7th Blue Danube Film Festival

Soetkin Verstegen is an independent film maker and animator from Brussels. Her films Mr Sand (2016) and Freeze frame (2019) travelled to numerous festivals and received jury awards at Clermont-Ferrand, Ann Arbor, Annecy, Fantoche and Animafest Zagreb. She was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, ZHdK's a-i-l programm, Saari residence and AniDox:Residency. She freelances as a stop motion animator and is a guest professor at LUCA School of Arts, Brussels.

De-indiginezed filmmaker born in México City. Through a poetic, ludic and sensory approach, her work explores questions of territory, nature, legacy and identity that traverse her Brown body and her intimate sphere. Titixe (2018), her first feature documentary in which she holds directing, editing, producing and cinematography credits, has been selected in more than forty international film festivals and collected several awards. In 2019, she was selected as a Flaherty Seminar – Professional Development Fellow (Flaherty Seminar, NY) and was awarded the Charles C. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award (Full Frame FF, NC). She currently works on her second film My Body Is an Expanding Star, in collaboration with Semillites Hernández Velasco. This project has been supported by FOCINE-IMCINE (2021) and Firelight Media’s William Greaves Fund (United States, 2021).