Jury
DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION JURY
Paweł Łoziński (Poland) – CHAIR
Film director, screenwriter, documentary and feature film producer. He was born in 1965 in Warsaw. A graduate of Film Directing at the Film School in Łódź, he gained recognition due to his intimate documentaries in which he would come closer to his characters eliminating the distance of the camera, such as A Just So Story and Sisters (1999). He has won a number of awards on international film festivals in Nyon, Leipzig, Moscow, including the Prix Europa Award for the best television documentary (Chemo), Silver Horn at the 53 rd KFF for Father and Son (2013), Silver Hobby Horse for the best documentary at the 56 th KFF for his latest work You Have No Idea How Much I Love You.
Cintia Gil (Portugal)
Producer, festival selector and philosopher. She is a graduate of the University in Porto, where she worked at the Institute of Philosophy, and a film course at the Portuguese Film and Theatre School. She has taught at the Film and Documentary Cinema School in Abrantes. In 2001-2007 she worked as a film producer. She was a selector of the Short Film Festival in Vila do Conde. Since 2012 she has co-created Doclisboa, a documentary film festival, as its managing and artistic director. She has also been a member of the Board of Apordoc, the Portuguese Documentary Filmmakers Association.
Miroslav Janek (Czech Republic)
Director and producer of over 40 films. He was born in 1954 in the Czech Republic. Before he immigrated to the US in 1979 he had been an assistant film editor at the Czechoslovak Television. Later, he settled down in Minneapolis where he worked as an editor and cinematographer but also directed his own films sponsored by local donors. He spent a few years teaching Film Directing as part of the Film in the Cities project in St. Paul. In 1986 he moved to New York where he continued his independent film activity. After leaving the US he went to Italy where he collaborated with the American film director Godfrey Reggio. In 1993 he went back to the Czech Republic where he started directing documentary films. He lives in Prague and since 1998 he has been teaching at FAMU.
Marek Rozenbaum (Israel)
Film producer recognised internationally and founder of Transfax Films Productions. He was born in 1952 in Poland but throughout his entire life he has been associated with the Israeli film industry. He studied Film at the University of Tel Aviv. He has directed 2 films and produced over 50 feature films, documentaries and international co-productions, many of which have been awarded all over the world. His production company also produces TV series and programmes. For many years he was the President of the Israeli Film and Television Academy and the President of the Film and Television Producers Association in Israel, of which he is still a member. He is a member of the European Film Academy.
Julia Teichmann (Germany)
Film critic who lives in Munich. She studied Comparative Literature, Philosophy and Psychology at LMU München and Culture Journalism at University of Television and Film Munich. After working at Berlin-based film production company Film 1 she started contributing regularly, among others, to the daily Berliner Zeitung and to the magazine Filmdienst as a freelance film journalist. She works as a senior programmer for DOK.fest München and the Festival des deutschen Films in Ludwigshafen. She has served on several festival juries around the world and hosted discussions with filmmakers.
SHORT FILM COMPETITION JURY
Agnieszka Smoczyńska (Poland) – CHAIR
Film director. She is a graduate of Cultural Studies and Film Directing at the Radio and Television Faculty of the Silesia University in Katowice. She took part in master classes offered by the Andrzej Wajda School. She has made a number of recognised short documentary and fiction films, including Aria Diva awarded in Krakow. In 2015, she debuted with her feature film The Lure which received the award for the best debut at the Film Festival in Gdynia and was hailed as the “Discovery of the Year” of Polish Film Awards. The film was also recognised abroad, including the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award for Unique Vision and Design. Her achievements include the Global Filmmaking Award at this year’s Sundance Festival for her new project.
Mario Micaelo (Portugal)
He was born in 1965 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He earned a degree in Painting from the School of Fine Arts in Porto where he also studied Multimedia Art. Since 1986, he has been teaching visual arts, animation and multimedia. In 1991, he founded and programmed Cineclube, a film club, in Vila do Conde. He is a co-creator of the Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival and has been associated with until today. Micaelo is one of the managers of Curtas Metragens CRL, a film production cooperative, and one of the three managers of the Portuguese Short Film Agency, which he co-founded in 1999.
