They direct, edit, compose film scores, and shoot, but they also curate festivals, program screenings and practise film criticism. Without them, cinema would not be what it is. They are the ones who are going to decide which titles in competition at the 66th Krakow Film Festival will receive awards. The recipients of the festival’s golden and silver statuettes, along with its cash prizes, will be revealed on 6 June during the closing gala.
International Documentary Competition
The Documentary Competition jury will comprise: Alessandro Stellino from Italy – film critic and programmer, Artistic Director of the Festival dei Popoli in Florence and IsReal – Festival di Cinema del Reale in Nuoro, Sardinia, lecturer in film studies at the Civica Scuola di Cinema “Luchino Visconti” in Milan and programming consultant for Cinema Godard at Fondazione Prada; María Campaña Ramia from Brazil – film curator and IDFA selector, for a decade Artistic Director of Ecuador’s Encuentros del Otro Cine – EDOC festival, consultant to the Geneva International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights, currently based in Rio de Janeiro; Mehrdad Oskouei from Iran – director of more than twenty-five documentary films, photographer, and producer whose poetic, deeply humanist cinema gives voice to the voiceless. His films, including Starless Dreams, Sunless Shadows and A Fox Under a Pink Moon, have earned him more than 200 international awards, while at the Krakow Film Festival he received the Golden Dragon in 2005 and the Silver Horn in 2020; Petra Seliškar from Slovenia – director, screenwriter, and producer, founder of Petra Pan Film and co-founder of the Macedonian festival MakeDox and the Balkan Documentary Distribution Network, currently working on her new film Toso of an Old Cat;as well as Weronika Mliczewska – director, anthropologist, and photographer whose feature debut Child of Dust won best picture in the National Competition at the 2025 Krakow Film Festival and received a nomination for the 2026 Polish Eagles Awards.
International Short Film Competition
The winners of the International Short Film Competition will be selected by: Réka Bucsi from Hungary – animation director whose graduation film Symphony No. 42 was shortlisted for the Academy Awards, while Solar Walk received the Audi Short Film Award at the Berlinale. Bucsi is also a European Film Awards nominee, a member of AMPAS and the EFA, and has been a guest lecturer at CalArts and the Pratt Institute; Mari Liis Keevallik from Estonia – director of PÖFF Shorts, one of the Baltic region’s largest short film and animation festivals, accompanying the Black Nights Film Festival; and Jay Rosenblatt from the United States – two-time Oscar nominee and creator of more than 35 films exploring the emotional and psychological dimensions of the human experience, honoured at Sundance, IDFA, and New York’s MoMA. A Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellow, he has also won two awards at the Krakow Film Festival.
International Music Competition DocFilmMusic
Films at the intersection of music and documentary will be judged by: Günter Atteln from Germany – director and producer with 30 years of experience in music films, producer at Accentus Music in Leipzig since 2010, and creator of the documentary The Lost Paradise about Arvo Pärt; Maxim Derevianko from Italy – born into a family of ballet dancers, the Rome-based director creates documentaries about art, music, and fashion for institutions such as the Rome Opera, while his latest film Ai Weiwei’s Turandot has screened at CPH:DOX, Hot Docs, and the Krakow Film Festival; and Mary Komasa from Poland – composer, vocalist, and songwriter who, together with Antoni Komasa-Łazarkiewicz, has created film scores for productions by Agnieszka Holland (Mr Jones, Charlatan) and Julia von Heinz (Treasure, premiered at Berlinale 2024), and most recently for the Netflix series Lead Children.
National Competition – Short Films
The jury deciding on the best short film in the National Competition will include: Olga Bobrowska – film culture activist, co-founder and director of the StopTrik International Film Festival in Maribor, assistant professor at the Institute of Art and Design of the University of the National Education Commission in Kraków, and author of two monographs on Chinese animated film published by CRC Press; Łukasz M. Maciejewski – screenwriter and member of the Polish Screenwriters’ Guild, co-author of scripts for Marcin Koszałka’s films The Red Spider and White Courage (winner of Best Screenplay at the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia), as well as scripts for The Getaway King, Mother’s Day and the series The King of Warsaw, adapted from Szczepan Twardoch’s novel. In 2025, the weekly Polityka named him among the 12 most gifted screenwriters in Poland; and Maria Zbąska – photographer, cinematographer, and director. Graduate of the Łódź Film School and the Wajda School, whose feature debut It’s Not My Film received awards at festivals in Gdynia, Thessaloniki, and Prague, while she herself won the 2025 Polish Film Award for Discovery of the Year.
