Arun Bhattarai is a director, producer, and cinematographer from Bhutan. He premiered his first feature-length documentary The Next Guardian (co-directed by Dorottya Zurbó), an intimate family story set in Bhutan, at IDFA in 2017. The film has been screened at more than forty international festivals. He graduated from the first edition of DocNomads Joint Master in documentary directing in 2014. His recent short documentary Mountain Man, about Bhutan’s only glaciologist, won the best pitch prize at If/Then Global Short-Pitch at IDFA 2019 and is supported by the IDA-XRM Media incubator program. His new film Agent of Happiness is supported by the Sundance Film Institute, Catapult Film Fund, and DMZ Docs Fund, among others. The project was developed at the Points North Fellowship 2022, True False Rough Cut Retreat 2023, and Dok. incubator 2023. He established his own production company, Sound Pictures, dedicated to creative documentaries in 2015 and is one of the few independent documentary filmmakers in Bhutan.
Dorottya Zurbó premiered her first feature-length documentary The Next Guardian (co-directed by Arun Bhattarai), an intimate family story set in Bhutan at IDFA in 2017. Since then, it has been screened at more than forty international festivals (True/False, San Francisco IDFF, MoMA DocFortnight, etc.). She worked concurrently on her directorial debut Easy Lessons, a feature-length documentary about a young Somalian refugee girl who tries to adapt to Hungary which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival Critics Week section in 2018. The film participated in more than forty international festivals and received the Hungarian Critics Award for Best Documentary in 2019 among others. Besides filmmaking, she has been teaching at the prestigious DocNomads Joint Master program in Europe.