Géza M. Tóth (Hungary)
Film director, producer and screen writer. He received an Oscar nomination in 2007 for his animated film Maestro (2005), which was screened and awarded at many international film festivals. A founder and manager of KEDD Animation Studio, he is a professor and rector of the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest and a member of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (ATAS).
Álvaro Yebra (Spain)
Distributor and programmer specialising in short films. A graduate of the University in Valencia where was an editor of the magazine L’Atlante for a number of years. Since 2008 he has been working as a short film distributor at Some Like It Short and as a programmer of the international film festival Cinema Jove in Valencia. He collaborates with HumanFest and La Cabina International. He also works as a teacher at cinema projects developed at schools and museums.
Giedrė Žickytė (Lithuania)
Lithuanian film director and producer. Her documentaries have been screened and awarded at many international film festivals and the most recent one (co directed by Maite Alberdi), I Am Not from Here, won an award at the 56 th KFF and was nominated to the European Film Academy awards. Her previous documentary, Master and Tatyana, won several distinctions at the Lithuanian Film Awards. She is a member of the European Film Academy, the European Documentary Network, the Lithuanian Film Academy and the Vice President of the Lithuanian Filmmakers Union Documentary Guild. In 2013 she started her own production company, Moonmakers.
DOCFILMMUSIC COMPETITION JURY
Gitta Gsell (Switzerland) – CHAIR
Director and screenwriter. She studied at the F+F School for Art and Media Design in Zurich, the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College in New York. She makes several feature and short films as well as music documentaries, which include Bödälä – Dance the Rhythm (2010), Irene Schweizer – Jazzpianist (2006) and Melody of Noise (2015) which won the Golden Heynal Award at 56 th Krakow Film Festival.
Alessandro Battaglini (Italy)
Avid fan of music and cinema and co-organiser of festivals that combine the two disciplines. He was born in 1982 in Turin and studied Film as well as Culture Management and Economics at the local university. He is a manager of the Seeyousond Music Film Festival and a Deputy Director of the British Irish Film Fest. In 2008-2010 he supervised the Short Film City section at the International Film Festival in Leeds. Since 2005 he has worked in audiovisual industry producing films, commercials and TV programmes. Since 2011 he has been a coordinator of events at Officine Grandi Riparazioni. At present, he is working on his documentary Caravan Next: Feed the Future.
Antoni Komasa-Łazarkiewicz (Poland)
Film, television and theatre music composer. He grew up in Warsaw, studied in Krakow and now lives and works in Berlin. Thanks to his collaboration with Agnieszka Holland on July Walking Home (2003) he was noticed by the German director Hans Steinbichler. The first of the films they made together (Hierankl) won recognition at international film festivals opening him the path to develop his career. Further collaboration with Holland brought him the Czech Lion award for the music to the mini-series Burning Bush. He has also made music to the films of Jan Komasa (Warsaw 44), Maciej Żak (Convoy), Wojciech Kasperski (Icon) and Yesim Ustaoglu (Clair Obscur).
POLISH COMPETITION JURY
Dariusz Jabłoński (Poland) – CHAIR
Producer, director, founder and president of Apple Film, one of the first independent film production companies in Central and Eastern Europe. Since 1990, he has produced or co-produced over 30 feature films (including Street Games, The Spring to Come, Aftermath), as many feature-length documentaries (including Amateur Photographer, Reed Dance, Karski and the Lords of Humanity) and several television series (Cops, Spies in Warsaw). He has collaborated with almost all European countries, and, additionally, Canada and the US. His productions have won over 200 international and national awards. His directing debut, the documentary film Amateur Photographer, based on colour slides from the Łódź ghetto, won over 50 international awards (including Prix Europa, IDFA Grand Prix, Fipa d’Or, Prix Planete, Grimme Prize) and was shortlisted as one of the most important pictures of the recent decades. He also directed War Games, a film and series about Colonel Kukliński made together with ARTE and BBC, and Strawberry Wine, an adaptation of Andrzej Stasiuk’s prose, both screened and awarded at many international festivals. Over 10 years ago, he developed ScripTeast, a European master programme for the best screen writers from Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2012 he has been President of the Polish Film Academy and the Deputy President of the European Producers’ Club.
