Susanne van Loon (photographer and architect, Dipl.-Ing.) has lived in Regensburg for ten years and works for a local developer in the area of rentals/old town. She is a photojournalist for neue musikzeitung, JazzZeitung.de, Eclat Festival/SWR, Musik der Jahrhunderte, BMW-Welt in Munich and others; as a photographer she also works in the fields of food and architecture photography. She has pursued her passion for movies since her studies at the University of Stuttgart, where she designed several film projects. At home in the film and cinema landscape of Ludwigsburg for many years, Susanne van Loon also enthusiastically appreciates and follows the rich cinema and film offerings of the world heritage city as a Regensburg resident.

Leo Kuelbs (b. 1968 in Minnesota, USA) is an art collector, curator, journalist, and musician. He grew up in a Harley-Davidson motorcycle store until he started studying theater, media, and business at the University of Wisconsin, graduating in 1992. Leo’s family is mostly of German descent with deep roots in the Palatinate. As a gallerist and curator of the “Leo Kuelbs Collection”, audiovisual works such as video works or public mapping installations are among his key areas of interest, such as “Light Year” (New York, 2015-present) or “Mitte Media Festival” (Berlin, 2016-2019). With his “Digital Fairy Tales” (2016-present) he was already a guest at the Short Film Week in 2018 and will be again this year. Today he lives and works in Berlin and New York.

RiA – the “First Lady of Bavarian Rap” – is known for songs like “Bazz” or “Huastnguadlbua” from radio and TV. But only a few know that the native of Lower Bavaria worked as a set designer for various Hollywood productions before her music career, including Roland Emmerich. RiA rediscovered her love for the dialect, her native slang, in Africa. The whole thing culminated in a yodeling diploma in Namibia. From Puttenhausen out into the big, wide world and back. In 2011, her solo career began as Maria Reiser, beyond the country’s borders, to Las Vegas and since 2020, the “Reiserin” tours as Bavarian rapper RiA. This May starts her “Schwungscheim United Tour 2023” among other things with its own mobile stage!

Vincent Wild

Vincent Wild, filmmaker and artist, grew up in Munich. And never made it out either. With a great interest in all media and art forms, the medium of film in particular has remained his constant companion since early childhood. In 2015, he completed his training as a media designer for image and sound at Bavaria Film with a focus on scenic film. A year later, together with Alexander Kleinrensing, he founded the company Luminous Delusion, which offers visual effects and animation for film and television. Since 2018, he has also been a permanent member of the team at the Munich youth film festival flimmern&rauschen, where he is responsible for design. Driven by the love of storytelling, he tries to shoot, write, draw as much as possible on the side and is always happy to find new ways to make others laugh, think, cry, get spooked and most of all be amazed.

Veronika Osterauer has been active in cultural work since her studies of Italian, ethnology and communication sciences at the LMU Munich. She is particularly fascinated by the world of film and cinema as a place of discourse. Thus, after a year abroad in India, during which she already supervised various film projects, she took over the theater management of Kino Breitwand Starnberg in 2012, and in 2014 the marketing management of all Breitwand Arthouse cinemas in Gauting, Starnberg, Herrsching and Seefeld, which are awarded annually by the federal and state governments for their outstanding film program. Since 2007, this carefully curated film program culminates in the International Five Lakes Film Festival (fsff), which she has helped to shape as marketing director since 2015, and as organization director since 2020.

Kerstin Fröber came to Regensburg in 2003 to study psychology. She earned her doctorate at the University of Regensburg in 2013 and finally habilitated in 2020. In addition to her academic career, she is involved in numerous festivals for film and cinema, including the Short Film Week Regensburg, the Hardline Film Festival and the Silent Film Week. She is also still active in her Upper Franconian home at the Hofer Filmtage and the Grenzland Filmtage in Selb, where she has been the 1st chairwoman of the supporting association since 2020. In 2018, Dr. Kerstin Fröber was also able to combine her two passions – research and film – in a research project for the first time. In the 1st Regensburg Cinema Experiment, she was able to demonstrate that a film is subjectively rated better and the emotional film experience is heightened when the film is viewed for the first time in the cinema and not at home. The results of the study were published in 2021 in the renowned scientific journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

Säm Wagner loves music and film. In addition to his passion for pop music from the Upper Palatinate and around the world, he has been a permanent guest in movie theaters ever since he could walk. At the same time, he has developed a penchant for the weird and sometimes even the offbeat. As a cameraman, Säm Wagner has already shot several music clips and short films that, for some inexplicable reason, never made it into film history (and also failed to win a flower pot at the Short Film Week). As popular music commissioner of the district of Upper Palatinate, he is responsible not only for music but also for film promotion. But above all, as a film lover, he is looking forward to the short films submitted in the regional window of the International Short Film Week.

Cindy Michel

As a child of the 80s, the then Army Brat consumed pretty much everything that the cinema screens between the good ol’ Oberpfalz and New York offered. TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, BACK TO THE FUTURE, THE THREE LORDS and THE GOONIES set the course for her professional life: After voluntary service the scholarship holder went to Berlin to study film & literary studies. Before 1e9, LEAD and W&V, the author and media consultant wrote for WIRED Germany, among others. Cinema, pop and nerd culture are her favorite topics. Currently, the project manager at Oberpfalz Marketing shows via film and text how crazy great life in the Upper Palatinate can actually be. Quote: “The future is a state of mind”.