Guests 2026

The Knight of the Legion of Honor and one of the world’s most famous animators. Michel Ocelot was born in Villefranche-sur-Mer, but he spent his childhood in African Guinea, which had a profound influence on him. He devoted his entire career to film animation and directed all of his short and feature-length films using his own screenplays. His extensive work is formally rooted in cutout animation, while exploring tales and myths from all around the world.

The retrospective was prepared in collaboration with the FEMA La Rochelle.

One of the most acclaimed and prolific Czech actresses made her debut at the age of 14. However, it was not her role in Let’s All Sing Around that shaped her future, but rather her performance in Requiem for a Maiden a year later. Since then, she has appeared in nearly fifty films, won five Czech Lions, but above all, thanks to her unique versatility and ability to blend strength and vulnerability, she has become one of the icons of contemporary Czech cinema.

Jiří Lábus won the Thalia Award and two Czech Lions for his dramatic roles in America and Clownwise, but he has always been seen primarily as a comedian, both in film and television roles. Not to mention his radio sketches with Oldřich Kaiser or his legendary voice acting for Marge Simpson. The Summer Film School will focus on both sides of his acting career.

The French-Senegalese director and screenwriter studied at the prestigious La Fémis school in Paris. She began her career co-writing screenplays for other directors, later she made her directorial debut with Banel & Adama, a lyrical love story set in rural Senegal, which was screened at the festivals in Cannes and Toronto. After last year’s Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, we now have another prominent filmmaker with African roots who will share the context of contemporary African cinema.

Valerio Coladonato is a film historian at Sapienza University in Rome. He focuses on the history of Italian national cinema, its overlaps and international context. His current projects deal with the role of the United States in the Italian film industry of the 1940s or with populism in 21st century Italian film and television.

Damiano Garofalo is an assistant professor at the Department of History, Anthropology, Religions, Art and Entertainment of Sapienza University in Rome where he teaches the history of cinema, television and film distribution. He focuses on the history of Italian cinema from a cultural and industrial perspective, the history of Italian television with particular reference to forms of consumption and social dynamics and the relationship between cinema, history and memory, specifically in the representation of the Holocaust in audiovisual media.

Yannick Rolandeau is a screenwriter, filmmaker, contributor to the literary magazine L'Atelier du roman, and author of several essays on cinema (Le Cinema de Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino ou le crépuscule de l’image, Nouvelle Vague : essai critique d’un mythe cinématographique and Roman Polanski: L'Ironie et le mal) and novels Deus Sex machina and Les Yeux des autres of others as well as a collection of short stories L'Impromptue de Caen. He is the co-founder of the YouTube site Odysseus, journey to the center of the big screen.

Davide Rapp (1980) is a video artist, director and architect working across architecture and cinema to produce mixed-media installations, movie montages and video essays. In 2014 he participated in the 14th International Architecture Exhibition (Biennale Venezia) with Elements, a 32-minute montage conceived for the exhibition Elements of Architecture. In 2021 he competed at the 78th Venice International Film Festival with the VR montage film Montegelato. His films and video essays have been screened in international museums and film festivals. He is the founder and creative director of the Milan-based creative agency -orama.

Comet, a new subsection of the Guests section, will showcase young, progressive filmmakers who are shaping contemporary cinema. The first selected filmmaker is Faraz Shariat, one of the leading figures in young German cinema. His work addresses critical issues in contemporary Europe (immigration, neo-Nazism, etc.) and sets them within thoroughly crafted genre structures (romance, thriller). Faraz Shariat will not attend the SFS in person, but he will participate in online discussions about his films.