Once upon a telenovela, the Marias taught their viewers to dream bigger, cry harder, and wait for endless love – now, the women return to ask, ‘Who wrote the script?’
Viktorija Mickutė is a three time Emmy-nominated director, producer and writer. Viktorija’s project Still Here, exploring incarceration and gentrification in the US, premiered at Sundance in 2020. Since 2017, she has been creating immersive and interactive documentaries at AJ Contrast, Al Jazeera’s media innovation studio. Viktorija’s works have been recognized with 37 awards, including Amnesty Media and multiple Drum Online Media awards, and were screened in dozens of film festivals such as Sheffield Doc Fest and One World Film Festival. Born and raised in Lithuania, Viktorija was awarded with a Fulbright scholarship and earned a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Missouri. In 2022, she was selected for the Online News Association’s Women’s Leadership Accelerator. In spring 2023, Viktorija was a fellow at the Mercury Store Theatre Directing Lab in Brooklyn, and in June, she directed a theater performance at the Wooster Group’s Performing Garage in Soho, New York.
Ieva Balsiūnaitė is a journalist and documentary creator based in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her past projects include a documentary film The Snowball Rolled South (2018), which explores the lives of Litvak Holocaust survivors in South Africa. Other notable projects include radio documentaries produced in Ukraine (2022, 2023) about the difficulties of everyday life during Russia’s invasion and women in the military. In 2022, Ieva’s radio feature about exiled Belarusian activists won 1st place at the prestigious Prix Bohemia Radio festival in the Czech Republic. She is currently the foreign news editor and special reporter at the Lithuanian National Radio and Television (LRT) where she continues multi-format work focused on human rights, foreign affairs and sociopolitical issues. In 2025, Ieva's radio documentary "Farewell to Kostia" was nominated for the prestigious Prix Europa Media award.
