutz Berlin. He has worked with Berlinale and has served on juries across Europe, the US, and beyond.