Image (Left-Right): Darshan Gajjar, Erica Monde, Greta Santagata, JIJO, Joanna Suchomska, Maria Millan
We are thrilled to announce the cohort for this year’s Filmmaker Challenge!
Returning for a 4th edition in 2025, our Filmmaker Challenge, supported by Principal Sponsor Prime Video, selects six filmmakers to make a short documentary in and around Sheffield during the festival, under the guidance of an experienced mentor and supported by equipment, production budget, and festival passes.
We are delighted to have Waad Al-Kateab, Academy Award® nominee and BAFTA and BIFA award-winning director of 2019’s For Sama, as our Guest Mentor this year. She will mentor the cohort of talents to develop their short films, from inception of their ideas in response to the 2025 theme Where Perspectives Meet, to providing feedback during production and editing via filmmaker 1-2-1s, to the shorts’ showcase at the 32nd edition of Sheffield DocFest.
Working to a tight deadline, the selected filmmakers will create a 3 minute non-fiction film over five days, with filming taking place over a single day. The finished films will then be presented at a festival screening on Saturday 21 June plus Q&A with the Guest Mentor and festival representatives.
Meet the cohort:
Darshan Gajjar
Darshan Gajjar is a Sheffield- and London-based Director and Director of Photography working at the intersection of documentary, identity, and social justice. His work amplifies underrepresented voices, particularly within the South Asian community, exploring themes of cultural heritage, systemic inequality, and belonging.
He is currently directing Gurkha: The Untold Truth, a feature documentary uncovering the overlooked history and injustices faced by British Gurkha veterans. Told in collaboration with presenter Nayungma Rai, the film sheds light on pension inequality, discrimination, and the silencing of Nepali voices across generations. The project is currently in production, funded by grassroots community support.
Erica Monde
Erica Monde (they/them) is a filmmaker from Northern California based in Glasgow, where they work as a Director, Writer, and Film Educator. They currently run IMPRINT Documentary Collective, a queer feminist film collective exploring embodiment and the body in experimental and documentary filmmaking. With a background in anthropology and the visual arts, their work explores themes of the body, the environment, gender, queer ecologies, health and disability at the intersections of documentary, experimental and fiction filmmaking. Erica is currently completing their most recent film, commissioned by BFI Network, Screen Scotland and Short Circuit, entitled This Desert Will Rust Your Bones.
Greta Santagata
After walking away from a career in neuroscience Greta Santagata picked up the camera for fun, and hasn’t been able to put it down.
Greta started at the BBC Natural History Unit, filming weird and wonderful nature, and through that came face-to-face with every form of environmental abuse and human injustice imaginable.
From reporting on illegal fishing in Liberia’s sovereign waters, to exposing dolphin bycatch in France, one thing has never changed: she wants to be able to give a voice to the voiceless and make a difference in the world.
Greta is currently training as a multimedia journalist with the NCTJ.
JIJO
JIJO (he/they) is an Indian-British Director, Screenwriter and Shooting Producer/Director working across documentary, narrative and commercial storytelling. His work centres human connection, social justice and cultural identity.
JIJO’s directing credits span Channel 4, BBC Studios, National Geographic and Discovery, alongside partnerships with Doc Society, the BFI, Arts Council England and Houses of Parliament. His independent shorts have been selected for over 60 festivals, while his narrative work includes KALI (Amazon Prime), Moonlight Dreams (Nowness), and Secrets of the Delta, an eco-thriller and his debut feature, currently in development through Climate Spring, BBC Writers and Film London’s Hot House lab.
Joanna Suchomska
Joanna Suchomska is a Polish-born documentary filmmaker based in Brighton. MATKA / POLKA (2022), her lyrical documentary exposing Poland's hidden abortion stories, received numerous international festival accolades and won Best Documentary at Women X Festival (UK). Joanna's upcoming film, Call Me If You're Lost, explores displacement, gender-based violence, and the vulnerabilities of being a young woman online through the eyes of an activist. The film was selected for the East-West Talent Lab industry pitch at goEast Festival 2024. In her work, shaped by her identity as an immigrant, she is drawn to themes of belonging, memory, taboo and the female experience.
Maria Millan
Maria Millan is a Venezuelan-British filmmaker based in London. She is an alumna of the Latino Filmmakers’ Fellowship at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where she participated with her screenplay The Hollow Women.
Following Sundance, she signed with the Star Collective in LA. Her recent documentaryTrans_CCS, portraying a transwoman in Caracas during the pandemic, won Best Film at That Film Festival (Cannes showcase).
She is currently shadowing Series Producer Mat Chaplin and Director Sean James Grant on an Apple TV production by 60Forty Films in the UK.
Principal Sponsor Prime Video
Supported by Prime Video, Sheffield Hallam University, Sticks and Glass and South Yorkshire Filmmakers Network.
