Cultural journalist and film critic for various major German and Swiss dailies and magazines for over twenty years (Die Welt, Tageszeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, epd film…). Curator of photo exhibitions in Europe and the USA (Annemarie Schwarzenbach, The Dark Years 1937 – 1938; Paris, New York, Chicago, Tbilisi) Annemarie Schwarzenbach: Selected Photographs and Writings, 1933-1940, Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College). Former artistic director of the East-West Film Festival (Orenburg, Russia) and program consultant and curator for various international film festivals such as Mumbai Intl. Film Festival, ( India), Visions du Réel and Fribourg Film Festival, (Switzerland), FIPA, (France) , Millenium Film Festival, (Belgium), Metropolis Cinema and Filmhaus Nürnberg (Germany).
Director of Department at FIPRESCI in charge of FIPRESCI AWARD Promotion, she is organizing since 2010 special film programs for a wide range of film festivals all over the world, and as a challenge to Covid, she created in 2021 with her company alizarine, films, arts & events, Terres d’Ici, Terres d’Ailleurs, a film festival in a small rural village in Southwest France. In 2023 she joined the programming team of the Festival du Cinéma Méditerranéen de Tetouan, Morocco.
Born in the former GDR, BLdL studied theater and social sciences and is a graduate from Hamburg University (Germany) in Clinical Psychology and a post-graduate from Sorbonne and EHESS (France) in Sociology.
Philip Cheah is a film critic and is the editor of BigO, Singapore's only independent pop culture publication. He is currently program consultant and advisor to film festivals in Shanghai (China), River Meets Mountain (India), Jogjakarta (Indonesia), and Hanoi (Vietnam).He co-founded the South-east Asian Film Festival and the Asia Pacific Screen Lab and is Patron of the SEA (South-east Asia) Screen Academy in Makassar, Indonesia. He is also Spiritual Advisor to the Bakunawa Young Cinema Film Festival, Philippines.He is co-editor of the books, Garin Nugroho: And the Moon Dances; Noel Vera: Critic After Dark and Ngo Phuong Lan: Modernity and Nationality in Vietnamese Cinema.He was given an Honorary Award at the 15th Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival 2019, an award for Achievement in the Promotion of Kyrgyz film by the Kyrgyzstan Film Critics in 2010, an award for promoting Vietnamese film by the Vietnam Cinema Association in 2008, an Award for Asian Cinema at the 8th Cinemanila International Film Festival in 2006, and the Korean Cinema Award at the 9th Pusan International Film Festival in 2004.
Has developed her professional career in the areas of film criticism, Philology, Neurolinguistic Programming, translation specialized in modern art, cultural journalism, and children's literature. Contributed for twelve years to the weekly cultural magazine Cartelera Turia, as a critic and columnist in the sections "Material sensible" and "Sola en la oscuridad", reviewing film shootings, premieres and international film festivals, as well as in other media such as Bianco e Nero, magazine of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.
In 2014, she founded the online cultural magazine El Hype, which is distributed in Spanish and English, where she is the editor and contributes to her personal blog Director's Cut. For several years she has collaborated in the coverage of the Cannes Film Festival for the Radio 3 (RNE) program El séptimo vicio and in 2022 she participated in the documentary Mujeres sin censura (Women Without Censorship, Eva Vizcarra).
As a writer, she has published two children's novels, Las vacaciones de Saída, winner of the Martín Sarmiento Award, and El tesoro de Saída, winner of the Samaruc Award. She is also co-author of the essay Ficciones las justas (Ensayos sobre la nueva moral en el cine, la música y la pornografía, Ed. Contrabando, 2022)
As a member of the international federations FIPRESCI and FEDEORA, she has served, among others, on the juries of twenty international film festivals such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, St. Petersburg, San Sebastian and Karlovy Vary.