CREATURA: A Journey Into The Unfamiliar

Saffron Maeve
Critic, Curator

Saffron Maeve is a Toronto-based critic and curator. Her writing has appeared in Film Comment, The Globe & Mail, Sight and Sound, MUBI Notebook, Reverse Shot, Cinema Scope, Hyperallergic, Toronto Star, and Screen Slate. She is the curator of CONTOURS at Paradise Theatre, a monthly series of films which thematize visual art. Saffron is an active member of the Toronto Film Critics Association and GALECA: the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, as well as a past guest speaker and moderator for TIFF, International Film Festival of Ottawa, Dave Barber Cinematheque, Wavelengths, and Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.

Iris Ng
Cinematographer (THE LAST OF THE SEA WOMEN)

Iris is a cinematographer known for work that focuses on human rights, marginalised perspectives, and POV filmmaking. She has extensive experience in documentary films but has also been lensing films for contemporary artists, as well as shot scripted shorts, prime time TV, and digital series. Her most notable work includes Stories We Tell, Shirkers, and celebrated socially-critical feature documentaries such as Twice Colonized, One Of Ours, Subjects Of Desire, A Better Man, Migrant Dreams, and most recently Exclusion: Beyond The Silence, and The Last Of The Sea Women.

Ila Firouzabadi
Screenwriter (UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE)

Born in 1980 in Tehran and based in Montreal since 2012, Ila Firouzabadi is an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on ambiguous and sensitive forms through drawings and a combination sculpture and installation. Firouzabadi received a BA in graphic design in 2005 from Azad University of Art and Architecture in Tehran and graduated from École national des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg in 2009.  She has exhibited her work around the world, notably at Keramikmuseum and the Artforum Kunstlerkreis Ortenau Gallery (Germany,2009), the Espace Apollonia (France, 2010), at the Theodore Deck museum (France, 2010), at OBORO (Quebec,2013), at MAI (Quebec,2015) and at Etemad gallery (Iran,2016). In Canada, Firouzabadi’s practice has expanded into moving images in two collaborative projects with director Matthew Rankin; an Esperanto-language docu-fiction project presently in production, Kongreso, and the fiction film of Universal Language (2024) which premiered at the 55th Directors Fortnight in Cannes.