Salem Salavat was born in 1975 in Kurdistan – Iran (Rojhelat). He started being active in the Iranian Youth Cinema in 1989. He directed 4 feature films: The Departure Time (2011), The Last Winter (2014), At Dawn (2019) and The Fathers (2021).

Zülfü Gül graduated from Fırat University, Department of Turkish Language and Literature. He works as a teacher in Mersin. He received various training regarding cinema and photography. His photographic works have received many national and international awards. The short animated film “The Last Tree” was selected for the 2023 Cannes Film Festival Short Film Corner. It was also selected as the best short animated film at the 11th International Antakya Film Festival.

Shakila Moezi was born in 2000 – Kurdistan, Iran. She is a student of education sciences and a short film stage secretary.

Mehmet Acaruk has been doing professional photography for about ten years. He worked for a long time in Iz Magazine, with the editor-in-chief of Ara Güler, who is known as a master photographer in Turkey and around the world. He took important roles in the “Fotografevi” (which is known as a workshop, exhibition, Iz Magazine, and publishing house), the Turkey representative of “Magnum Photos”. He worked as a specialist sociologist in Turkey’s many important civil organizations (TEGV, ZENTARA).

He tried to transfer the story language he obtained from photography to cinema. It can be seen the effects of sociologist identity in all his works. He is of the opinion that all artistic and social disciplines should be addressed with aesthetic integrity. He takes his motivation for making movies from this claim.

“The Apple” is his first short film.

Hêja Netirk is a singer, actress, writer and filmmaker from North Kurdistan (Bakur). In 2018, she produced the feature film Momê directed by Rodi Guven Yalcınkaya. In 2019, she founded BAN Theatre, the Kurdish theatre initiative in Hamburg, with Alan Ciwan and Hüseyin Umaysiz. Currently she is living in Hamburg and working as an actress on the stage and in front of the camera for kurdish and international productions.

Coming from a literary background, Hêja is concerned with migration and integration policies in Germany, decolonisation and women’s oppression as well as performance and its relation to Kurdish history and society. Central to her artistic practice is her experience as a woman in exile, which she presents in various forms of art – singing, acting, film.

Julia Zimmermann is a German filmmaker, journalist and photo reporter, based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq since 2022. She has been working as a freelance photographer and Videographer with French, Swiss, German and American media such as La Croix, Liberation, Le Soir, Ouest France, Deutsche Welle and international agencies such as AP and SIPA. But she also collaborated also with a local media kurdistanin.net on a documentary about woman.life.freedom for the past year.