FESTIVAL JURY - DOCUMENTARY

BINA PAUL

GARGI SEN

NANDAN SAXENA Bina Paul graduated from the FTII, Pune and has worked mainly in Malayalam-language films. She has over fifty editing credits and has directed four documentaries. Her first editing work was in 1985 on Aravindan’s documentary The Seer Who Walks Alone and her first feature film work was on Abraham’s Amma Ariyan in 1986. Paul won her first National Film Award for Revathi’s Mitr, My Friend, which had an all-woman crew. Paul won Kerala State Film Awards for Venu’s Daya, Sarath’s Sayahnam, and Madhusudhanan’s Bioscope, and another National Film Award for Sarath’s Sthithi. Paul has been the Artistic Director of the International Film Festival of Kerala, and in 2017 she was a founding member of the “Women Collective in Cinema,” India’s first association working for equal opportunity for women in the film industry. Bina curates extensively for film festivals around the world, with a focus on Indian Cinema. She is currently the Vice Chairperson of the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy.

Gargi Sen is a documentary filmmaker, curator, producer and distributor. She studied Visual Communication and specialised in Exhibition Design at the National Institute of Design, as well as MA in Mass Communication Theory at the University of Leicester, UK. Gargi has directed over 22 documentaries, mentored documentary productions around the world, and served on film festival juries nationally and globally. In 2011 Gargi was awarded the prestigious International Clore Fellowship for Arts Leadership, UK. She completed a 5-month secondment with the Tate galleries, UK. In 2017 she was awarded the Fulbright Nehru Fellowship in the category of Academic and Professional Excellence in the Arts. She was a Fulbright scholar in residence at UC Davis, California, USA and taught and researched South Asian documentaries. Gargi is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, UK, and advisor on several cinema and education related initiatives in India and the world. Currently Gargi is working as a consultant with the National Gallery of Art, New Delhi.

Nandan Saxena is a story-teller, independent film-maker and Director of Photography with over 40 films to his credit, many of them featurelength. His camera creates layers of meaning like a painter wields his brush. His films have experimented with form, often entering the space of the creative documentary. His films – poignant portraits of these times, often blurring the thin line between documentary and cinema – have premiered at Thessaloniki and London (Film Festivals). Besides other awards, he has been honoured with the prestigious National Film Award three times for his films Cotton For My Shroud, Candles In The Wind And I Cannot Give You My Forest. He also mentors filmmaking workshops at film festivals and film schools.