In this session, two critically acclaimed filmmaking teams will share the granular details of their working relationship, walking through scenes from meaningful recent films.
Yaël Bitton
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Yaël Bitton is an award-winning documentary film editor, writer, story consultant, and director with over 30 years of experience. She has won the SIMA Editing Award for Radio Silence (2020), Best Editing at the Israel Documentary Forum for Advocate (2019), and the Adobe DokFest Editing Award for KIX (2024). She has been editing mostly non-fiction films with directors from around the world, shaping complex and unique stories and forms, particularly loving to work with music and sound. Over the last years she has worked with: Natalia Koniarz, whose recent Silver (2025) won 6 awards at Krakow Film Festival; Callisto Mc Nulty on La Muraille (2024), which premiered at VDR 2025; with Karima Saïdi Ceux qui veillent by Karima Saïdi (2025), which premiered at IDFA 2025 ; and also with: Petra Costa, whose latest film, Apocalypse in the Tropics, opened at the Venice Film Festival (2024) and is shortlisted for the Oscars; Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivisan on Nocturnes (2024), which won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Craft at Sundance; Balint Revesz and David Mikulan on KIX (2024), which won best film at Camden Film Festival 2024, and over 20 awards that year; Rahul Jain, whose latest film Invisible Demons (2021) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival that year, and whose first film Machines (2015) won numerous prizes worldwide, including Sundance in 2017; Felipe Monroy, including the powerful Las fantasmas del Carribe (2023) and Hijos del Viento (2021); Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche on Advocate (2019) which won, among numerous awards, the Emmy award for Best documentary, the Asia Pacific Screen awards for best documentary feature; Juliana Fanjul on Radio Silence (2019) and Muchachas (2014), among many others.
Yaël is a mentor, consultant, and educator, working with programs such as Docs Nomads, Zelig Documentary film school, DOK Incubator, Visions du Réel, and Ex Oriente. She taught editing at HEAD/Cinéma du Réel in Geneva from 2008 to 2023. During the Spring semester of 2024, she was invited as a fellow teacher at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York. She is a member of the Oscars Academy documentary branch and was invited by the NCE to give a masterclass at IDFA.