Festival Board

Geraldine O’Neill

Asylum Support Adviser at Scottish Refugee Council

Geraldine O’Neill currently works as an Asylum Support Adviser at Scottish Refugee Council and previously worked with a Deaf organisation in Glasgow.  She is active in promoting Palestinian human rights in the UK including writing articles for local newspapers and selling goods from a Women’s Co-operative in the West Bank.  She has visited the West Bank working alongside Palestinian and Israeli grassroots organisations.  She has also volunteered on a number of projects including befriending unaccompanied young asylum seekers in Glasgow and working at a food bank in Tokyo.

Dr David Archibald

is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. He has a long history of involvement in political and community campaigns, including the anti-apartheid movement and the anti-poll tax campaign. He combines academic work on politics and film – his book on the Spanish Civil war in Cinema will be published later this year - with articles in newspapers and magazines and has written for over twenty different publications including Cineaste, Financial Times and the Guardian

Maria A. Velez-Serna

is a research student in Scottish cinema history at the University of Glasgow, where she recently helped coordinate a postgraduate workshop on documentary filmmaking. Before coming to Scotland, she had worked in cultural policy design and event organizing at Colombia’s Universidad Nacional. She has also written on Colombian cinema and film criticism. Likes tortoises and archives

Neill Patton

Worked with Document for nine years before becoming a member of the board. In that time he developed a number of key areas of the organisation and established important partnerships with, among others, Pravo Ljudski Film Festival, the Poverty Alliance, universities and colleges from across Scotland. While working with Document he also spent time as a film programmer with the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival and as one of the coordinators of One Scotland Many Voices Film Festival. He now works as Fieldworker and Researcher for the Cadispa Trust, where he works with rural communities to help build their capacity and develop sustainable plans for the future using place based research. Neill is also one of a UK wide team delivering  an AHRC funded research project looking at the value of the arts in releasing the capacity of communities facing multiple deprivation and is part of the delivery team of the Streetland Festival which runs annually in Govanhill, Glasgow