Ariel Kleiman

It is the assured nature of the atmospheric 20-minute drama Deeper Than Yesterday, about the tensions within a Russian submarine, that has particularly attracted attention to Ariel Kleiman. The film won two awards after being invited into Critics' Week at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, including the Kodak Discovery Award for best short, the jury prize for international short filmmmaking at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and the Rouben Mamoulian Award for best director at the 2010 Sydney Film Festival. It was a big factor behind him being awarded the Rising Talent Award at the 2010 Inside Film Awards. Ariel's previous short, Young Love, also made when he was a student, received an honourable mention at Sundance in 2010.

Amy Gebhardt

Amy's talents have been acknowledged in many ways in the past few years. She won international prizes for her shorts Walnut and Sharp in 2007 and 2008, was Kodak Australia's new director of 2008 and won a Silver Lion (for advertising) at Cannes in 2009 for her Anzac Memories beer commercial. Amy's half-hour documentaries A Night at the Drive-In and Heart were shown on SBS and ABC TV respectively and she directs commercials under the Melbourne-based Exit Films banner. She attained an arts/law degree and worked as a cinematographer before training at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and moving into directing.

Luke Doolan

Luke wrote, directed and edited the Oscar-nominated Miracle Fish and received the 2010 Australian Film Institute Award for editing the crime drama Animal Kingdom. Luke likes to deeply affect audiences: in Miracle Fish an eight-year-old boy has a birthday that he will never forget and audiences are unlikely to either. Luke trained under legendary editor Jill Bilcock and has edited Ten Empty and The Square which, like Animal Kingdom, are debut features. He is part of Blue-Tongue Films, a collective of Sydney-based filmmakers that includes David Michôd and brothers Joel and Nash Edgerton. The list of artists for whom he has made clips reads like a who's who of the Australian music scene.

Louise Smith

Louise has been working in the production of television commercials and feature films for more than ten years. She has gained an international reputation for her collaborations with filmmakers including Nash and Joel Edgerton, renowned actor Rachel Griffiths, and internationally recognised commercials director Derin Seale. Her work has screened at festivals such as SXSW, Sydney Film Festival, Telluride, Sundance, Aspen and Berlin and has been awarded honors by the Toronto Short Film Festival, Palm Springs and Puchon. In 2002 she co-produced the feature film The Rage in Placid Lake staring Ben Lee, Rose Byrne, Garry McDonald and Miranda Richardson. In 2008, she produced the feature film The Square, directed by Nash Edgerton and written by Joel Edgerton & Matthew Dabner which was nominated for 7 AFI Awards and has been theatrically released in France and the USA.