US Premiere

About the Director

Germán Sancho (Madrid, 1979) graduated in Audiovisual Communication from the European University (Spain). Following this, he also carried out several post-graduate courses in Film Direction, Film Production and Editing. In 2004, he gained a masters degree from the Complutense University (Madrid, Spain) in Film Direction and TV-Format Design. Subsequently, he worked as the Director’s Assistant in the Direction Team of TVE's Daily News (Public Service Broadcaster) in 2005, covering multiple national and international events.
Since October 2013, he has been working as the Director of a daily news program called “La Noche en 24 Horas” on TVE.
“Invisible” (2015) was his first project as Film Director. His short-film was shown at different film festivals in Spain and others Countries.

About the Director

Born on the Canary Islands and raised in Madrid, Carlos Baena came to the United States in 1994. He’s worked at Industrial Light & Magic and Pixar Animation Studios, on films such as Jurassic Park III, Star Wars: Ep II, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, Wall-E and Toy Story 3. For his work in the film Cars, Carlos received a 2007 Annie Award nomination for Best Character Animation. Carlos also directed the acclaimed live-action short films “Play by Play” (2011) and MarketSt (2015). From 2013-2016 Carlos developed Feature Animation content at Paramount Pictures and served as Character Director at the Robotics Studio Anki on the First AI Toy “Cozmo”. In 2017, Carlos was Supervising Director on an Upcoming Animated Anthology. He is also Co-Founder of AnimationMentor, the Online Animation School as well as the Cloud based Virtual Platform Artella. Carlos just completed his first Animated Shortfilm “La Noria” and currently lives in Los Angeles, California.
For more information, check out his Web site: http://www.carlosbaena.com

About the Director

Benjamin Barfoot is a self taught filmmaker from Devon whose path to this festival started early when as a geeky child he started making stop motion animation films using plasticine. At school and then college he moved into film - creating shorts with the seemingly impossible dream of one day becoming a film director.

Straight out of college Ben started his TV career as an editor, cameraman and VFX artist whilst continuing to make his own films "It's hard to find anyone to work on your films in the beginning so you just do it yourself. Before you know it, you're a bit of a one man band". Ben worked at MTV and Vice and most regularly for the BBC - travelling to Israel, Palestine, Egypt and the Calais jungle to make documentaries. “It’s all storytelling” being his key belief - Ben’s documentary is highly sought after because it brings the flair of fictional film-making to non-fiction.

Throughout his career cinema has been firmly his aim. His first short, Signature, a dark animation, was nominated for a broadcast young talent award and his second, Fuse - which he wrote, directed, edited and created the vfx for played at Raindance and Soho Rushes.

Then five years ago Benjamin and Danny Morgan began their bromance - Danny a writer / actor whom he started making online comedy shorts with. "They were just scribbles, doodles with someone I found very easy to collaborate with. We share a love for humour and darkness”.

Their first outing, 'Where did it all go Ron?' followed a depressed drug-addicted Ron Weasley on the eve of his 29th birthday. Then there was a sketch sequel to Drive called 'Drive Too' and a mockumentry about a failed Hollywood actor that starred Garret Hedlund. These doodles went on to get the attention of producer, Matt Wilkinson and the most recent result of that bromance is Double Date.

About the Director

Before moving into Directing, Brian studied Sculpture in the DIT School of Fine Art. Whilst there his fascination with the exploration of three-dimensional space inevitably led to him picking up a video camera and creating his first experimental short films. Through these experiments, he discovered visual directors like Sergio Leone and Martin Scorsese, and his desire to be a highly visual commercial film director was born. His video work in college got the attention of his fellow students and before long he was making no-budget music videos for college bands. He considered abandoning art school in favour of film school, however, he felt compelled to complete his studies. After leaving college Brian worked internationally as a snow, ice and sand sculptor, taking part in many international competitions and creating sculptures on a corporate
level.

Brian has now completed his second feature film which has allowed him to further develop his own signature as a director. A classically themed gothic ghost story set in 1920s rural Ireland, The Lodgers tells the story of orphaned twins Rachel and Edward who reside in a crumbling manor that they share with their eternally damned ancestors. The Lodgers will receive its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017.