Jodie Foster won the Best Actress Academy Award twice — Silence of the Lambs and The Accused — and is the acclaimed director of movies including Little Man Tate, Home for the Holidays, and Nell. Her films as a performer include Taxi Driver, The Brave One, Inside Man, Contact, and Panic Room.

Tahar Rahim is best known for his breakout starring role in A Prophet, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and earned him France’s “Oscar” as Best Actor. His international career continued with Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, Fatih Akin’s The Cut, and the recent Netflix series The Eddy.

Kevin Macdonald is the award-winning director of fiction features — including The Last King of Scotland and State of Play — as well as documentaries such as One Day in September (1999 Oscar), Touching the Void, and Life in a Day.

Annette Insdorf is Professor of Film at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and Moderator of 92Y’s Reel Pieces series. She is the author of Francois Truffaut, a study of the French director's work; two books about Polish filmmakers—Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski and Intimations: The Cinema of Wojciech Has; Philip Kaufman, and the landmark study, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (with a foreword by Elie Wiesel). Her latest book is Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes, and she received the Mel Novikoff Award from the 2018 San Francisco Film Festival.