Scot Barbour was born in California in 1969 and studied film at San Francisco State. He worked in Los Angeles as a runner and technician, before teaching editing at UCLA. Barbour has also worked as Apple Computers’s development-liaison to Hollywood and as a post-production consultant on numerous feature productions. He now runs production company Dos Ojos. Malfunkshun (2004) is Barbour’s first feature film as a director.

Born in Sydney in 1951, David Bradbury has earned an international reputation as a filmmaker willing to go to extraordinary lengths for a cause, exposing political oppression and environmental vandalism to public scrutiny. His first film Frontline (1980), about cameraman Neil Davis, was nominated for an Academy Award, as was Chile: Hasta Cuando? (1986), which exposed life under Pinochet’s military dictatorship.

Shin Jane was born in South Korea in 1970. She studied philosophy at Seoul National University before entering the Korean Academy of Film Arts. Since 2000, Shin has made three short films. Shin Sung-il Is Lost (2004) is her directorial feature début.

Janet Merewether is a filmmaker and digital-media artist who also works as a curator, lecturer, and designer of motion graphics and film titles. Her award-winning shorts have screened in numerous festivals internationally, and most have screened at BIFF. Her experimental short Palermo—‘History’ Standing Still (2004) received a Dendy Award at the 2004 Sydney Film Festival and was nominated for ATOM, AFI, and FCCA Awards. Retrospectives of Merewether’s work have been screened in Berlin, Boston, Seoul, and Taipei.

Jack Sargeant is the author of critically acclaimed study of underground film Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression, The Naked Lens: Beat Cinema, and Lost Highways: A History of the Road Movie, all published by Creation Books. He also contributes to journals such as Headpress, Panik and World Art. An underground pop-culture theorist and commentator, he lectures on, and arranges screenings and tours of, rare and unseen films.

David Stratton will be presenting this year’s Chauvel Award, leading a Q&A session with David Bradbury at the event. Stratton is a former director of the Sydney Film Festival, former film critic for the international film industry magazine Variety, and is currently a film critic for The Australian and ABC Television’s At the Movies.

Born in Japan in 1966, Yutaka Tsuchiya began his serious creative work in 1990. He initiated the Video Act distribution project for independent video titles in 1998, and continues to work to develop networking between media artists.

American-born Caveh Zahedi studied philosphy at Yale and film at UCLA, where he began collaborating with Greg Watkins. A Little Stiff (1991), which he co-directed with Watkins, premièred at the Sundance Film Festival, winning widespread acclaim. I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994) won the Critics’ Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival and went on to develop a cult following.