Awards and Juries
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION JURY
Prano Bailey-Bond
(Wales) Based in London, she began her career making shorts and music videos, which screened globally. Her feature debut, Censor (2021, screened at this edition of the Festival), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and the Berlinale, and won the Méliès d’Or at Sitges Film Festival. She is represented as a writer-director by Casarotto Ramsay & Associates, and in the USA by United Talent Agency.
Celina Murga
(Paraná, Entre Ríos, Argentina) She studied at Universidad del Cine, where she directed her first shorts. She made Ana and the Others (2003), A Week Alone (2008), Normal School (2012) and The Third Side of the River (2014), which were shown at important international festivals like Berlin, Venice, Toronto, Rotterdam and San Sebastian. In 2008, she was selected by Martin Scorsese as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. She is currently post-producing her upcoming fiction feature El olor del pasto recién cortado.
Mimi Plauché
(USA) She is Artistic Director of the Chicago International Film Festival where she has worked for more than 18 years. She has worked on a doctorate in Japanese literature and film at University of Michigan’s Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. She is the recipient of Fulbright-Hays, Japan Foundation, and Social Science Research Council fellowships, and was named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture.
Tana Schembori
(Asunción, Paraguay) A film and theater director, trainer of actors and editor. She is, alongside Juan Carlos Maneglia, one of the most important names in Paraguayan cinema. They have made the films 7 Boxes (2012) and The Gold Seekers (2017), as well as the series Marilina: Atreverse a soñar (2023). Apart from her work of fiction, she is also co-founder of TIA, a school devoted to training actors, screenwriters and film directors that was founded in 2009.
Charles Tesson
(La Châtaigneraie, France) He is vice president of the French Film Critics’ Union. He was Artistic Director of Critic’s Week at Cannes Film Festival between 2012 and 2021 and president of Aide aux Cinémas du Monde (2016-2021). He was editor-in-chief at Cahiers du cinéma (1998-2003), where he began his career as a film critic in 1979. He was a film professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. He has written several books and essays: Satyajit Ray (1992), Luis Buñuel (1995), Photogénie de la Série B (1997), Théâtre et cinéma (2007) and Akira Kurosawa (2008).
LATIN AMERICAN COMPETITION JURY
João Fleck
(Porto Alegre, Brazil) Born in 1982, she has a post-doctorate in Marketing. He is a film producer, and his filmography is made up of more than ten features produced over the past ten years. He has been director and curator at the Fanspoa film festival for the past twenty years.
Maria Paula Lorgia
(Bogotá, Colombia) A curator and programmer of film and new media. She is a historian from Bogotá’s Universidad de los Andes (2008) and has a master’s in arts with specialization in documentary film from New York’s New School University. She worked at Bogotá’s Cinematheque as programming leader for nine years. She is currently the artistic director of the San Diego Latino Film Festival, creative director at audiovisual platform Tulpa and executive producer at Anibia animation exhibit in Bogotá.
Laura Paredes
(Buenos Aires, Argentina) She is an actress and playwright, and has been co-director of the theater group Piel de Lava for the past twenty years. As an actress, she has worked in Mariano Llinás’ La Flor; Laura Citarella’s Ostende and Trenque Lauquen; Martín Rejtman’s Two Shots Fired; Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985; Matías Piñeiro’s The Princess of France; Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents and The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis, directed by Andrea Testa and Francisco Márquez, among other films. She cowrote Trenque Lauquen with Laura Citarella and Blondi with Dolores Fonzi.
ARGENTINE COMPETITION JURY
Maria Alvarez
(Buenos Aires, Argentina) She made Las cinéphilas (2017), Le temps perdu (2004) and Near and Dear (2021). Her films have screened and won awards at such festivals as Mar del Plata, IDFA, Locarno, Thessaloniki, Göteborg, DocAviv, Gijón, DocLisboa, Bafici, Havana and Sydney, among many others. She wrote Quémese antes de leerse, a play that won the Second Fray Luis De León de Valladolid Award in Spain and was published in 2016
Haroldo Borges
(Salvador, Brazil) He is part of the Plano 3 Filmes collectives, where he made award-winning films such as the documentary Jonas and the Backyard Circus and the features Son of Ox and Bittersweet Rain, his most recent work and winner at the last Mar del Plata Film Festival, where was chosen Best Film by the Official Jury and the audience. With nine awards at international festivals, it was released in Brazil at Festival do Rio.