National Competition – Documentary Films
Polish documentaries will be assessed by: Kasia Boniecka – film editor and documentary consultant based in Paris, recipient of the Jan Machulski Award for editing Object, who edited, among others, A Picture to Remember – the opening film of IDFA 2023 – as well as Welded Together (winner of the Grand Prix at Sheffield DocFest); graduate and former lecturer at the Łódź Film School, mentor at dok.incubator and member of the European Film Academy; Natalia Koniarz – documentary director, graduate, and lecturer at the Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School, whose debut The Dam screened at over 50 festivals, while her feature-length Silver received six awards at the Krakow Film Festival in 2025 and a nomination for the 2026 Polish Film Awards; and Wojciech Staroń – cinematographer and director, recipient of the Silver Bear at the Berlinale for cinematography of El Premio. His directorial documentaries Siberian Lesson and Argentinian Lesson have been honoured in Kraków, at IDFA and at Cinéma du Réel. As cinematographer he has collaborated with Krzysztof Krauze, Diego Lerman (Cannes 2014) and Viesturs Kairišs (Tribeca 2022). His latest documentary, Passion According to Agnieszka, won the National Competition at last year’s KFF.
FIPRESCI International Federation of Film Critics Jury
The documentaries presented at the Festival will also be evaluated by critics: Łukasz Dawid Knap – film journalist and creator of the podcast Kanapa Knapa; Kira Taszman from Germany – translator and film journalist specialising in French and Eastern European cinema, member of the German Film Critics Association (VdFk), publishing among others in Screen International and Filmdienst; and Ladislav Volko from Slovakia – film critic, sociologist, former diplomat, and poet, former editor-in-chief of Film a Divadlo and former president of the Slovak PEN Centre, currently chair of the Film Journalists’ Club in Bratislava.
FICC International Federation of Film Societies Jury
The FICC jury comprises: Tenneh Björkander from Sweden – vice-chair of the Swedish Federation of Film Societies, representing the Gällivare Filmstudio, located roughly 100 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle; Michael Schäfer from Germany – actor, university teacher, screenwriter, and film director; and Piotr Wiśniewski – initiator and co-founder of the Offeliada festival and the Film Discussion Club in Gniezno, historian and librarian, cinephile and bibliophile.
Student Jury
Once again, competing films will also be judged by students. This year’s jury is composed of: Amelia Georgiewska, Gabriela Zawidzka, Hanna Praschil, Jagoda Janicka, Katarzyna Grabiec, Krzysztof Strumiński, Michał Bech, Mikołaj Stachańczyk, Natalia Stefańska, Veronika Kalinchuk, Wojciech Krakowiak, and Zuzanna Adamowicz.
Polish Arthouse Cinemas Association Jury
The award for the best debut by the maker of a first or second short fiction film will be presented by Paulina Łuczyńska from Kino Kosmos in Katowice, Karolina Marciszewska from Kino za Rogiem Café in Rzeszów, and Robert Skrzydlewski from Agrafka and KIKA cinemas in Kraków.
And, of course, we should remember that all members of our audience also serve as jurors. The audience poll is partnered by Magazyn Filmowy SFP.
Insider passes for the 66th Krakow Film Festival are now on sale!
The Krakow Film Festival is on the exclusive list of film events qualifying for the Academy Awards® in short film categories (fiction, animation, documentary) and feature-length documentary, the European Film Awards in the same categories, and serves as a qualifying event for the BAFTA Awards.
The Krakow Film Festival is organised with financial support from the City of Krakow, the Polish Film Institute, the Creative Europe MEDIA Programme, and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund – a state purpose fund. The Polish Filmmakers Association serves as co-organiser.The 66th Krakow Film Festival will be held in cinemas from 31 May to 7 June 2027 and online on KFF VOD from 5 June to 19 June 2026.