The Montreal World Film Festival

Véra Belmont, one of France's top producers, began her career as an actress but quickly sensed that her talent lay not in front of the camera but behind it. In 1966 she produced Paul Vecchiali's The Devil's Tricks and over four decades she has produced over thirty more films, including André Téchiné's Memories of France (1975), Quest for Fire (1980, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud), Fucking Ferdinand (1987) by Gérard Mordillat, Farinelli (1994) by Gérard Corbiau, Franceso Rosi's The Truce (1997). In 1977 she made her own directorial debut in Mao's Prisoners and she returned to the director's chair in Red Kiss (1985) , in The Lover (1991), starring Valérie Kaprisky and Stacy Keach, and Marquise starring Sophie Marceau (1997). More recently she directed Surviving With Wolves, a hit at the French box office in 2008.

Michel Côté graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada in 1973, and has appeared on all the top stages and screens in Quebec, and that's not to mention the 33 years and counting that he has appeared in Broue created in 1979. On the small screen he appeared in Radio-Canada's New Year's Bye Bye show in 1984-86 and such series as La Petite Vie and the various seasons of Omerta, collecting prizes along the way. On the big screen he starred in Au clair de la lune and Le vent du Wyoming by André Forcier, Liste noire (Jean-Marc Vallée), Dans le ventre du dragon (Yves Simoneau), T'es belle Jeanne (Robert Ménard) – which earned him a Gémeaux award – and La vie après l'amour (Gabriel Pelletier), Le Dernier Tunnel (Érik Canuel) – Jutra and Genie nominations – and Ma fille mon ange (Alexis Durand-Brault). His performance in Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) garnered a slew of honours including best actor at the Jutras, Genies and Vancouver Films Critics Awards. He has also authored the screenplays for Cruising Bar 1 (also co-directed by Côté) and 2. 

Kim Dong Ho is a founding member of one of South Korea's top film institutions, the Busan International Film Festival. He has filled various government posts at the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism over the past 27 years. He served as president at the Korean Motion Picture Promotion Corporation and at the Seoul Arts Centre and he was vice-minister at the Department of Culture and Tourism. After serving 15 years as director of the Busan International Film Festival, he is now its honorary director. He was appointed dean of the Graduate School of Cinema at Dankook University in March 2012. He was awarded the Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et de Lettres by the French government in 2000 and he won the Outstanding Contribution to Asian Cinema Award at the Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong last year. He served on numerous festival juries including those in Cannes, Seattle, Rotterdam, Taipei, San Sebastian and Belgrade.

Andrei Plakhov, a Russian film critic and cinema historian, graduated in mathematics from Lvov University then defended his Ph.D. thesis (on Visconti and Italian cinema) at VGIK, the celebrated Moscow film school. He began writing film criticism for Russian magazines then became a contributor to such international publications as Sight and Sound and the Cahiers de Cinéma. He is a columnist for Kommersant, the Russian daily. During the Perestroika period, Plakhov was a secretary of the USSR Union of Cinematographers and a head of the conflict committee, which released more than 200 films banned by Soviet censorship. He was president of the International Federation of Film Critics from 2005 to 2010, is currently its honorary president, and he is a member of the European Film Academy. He is a consultant to numerous film festivals around the world. His books include “The Soviet Cinema” (in English; 1988), “Altogether 33: Stars of World Cinema” (1999) and “Catherine Deneuve: From ‘Les Parapluies de Cherbourg' to ‘8 Femmes'” (2005). 

Goya Toledo, born in Lanzarote in the Spanish Canary Islands, began her career as a model then attended drama workshops under Augusto Fernandez and Sanchis Sinisterra. After several parts in Spanish television serials, she made her big screen debut in 1996 in Diario de un amor violado directed by Giacomo Battiato, quickly followed by Pedro Olea's Más allá del jardín (1996), José Miguel Juárez's Dile a Laura que la quiero and Antonio José Betancor's Mararía (1998), which earned her a Goya (Spanish Oscars) nomination. She then came to critical and popular attention in Amores perros by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, an international hit that earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. In 2003 she starred in Laura Mañá's Killing Words and received a Shooting Stars Award at the 2003 Berlin Festival. She confirmed her international reputation in 13 Roses (2007) by Emilio Martínez Lázaro. Her performance in Paco Arango's Maktub (2011) won a CEC (Spanish cinema writers) award as well as another Goya nomination. 

Wang Xueqi was born in Beijing in 1952 and has been one of the most popular actors in China over the past 25 years. He began his career in the drama troupe of the Chinese Air Force, then got his big screen start as the soldier collecting folk songs in rural China in director Chen Kaige's breakthrough 1984 film Yellow Earth. He collaborated with Kaige again two years later on The Big Parade and was cast in other early Fifth Generation films, such as Huang Jianxin's Samsara (1988) and Zhang Yimou's Codename Cougar (1989). Other hit films include In the Heat of the Sun (1994) directed by Jiang Wen, and Sun Valley (1996) by He Ping for whom he later starred in Warriors of Heaven and Earth (2003). Among the acting prizes he recently added to his collection are the Golden Rooster for Forever Enthralled (2008) and the Asian Film Award for his performance in Bodyguards and Assassins (2009). His sole foray into directing, Sun Bird, won the Special Jury Prize at the 1998 Montreal World Film Festival.