Toby Poser
(USA) An American filmmaker, actress, voice-over artist, and writer. She is the founder of Wonder Wheel Productions, for which she directs, writes, produces, and performs, alongside her family (husband John Adams and daughters Lulu and Zelda) in all of their award-winning independent feature films: Rumblestrips (2011), Knuckle Jack (2012), The Shoot (2014), Halfway to Zen (2016), and genre films The Deeper You Dig (2029), Hellbender (2021, 36th Festival) and Where the Devil Roams (2023, shown at this edition).
ALTERED STATES COMPETITION JURY
Juliana Antunes
(Belo Horizonte, Brazil) Her films Sweet River (2017), Plano controle (2019) and Trópico de Capricórnio (2020), have achieved some great international recognition and were shown at such festivals as the NYFF, Jeonju International Film Festival, Viennale, Havana, Fid Marseille and Mar del Plata. She has been jury member at festivals such as Indie Lisboa, Olhar de Cinema and Tiradentes. She is a tutor at FicValdivia’s Encuentros Australes.
Flavia Dima
(Romania) A film critic, programmer and translator based in Bucharest, Romania. An student at programs such as Berlinale Talents and Locarno Critics Academy, she is a regular critic for Films in Frame and contributes to several local and international outlets such as MUBI Notebook, Con Los Ojos Abiertos, Film Menu and Kinoscope. Since 2020, she has been an associate curator of Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF), working primarily on the festival’s international competitions and auteur retrospectives.
Leandro Listorti
(Buenos Aires, Argentina) He works in the margins of archive footage and experimental practices. He has worked as film programmer at Bafici for ten years, and since 2015, he is in charge of the technical coordination and programming of the Buenos Aires Film Museum. He has taught at Universidad del Cine, UNTREF, UNSAM and the EICTV (Cuba). In 2016, he founded production company MaravillaCine alongside Paula Zyngierman. He has directed the features Herbaria, The Endless Film and Dead Youth.
WORK IN PROGRESS COMPETITION JURY
Felipe Guerrero
(Colombia) A producer, director and editor. In 2012, he founded Mutokino, a production and distribution company interested in auteur cinema with an emphasis on experimentation with the form and new aesthetics. As a director, he has made Paraíso (2006), Corta (2012) and Oscuro animal (2016). As a producer, he made Camila Rodríguez Triana’s The Song of the Auricanturi (2023); José Alejandro González’s Álvaro (2021); and Camilo Restrepo’s Los conductos (2020), among others. He is currently working on the new films by Chris Gude, Paula Rodríguez Polanco and Camilo Restrepo.
Marcela Santibañez
(Santiago de Chile, Chile) A documentary producer nominated for an Oscar in 2021 for the film The Mole Agent. She is a Fulbright scholar and has an MFA in Production from UCLA. Since 2016, she has been working as producer at Maite Alberdi’s Micromundo Producciones, where they have produced important documentaries such as The Eternal Memory and Tea Time, among others. She is director of FIDOCS Industry and Executive Production teacher at the Catholic University of Chile, in which she also leads short film production company Prisma UC.
Florencia Schapiro
(Buenos Aires, Argentina) Between 2003 and 2008, she was International Distribution Director at sales and production company Coproduction Office (France, Germany, Denmark). Since 2020, she has been working with that company in the development of its team for the Paris and Berlin branches. In 2008, she founded, alongside Morgane Brisson, film distributor LAT-E, which accompanied the releases of Force majeure (Ruben Östlund), Little Joe (Jessica Hausner) and Stranger by the Lake (Alain Giraudie), among other films.
