MDAG Industry Guest
Festival programmer, lecturer, critic and director. Born in former Yugoslavia, she lives in Utrecht/The Netherlands. Head of the Documentary Competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival. She initiated and co-heads the Docu Rough Cut Boutique platform and takes part in the selection at the Doha Fund. In Italy, at WEMW, she leads the Last Stop Trieste and is the programmer of the Documentary Competition at Trieste FF. For twenty years, I collaborated with the IDFA Amsterdam in different capacities: as a competition selection comity member, IDFA fund project selection and coordinator of all IDFA juries. , Rada was a selector of South Asian cinema at the IFFR Rotterdam and curated several focus programs. Lectures at The Master of Film at The Netherlands’ Film and TV Academy in Amsterdam. One of the founders and artistic director for 15 years of the Eastern Neighbours Film Festival in The Hague. Rada taught for 7 years at the University of Amsterdam in media studies and was a lecturer at The Dutch Institute for Film Education (NIF). Mentor at many workshops in Europe and Asia, a.o. Vision du Reel Nyon, Doc Lab Poland, Baltic Sea Forum Riga, Doc Lisboa, Ex Oriente Czech Republic, Dragon Forum, Balkan Discoveries, DunaDoc Budapest, Doc Edge Kolkata, DocWok New Delhi, RCLab Movies That Matter. Collaborated on the books: “24 Frames” by Dina Iordanova and on Indian books on Bhimal Roy, Mani Kaul, Girish Kasaravalli, as well as on the World Encyclopaedia of the Documentary Cinema published by Routledge, edited by Ian Aitken.
After being an assistant director on fiction feature films and directing several documentaries in Bosnian production (before the war in ex-YU in the 1990s), Rada directed 4 films produced in The Netherlands. They were selected for 60 festivals, awarded and screened in Europe, Asia, and the USA. (Room Without a View, 1997, Soske ,2001, In Whitest Solitude, 2001, The Way to School, 2007.) One of the films was invited to be screened and is archived at MoMA New York. In 2008 and 2010 Rada taught cinema one trimester at Srishti in Bangalore, India. Was a guest lecturer at the film schools in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Geneve, Eskisehir, Belgrade, Sarajevo, New Delhi, Trivandrum and Kolkata. Member of the NETPAC and the European Film Academy. Was a jury member for documentaries at EFA in 2020 and 2021 and in 2022 on the selection of films. Served as a jury member at some 50 festivals worldwide, a.o. IDFA, Hot Docs Toronto, MIFF Mumbai, IFFKerala, Cinema du Reel/Paris, Moscow FF, Kazakhstan/ EuroAsia, Karlovy Vary, IFF Sofia, Doc Barcelona, Go East Wiesbaden. This year, she is one of two primary mentors at INTERACTION, an international film school.
