EVANTHIA REBOUTSIKA (Greece)
Chairwoman of the jury
She is one of the most important Greek composers in the field of soundtracks and popular song, with several gold and platinum records. As a violinist, she has performed at festivals all over the world. Among her scores is that of A Touch of Spice (Tassos Boulmetis, 2003), which won an award at the Thessaloniki Festival. With the soundtrack for My Father and My Son (Cagan Irmak, 2005), she won the Discovery Award at the World Soundtrack Awards and the Radyo Boğaziçi Müzik Ödülleri Score of the Year Award. Honoured with the Golden Lion of Alexandria for her cultural contribution, she has also won awards at the London Greek Festival for Letters Never Received (Elias Demetriou, 2007) and at the International Movie Awards in Rome for The Unlost Homeland (Eftyhia Fragou, 2021).
EHAB ASSAL (Palestine)
He began working as first assistant cameraman in the 1990s on more than thirty Hollywood productions such as Sling Blade (Billy Bob Thornton, 1996), The Apostle (Robert Duvall, 1997) and The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999), under the orders of directors of photography such as Vilmos Zsigmond, Dante Spinotti and Barry Markowitz. In Palestine he continued his work as a cameraman while setting up the production company Yellow Dawn, which has participated in The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman, 2009) or Amazing Love (Kevin Downes, 2012) and has produced several short films for debut directors. His first film as cinematographer was Omar (Hany Abu-Assad, Roudania Hatoum, 2013), for which he received the Silver Frog Award at the Camerimage Awards 2014.
LANA BARIC (Croatia)
Graduated in acting in 2005 from the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo, she has acted in more than forty plays, films, and TV series, winning numerous awards. After writing several short films, she made her feature film debut with Tereza37 (Danilo Serbedzija, 2020), which won the Best Screenplay Award at the Pula Film Festival and was selected by Croatia to compete for the Oscars. Her first directorial work was the short film Snow White (2022), in which she also wrote the screenplay and played the lead role. She is currently working on Eve After The Fall, her feature directorial debut. She has been vice-president of the Croatian Filmmakers Association from 2018 to 2022 and is a member of the Croatian Audiovisual Council.
MARÍA MÍNGUEZ (Spain)
Graduated in Journalism and Audio-visual Communication, she trained at the New York Film Academy. She began her career at the production company ContaConta, in programmes such as Socarrats and Autoindefinits, before going on to write feature film scripts, which have been selected in various laboratories and development programmes. In 2019 she released her first film as a screenwriter, Vivir dos veces (María Ripoll, 2019), which won the Berlanga Award for Best Screenplay and received a nomination at the Forqué Awards. She is also co-screenwriter of the film Amor en Polvo (Suso Imbernón, Juanjo Moscardó Rius, 2019), awarded Best Comedy at the Cinequest Festival (USA). Her most recent work is Unicorns (Álex Lora, 2022). She is president of the Valencian screenwriters’ association and teaches screenwriting at the Barreira school.
PIERRE-SIMON GUTMAN (France)
Deputy editor of the film criticism magazine L’Avant Scene Cinéma and member of Fipresci. After studying literature at the Sorbonne, he wrote his doctoral thesis on the American filmmaker Michael Cimino. He has collaborated with media such as 3 Couleurs, Les Fiches du Cinéma and Eclipse(s), among others. He teaches at the ESRA (École Supérieure de Réalisation Audiovisuelle) in Paris and Brussels, and previously taught at the Paris VII and Nancy 2 universities. He has directed several short films and for years has been a member of the selection and programming committee of the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week, where he has also been a member of the jury that awards the Camera d’Or for best debut film at the event.