LUISA PRETOLANI
Luisa Pretolani is the director of a trilogy of feature films (Berbablù, Tanabess and Tizca) set in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna where she was born and grew up. After graduating from Bologna University with a Masters in Mediaeval History she trained in film at the New School in New York. A decade later she moved to London where she worked for Discovery and the Italian broadcaster RAI and directed the globally acclaimed documentary Mandy’s Choice, filmed in Colorado and distributed by ITVGE. A trained psychoanalyst and graduate of Eurodocs, she is a BAFTA member and one of the directors of Cinema Italia UK. Her work often explores themes of migration, displacement, women’s lives and the collision of personal and wider histories. She now lives between London and Ferrara where she writes in the former alimentari (grocer’s shop) that her late grandmother ran. She is currently writing a new feature film which brings a domestic sidelight to the events of the 1930s and 40s in the cities of Trieste and Vienna.
MIKE SMITH
Mike Smith has over 150 credits as an executive producer and director of a range of documentary, premium factual, science, history, arts, investigative and prime time output for BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel Five, Sky, PBS, Netflix, Smithsonian, Paramount+, TLC, Discovery. Subjects range from archaeology (Sacred Wonders of Britain, BBC Two) to ISIS (Tareena Return from ISIS), arts (Blackface: the Hidden History of Minstrelsy with David Harewood), culture (Sacred Rivers with Simon Reeve) history (The Unremembered with David Lammy, the prominent British MP and multiple seasons of the Simon Sebag Montefiore Cities series for the BBC including Rome, Vienna, Istanbul and Madrid), science (Mind of the Murderer; The Copenhagen Fallout for BBC/Discovery) and premium talent (1000 Years of Slavery Paramount +, Smithsonian, Channel Five). He has acquired rights to a historical mystery involving one of the world’s most famous cultural figures and is currently developing three new international projects set around the Adriatic.