​Future Leaders 2024: film festival programmers and curators to watch

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For the second time, Screen International trains the Future Leaders spotlight on up-and-coming names among festival programmers and curators.

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Screen File

Future Leaders has long been one of our favourite initiatives at Screen International — a chance to showcase some of the rising talents in a particular sector of the industry. Over the years, we’ve trained the spotlight on up-and-coming producers, sales and acquisitions executives, talent agents and managers, profiling the people who are already influential in their fields and destined to rule the business in years to come.

This year, we turn our attention for the second time to film festival programmers and year-round curators. We first spotlighted this group in 2019 and in the intervening five years, some of the names on our original list have indeed become leaders, perhaps most prominently Ava Cahen, who in 2021 stepped up to become artistic director of Critics’ Week at Cannes.

A lot has changed in the world and the industry since our original programmers and curators showcase. The pandemic, of course, battered the whole ecosystem, prompting an existential crisis about whether watching films in cinemas would even continue as a cultural pastime. Festivals suffered, both in terms of sponsorship and audiences, but reports of cinema’s death proved greatly exaggerated.

Last year offered a bonanza of outstanding cinema — and showed that audiences will be there for the high-quality storytelling and bold auteurs. And those for whom cinema is much more than just a pastime — it is something they live and breathe — become ever more important in this post-pandemic world: their passions become our passions, their impact on film culture is immeasurable, and that’s why we are spotlighting some of the rising stars in these fields again this year.

As always, we sifted through hundreds of potential candidates in consultation with our network of industry contacts — including A-list artistic directors, senior programmers, critics and filmmakers — to arrive at the 25 Future Leaders on our list. All of them are tastemakers who are already making a huge impact, and we think could be running A-list festivals in the future. We hope you enjoy meeting them as much as we did.

To find out more about our 2024 Future Leaders, click on the profiles below