Wojciech Kasperski (Poland)
Film director, screen writer and producer. A graduate of the Film Directing at the Film School in Łódź, he also studied Philosophy at the University of Gdańsk and completed in courses at NFTS in Beaconsfield, La Fémis in Paris and VGIK in Moscow. His documentary debut The Seeds (2005) has won over 40 awards. His consecutive pictures, such as Abyss (doc., 2009), The Refuge City (2006) and A House at the End of the Road (2013), have been screened at festivals across the world. In 2016, his feature debut On the Border was released on cinema screens while his documentary Icon (2016) won acclaim at international film festivals and was awarded with the Golden Hobby Horse in Krakow.
Marta Pajek (Poland)
Born in Kielce in 1982. She is an independent animator and a graduate of the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow where she specialised in animation at Professor Jerzy Kucia’s Studio. As part of her scholarship, she also participated in a traineeship under the tutelage of Priit Pärn at the Turku Arts Academy in Finland. Her debut film, Sleepincord (2011), was screened and awarded at many international festivals. She received the Silver Hobby Horse at the 56 th Krakow Film Festival for Impossible Figures and Other Stories II (20016), a part of an animated triptych made in collaboration with Animoon. She lives and works in Warsaw.
Dorota Segda (Poland)
Actress, professor of dramatic arts and rector of the State Drama School in Krakow. Since 1987, she has been associated with Teatr Stary in Krakow and in 1997-2000 she also worked at Teatr Narodowy in Warsaw. Her achievements include 60 stage parts, such as Salomea in Salomea’s Silver Dream and Gretchen in Faust directed by J. Jarocki (Aleksander Zelwerowicz Awards), and about 40 parts in the performances of the Television Theatre. She appeared on screen as, among others, eponymous Faustyna in the film by J. Łukaszewicz (1994, Grand Prix for Acting at the International Film Festival in Riga) and Ewa in M. Ślesicki’s production Tato (1995, “Golden Duck” of the “Film” weekly). In 1995, she was presented with the Zbigniew Cybulski Award (1995).
Krzysztof Spór (Poland)
Journalist who writes about film and media; promoter and animator of film culture. He was a co-founder of Stopklatka.pl and the portal’s editor in chief in 2000-2013 (Polish Film Institute Award for the best Internet film portal). He won the Jan Machulski Award for his contribution to the development of Polish independent cinema. Since 2013, he has worked as an artistic director of the Summer with Music Festival in Nowogard. He manages the Film Culture Centre at the Delta Club in Szczecin. He shares his expertise by supporting film event organisers and hosting numerous meetings devoted to cinema. He has his own radio programme, collaborates with the Kino monthly and writes a blog entitled “Spór w kinie” (sporwkinie.blogspot.com).
JURY FIPRESCI
Kaj van Zoelen (The Netherlands)
Antti Selkokari (Finland)
Barbara Giza (Poland)
JURY FICC
Sylwia Hamerska (Poland)
Eva Campos Suárez (Spain)
Samiran Biswas (India)
STUDENT JURY
Kamila Jankowska
Paweł Kamiński
Natalia Klejdysz
Jędrzej Kościński
Małgorzata Kramek
Katarzyna Kuca
Paulina Richert
Katarzyna Panas
Marzena Pitek
Katarzyna Popiel
Bartosz Tesarz
Magdalena Urbańska