Juries

Atom Egoyan’s international breakthrough came in the 1987 Forum where he presented his feature film Family Viewing. His greatest successes include Calendar, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter and Ararat. The director, who has Armenian roots, has won numerous prizes at international film festivals including The Grand Prix and International Critics Awards from the Cannes Film Festival and two Academy Award nominations. His art installations have been presented at museums and galleries throughout the world, including the Venice Biennale. For the Canadian Opera Company, Egoyan has produced Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

After having acted in small roles, Humbert Balsan changed his profession in the late seventies and became a producer. Balsan has discovered and promoted a whole string of French filmmakers including Philippe Faucon and Sandrine Veysset. One of his most recent productions is Divine Intervention by Palestinian director Elia Suleiman who received the Jury Prize in Cannes in 2002.

Kathryn Bigelow is one of the few women directors to feel at home with the action genre. After years of working as a painter and conceptual artist she switched to directing. Her first big hit was Blue Steel which was screened in the Berlinale Panorama in 1990. She excited critics and audiences with her film Strange Days in 1995 an action-packed thriller mixed with science-fiction. Her most recent film K-19: The Widowmaker ran last year in movie theaters all over the world.

In Patrice Leconte’s Le Marie de la coiffeuse (The Hairdresser’s Husband) from 1990, she played an atractive hairstylist and loving wife – a role which was to earn Italian actress Anna Galiena international acclaim. She performed in the screen adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Mario und der Zauberer (Mario and the Magician) as well as in the international productions Jamón, Jamón and The Leading Man. Anna Galiena has acted in countless European productions as well as on American television and at the Public Theater in New York.

As the beautiful, spirited cook in Bella Martha (Mostly Martha), Martina Gedeck won the hearts of audiences from Italy to the USA. The film also brought her the German Film Award 2002 as well as diverse international prizes. German movie-goers are acquainted with this multitalented actress of complex roles – whose screen career began in 1988 with Tiger, Löwe, Panther – from such successful hits as Der bewegte Mann (Maybe… Maybe Not), Das Leben ist eine Baustelle (Life is All You Get) or Rossini.

As director of the Sundance Film Festival in Park City/Utah, Geoffrey Gilmore is an indefatigable traveller when it comes to film. After years of responsibility for the festival’s program selection Gilmore is one of the best authorities on international independent filmmaking. Moreover with the Sundance Collection Gilmore has established a unique independent film archive at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). He is also active as advisor for many film organizations and projects.

Director Abderrahmane Sissako born in 1961 in West African Mauritania grew up entirely in Mali and later went on to study cinema at the VGIK in Moscow. Sissako’s first feature length film Rostov-Luanda was screened at the Documenta X in Kassel. His film La vie sur la terre (1998) received awards at festivals around the world. Sissako is now living in Paris, but in his films he remains faithful to the country and the people of his origin: In his latest film Heremakono, which screened at Cannes 2002 in “Un certain regard”, he once again returns to the African continent.

After receiving the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Berlinale in 2002, Andreas Dresen's Halbe Treppe (Grill Point) toured the festival world. The director, born in 1963, made a name for himself with the episodic film Nachtgestalten (Night Shapes) which also ran in the Berlinale competition. Alongside his cinema projects, Dresen works for both theater and television.

Phyllis Mollet lives in Paris and worked from 1993 to 2002 for the International Federation of Film Producers’ Association (FIAPF). As the association’s general secretary, and then as its director of communications and festivals, she was responsible for 60 film festivals worldwide.

Thom Palmen is the director of the Umea International Film Festival in Sweden and chairman of the board of directors of the European Coordination of Film Festivals (ECFF). As a member of the jury, he has been a guest at many film festivals.