Pedro de Filippis is a filmmaker from Belo Horizonte, Brazil. His debut feature Rejeito (2023) underlines his ongoing research on post colonialism and it was screened at festivals like Cinéma du Réel, IDFA and HotDocs. In 2021 he was nominated for the Global Emerging Filmmaker prize by Netflix and IDA. In 2016 he was selected for the European MFA program Doc Nomads, through which he directed documentaries in Portugal, Hungary, and Belgium during the two years of the program. Pedro is also a Logan NonFiction and Points North fellow alumni. He is currently a researcher at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, through which he develops audiovisual language with a focus on scientific dissemination.

Pedro has received a SNW Research/Production Grant for his feature documentary Nickeland.

In Nickeland, within the bustling heart of Brazil's Goiás state, Júlia and Aldair, dedicated veterinarians from the Animal Rescue Group (GRABH), struggle to revive a canary within their ambulance's confines. Their efforts symbolize a broader mission to provide on-the-spot aid to animals across South America. Amidst the urban sprawl, mining activities meld seamlessly into the landscape, epitomized by a protest banner labeling the locale "Ammonialand" at the mining complex's entrance.

Jess X. Snow is a filmmaker, multi-disciplinary artist, writer and cultural worker. Born in Canada, of JiangXi Chinese heritage, through a wide range of mediums and genres—their work explore migration, surrealism, multispecies justice, unwellness, Black/Asian/indigenous intimacies and abolitionist futures. Recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film, their genre-defying short films merge bold visuals, dream, memory and song to reveal how flawed diasporic people become free. Their previous short films have screened in festivals like BFI London Film Festival, BlackStar, New Orleans, Ann Arbor, Indie Memphis, Durban International Film Festival (Special Mention) as well as in classrooms and community gardens. In addition to film, they have been creating posters and community murals for social movements for over a decade. They collaborated with the Center for Biological diversity on several large scale murals featuring endangered species of plants and animals in their native lands. Jess earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in screenwriting and directing from the Graduate Film Program at New York University.

Jess has received a SNW Development Grant for their narrative feature When The River Split Open which also received support from Film Independent, Cine Qua Non Lab, and Canada Council for the Arts.

On a visit to their industrializing ancestral homeland, a rebellious Chinese-American escapes their over-protective maternal family to find the truth about their estranged father–whose legacy was entangled with the first species of dolphin driven to extinction.

Jesse McLean has dedicated her creative research and art practice to exploring what it is to be human in relation to what is not. Her films reveal the deep intimacies and connections formed through these relationships and contrast the finite capacities of the nonhuman with infinite human desires.

Jesse has received a SNW Development Grant for her observational documentary feature Everything Must Go.

This film explores grief and loss through a variety of subjects—a cemetery surrounded by shopping malls, a plastic-free laboratory, a hoarder's unopened online purchases, and the sudden death of a loved one. It delves into what humans hold onto and what we cannot let go of.

Jessica Oreck makes projects large and small that instill a sense of wonder about the world of the everyday. Jessica’s documentaries (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, and several of her shorts) have played at festivals such as Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, Cairo, BFI, and many more. Her latest feature, One Man Dies a Million Times, opens theatrically on July 29. Jessica also makes bite-sized educational content, including two series for TED: Mysteries of Vernacular and In a Moment of Vision, as well as several shows for a soon-to-launch children’s network. Jessica now runs a small museum called the Office of Collecting and Design in downtown Las Vegas.

Jessica has received a SNW Production/Distribution Grant for her animated documentary series Memoirs of Vegetation.

A bite-sized animated series about plants that have changed the course of history. Each episode presents an enticing kernel of botanical intrigue and how it has shaped the world as we know it. This pilot first episode delves into the salubrious uses and nefarious misuses of castor beans throughout history. Each following episode will address a different species and their influence. Possible future episodes include Cotton, Bananas, Chili Peppers, Vanilla, Coffee, Pineapples, Cocoa, Tobacco, Apples, Sugar cane, or Asparagus.

Elise Guillaume is a Belgian artist whose work explores our complex relationship with nature. Her work is situated at the intersection of psychology, ecology, and concepts of care. Through audiovisual, photographic, and sonic mediums, sometimes manifested as immersive installations, Elise Guillaume is interested in the relationships between psychological health and environmental change. The body is a key element in her work: it becomes a vessel for interpreting the interconnections between the beings that form our world. In her often intimate works, Elise Guillaume explores the possibilities for a renewed relationship with the earth.

Elise has received a SNW Development Grant for her work-in-progress Untitled grief and hope project.

Can loss help us look towards the future? Centered around the Arctic, Untitled grief & hope project parallels my personal experience of grief with the psychological impacts of climate change, by intertwining personal introspection with scientific research.

Gala Hernández López is an artist-filmmaker and researcher. Her interdisciplinary practice combines film production with video installations, performances and publications as multiple modes of epistemological exploration. More specifically, her work looks at new modes of subjectivation as produced by computational capitalism. From an ecofeminist and critical lens, she examines imaginaries circulating in virtual communities, desires and futurities conveyed by disruptive technologies, and new reactionary tech utopias as shared political fictions forming our collective unconscious. She attempts to create research-based artworks combining materialist analysis with poetry, intimacy and dreams with the aim of dissecting human fantasies of limitless techno-scientific control over reality.

Gala has received a SNW Research Grant for her narrative feature Dreams of Prophets.

A theater director, tormented by constant nightmares, starts doing research about the history of dream engineering technologies and becomes interested in an American start-up, Prophetic, which has designed a device to induce lucid dreams using artificial intelligence. In parallel, the woman rehearses with performers testimonies of historical figures who played a role in the history of the technoscientific control of dreams: magnetized women such as Agent Inconnu and the Seeress of Prevorst, the Soviet architect Konstantin Melnikov or the French Baraduc and Darget, inventors of “mental photography”. The dreams of all of them are hallucinated by an AI.