The Once and Future

A visual artist and filmmaker from Singapore. His fiction feature, A Land Imagined (2018) won the Golden Leopard grand prize at the 71st Locarno Film Festival, Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Film Score at the 56th Golden Horse Awards in 2019, and the Roberto Rossellini Jury Prize at the 2nd Pingyao International Film Festival. Internationally distributed over NETFLIX, A Land Imagined was Singapore’s entry to the Academy Awards in 2020. Extending beyond conventional cinema networks, his works have been shown at venues like the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid; the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, the City Museum of Ljubljana, and for the Singapore International Festival of Arts.

Photo: © Laura Stevens

Born in 1987, Eugene Birman graduated from the University of Oxford, Columbia University, The Juilliard School, and the Accademia Musicale Chigiana. A composer of music of “high drama” and “intense emotion” (BBC), Birman has written for leading symphony orchestras, choirs, ensembles, and soloists across four continents in venues ranging from London’s Southbank Centre to New York’s Carnegie Hall to above the Arctic Circle. Awarded the 2017 Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize, his work is characterised by a fearless focus on socially relevant large-scale compositions covering the financial crisis, Russian border treaties, and more. Being a 2018 Guggenheim fellow, he has appeared on CNN, BBC World TV, Radio France, Deutsche Welle, and others throughout his highly public career.

Hailed as a child prodigy, Anandi Bhattacharya featured in the album Beyond the Ragasphere conceived by her father, Debashish Bhattacharya, alongside the likes of John Mclaughlin, Jerry Douglas, Bickram Ghosh and Tanmoy Bose, which won the Album of the Year (2014) at WOMEX. She has topped the World Music Europe Chart, the Transglobal World Music Charts Europe for Best Album (2018), while garnered the German Record Critics' Award and the Songlines Music Award (2019). She was featured in the Songlines magazine, The Guardian, BBC Music Magazine and, alongside artists like Mac Miller and Billie Eilish, in the London Evening Standard’s Albums of the Month and the PopMatters compilation of best artists of 2019. She has also toured all over the globe showcasing her musical prowess, and recently collaborated with Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar.

Principal Conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra since 2014 with a season of 10 concerts each year in the Berlin Philharmonie. As guest conductor, Stanley Dodds has appeared with principal orchestras in major cities throughout Europe, Asia and Australia, which include the Australian World Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and a recent North American debut with the Vancouver Symphony. Dodds is a violinist and a member of the Berliner Philharmoniker, also the dual German and Australian citizen studied in Australia, Austria and Switzerland before settling in Berlin. He is the founder of the ZeMu! Ensemble Berlin dedicated to the performance of works by living composers. Audiovisual and CD productions document his work in contemporary music, with commercial recordings of works by Vito Zuraj and Wolfgang Rihm.

Photo: © Peter Rigaud

The ZeMu! Ensemble Berlin was founded in 2022 by its conductor Stanley Dodds and is the youngest ensemble to emerge from the ranks of the world famous Berliner Philharmoniker.

Photo: © Sebastian Hänel / Berliner Philharmoniker

Roger Garcia has been Executive Director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival and Asian Film Awards Academy, Artistic Director of the Hainan Island International Film Festival, and curator, consultant and juror to many international film festivals. He is a film producer who has worked on independent and experimental films in Asia and in Hollywood on commercial films and TV. As a film critic his books and articles have been published by British Film Institute, Cahiers du Cinema, Film Comment and many more. He was a Board member of M Plus Museum in Hong Kong until 2022, and was awarded Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government in 2018.

CEO and Artistic Director of the multidisciplinary Helsinki Festival in 2015-2018, where he commissioned and programmed the world's leading artists from Lang Lang and David Hockney to Kyle Abraham, Cate Blanchett and John Malkovich, and from companies of most of the art disciplines and for various media, often with multidisciplinary ethos. As a classical tenor, he has performed on the major stages and festivals with, for example, Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, Sir Simon Rattle and Riccardo Muti, in productions of Trisha Brown, Peter Sellars and others. He features in numerous audio and video recordings, having been nominated twice for a Grammy.

Photo: © Monica Rittershaus