International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
Jury members
IDFA Competition for Mid-Length Documentary Director, producer and mentor to up-and-coming filmmakers David Fisher is one of Israel’s leading documentary filmmakers. Six Million and One (premiere at the 2011 Haifa International Film Festival) completes a family trilogy he started with the critically acclaimed film Love Inventory. The second part of the trilogy, Mostar Round-Trip, was made back-to-back with Six Million and One – both films deal with fatherhood – and was selected for the Jerusalem International Film Festival, followed by an international premiere at the 2011 Montreal World Film Festival and other festivals to come. As Director General of the New Israeli Foundation for Cinema and TV (1999-2008), Fisher initiated and founded the “Greenhouse” program, aimed at developing documentary films by Mediterranean filmmakers, and helped bring Israeli documentaries to international recognition. Boris Gerrets is an internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker who lives and works between London and Amsterdam. He is also an accomplished visual artist and film editor. Born into a BulgarianGerman family, he grew-up in the Netherlands, Spain, Sierra Leone and Germany. Gerrets’s films are close-ups of local environments, which he describes as “biotopic explorations” exploring the gap between factual events and their fictional and poetic meaning. He sees the camera as a tool that creates a social dynamic between him and his protagonists. Gerrets’s cinematic approach contains a strong performative component and relies heavily on his multidisciplinary background in fine arts, dance and theater. His most recent film, People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am (2010), has garnered critical acclaim worldwide and won multiple awards at international festivals, including the IDFA Award for Best Mid-Length Documentary. Maria Ramos is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. After graduating from the University of Brasilia, she moved to Europe where she studied Musicology and Electroacoustic Music in Paris and in London at City University. In 1990, she moved to the Netherlands,
where she enrolled in the Netherlands Film and Television Academy. Her first feature documentary Brasilia, a Day in February was awarded the Jury Prize at the It’s All True International Documentary Festival. Her second feature film Desi won the Audience Award at IDFA in 2000. Justice won nine international prizes, among which the Grand Prix at Visions du Réel International Film Festival in Nyon and the Amnesty Award at CPH DOC, Copenhagen. Her awardwinning film Behave opened at the Locarno International Film Festival (Filmmakers of the Present Competition) in 2007. Her latest documentary, Unexpected, premiered in the Netherlands in May 2011. Ramos is currently working on her new film Hills of Pleasure. Miranda Siegel is a critic and culture journalist focused on cinema, art, and exploration. As a contributing writer to New York magazine and its associated culture blog, Vulture, Siegel’s work ranges from film criticism to international festival coverage, as well as interviews with filmmakers and artists. Recent subjects include documentarian Joe Berlinger and his film Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Parronaud and their follow-up to Persepolis, and Bobcat Goldthwait’s take on dark comedy. Her feature about contemporary life in Greenland through the lens of a Norwegian photographer was published in the Winter 2011 issue of VQR. The piece is indicative of Siegel’s interest in illuminating perspectives from spaces otherwise unseen by her audience. Ben Tsiang is the CEO and co-founder of CNEX Foundation Limited. Established in 2007, CNEX is a social enterprise for innovative documentary making and promotion in Chinese society. Tsiang has produced more than 30 documentary films, including the awardwinning film 1428 (2009), which won the Orizzonti Prize for Best Documentary at 2009 Venice International Film Festival, and box office hit KJ: Music and Life (2008), which was in the Hong Kong cinemas for more than eight months.
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