Palestinian Jury |
Sahera Dirbas is a Haifa-born and Jerusalem-based filmmaker and freelance producer. Until 2007 she worked for international TV stations, such as Rai and BBC, after which she began working as an independent filmmaker. Films directed by Dirbas include: Between Heaven & Earth (2015), Sumud (2015), Deir Yassin Village and Massacre (2012), Jerusalem Bride (2010), 138 Pounds in my Pocket (2009), Crystal Grapes (2009), A Handful of Earth (2008), and Stranger in My Home – Jerusalem (2007). All of these films have participated in international film festivals, and Stranger in My Home-Jerusalem was awarded in the Euro Arab Film festival in Spain and has been translated into 6 languages. In 2013, Dirbas started a documentary training project for Palestinian women directors, which resulted in the production of five independent films about Palestinian women’s oral history. Between 1989-91, she also published three books about three destroyed Palestinian villages: Tirat Haifa, Al-Birweh, and Salameh. |
Muhammad Bakri was born in the village of Bi’ina in northern Israel. He went to elementary school in his hometown and received his secondary education in the nearby city of Acco. He studied acting and Arabic Literature at Tel Aviv University in 1973 and graduated three years later. Bakri began his professional acting career in with HabimaTheatre in Tel Aviv, Haifa theater and al-Kasaba theater in Ramallah. His one-man plays, The Pessoptimist (1986), The Anchor (1991), Season of Migration to the North (1993), and Abu Marmar (1999), were performed in Hebrew and Arabic. After a few years of acting in Palestinian and Israeli film, Bakri began to act in international films in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Canada. Bakri also directed two documentary film including the controversial Jenin, Jenin. |
Naim Mahmoud Al Khatib is a Palestinian who was born in 1968 in a refugee camp in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. He received his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with a minor in Theatre from the American University in Cairo in 1993 and his master’s in (same major) from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2003. He published his first narrative collection Free Reign in 2010, and his second one Stolen Alive in 2013 (both in Arabic). During that time, he has been practicing screenwriting and playwriting in addition to his longtime passion for acting and directing. |
Jamal Abu Al Qumsan (born 1967, Gaza) is a Palestinian stage actor. He has directed several plays and trained a number of organizations.He has worked in LAMA Film as a producer, lead actor and production manager and as a production manager on several UNRWA documentary films. He is the founder of the first theatre and cinema in Gaza and the manager of the Gaza Theatre Festival. |
Italian Jury |
Luciana Castellina is an Italian politician, journalist and writer, for several times communist Member of the Italian and European Parliament. She is author of many publications, Hononary President of ARCI since 2014. Member of the Communist Party since 1947, she was expelled in 1969 when together with Magri, Natoli, Parlato, Pintor and Rossanda founded the newspaper “Il Manifesto”. She has published La scoperta del mondo, one of the five nominees at the Strega Award in 2011, and Siberiana, winner of the Vallombrosa Award in 2012. In 2014 she has published her last book, Guardati dalla mia fame, written together with Milena Agus. |
Monica Maurer. Academic, writer and film maker studied Sociology and Communication Sciences at university in Munich and Berlin before working as a journalist for several newspapers in Germany and the radical US magazine “Ramparts”. Late she wrote features for television and became an assistant director to the avant-guarde director Carmelo Bene. Due to growing anti-arab tensions in 1974 she left film-making in favour of political activism, setting up a multinational bookshop for immigrant workers in Cologne (Germany). From 1977 on she worked as a director and writer with Palestinian Cinema Institution (PLO Unified Information) and the Information Department of the PRCS (Palestine Red Crescent Society) in Beirut, producing a number of films on the issue of Palestine including Palestine Red Crescent, Children of Palestine, The Fifth War, Born out of Death and Palestine in Flames. From 1994/96 she lectured International School of Film and TV in Cuba an now lives in Rome where she continues to teach and work as a film consultant. |
Andrea Adriatico is a movie and theater director. He has directed three short movies (Anarchie, L’auto del silenzio awarded at the Arcipelago Festival, and Pugni, première at the International Venice Film Festival, winner of several awards in Italy and abroad). He has also directed two fictions, (Il vento, di sera, 2004, première at the Berlin Film Festival, winner at the Roseto Opera Prima; All’amore assente, 2007, première at the London International Film Festival, Special Panel Award at the Annecy Cinéma Italien). In addition, he has directed two documentaries, (+o- il sesso confuso, 2010, awarded at the Abruzzo Documentary Festival, and Torri, checche e tortellini, 2015). |
Massimo Vattani. During the last 20 years Massimo Vattani has organized the International Film Festival Tekfestival and many other cultural events, such developing excellent competencies. He is a free lance projectionist and he does video installations. Since 2010 he has been working at the Nuovo Cinema Aquila in Rome as artistic director of the Festival Contest – Documentary Film at the Theater. At the Nuovo Cinema Aquila he is also responsible for the Italian and International documentary and short movies planning. |