Jury for the International Competition

Eric Hynes is the Director of Film Curation and Programming at the Jacob Burns Film Center, one of the leading independent cinemas in the United States. Located north of New York City in Pleasantville, New York, the Burns encompasses a 5-screen arthouse theater, post-production media lab, and Artist Residency.  

Previously Senior Curator of Film at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, Eric led year-round programming as well as the annual First Look Festival for new films and works in progress. He has served on numerous festival juries and awards nominating committees, and from 2016–2018 was writer-in-residence at the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Edit & Story Lab. His criticism and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Film Comment, Rolling Stone, Slate, New York, Sight & Sound, Village Voice, and Reverse Shot, where he has been a staff writer since 2003.  

Isabelle Glachant started as a journalist for French TV station Canal + and began her career as a producer with Shanghai Dreams (Wang Xiaoshuai, Cannes Jury Prize, 2005). She participated in several of Wang’s productions, including 11 Flowers (2011), the first official French-Chinese co-production, and Chinese Portrait (2018). She also collaborated with Chinese directors Li Yu, Lu Chuan, Lou Ye, and Yang Lina. Glachant is the founder behind Hong Kong-based production company Chinese Shadows and French-based Shasha & Co Production. Productions include several works by Wang Bing, and Indonesian female director Mouly Surya’s Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (2017) and Perang Kota (2025). 

Glachant also founded international boutique sales company Asian Shadows, representing work by Asian talents. Their line-up includes works by documentary Masters Wang Bing and Kazuhiro Soda, including Man in Black (2023) and The Cats of Gogoku Shrine (2024), as well as debut animation documentary Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish (Lei Lei, 2022) and debut docu-fiction Chasing the Sun (Huang Ruosong, 2025). 

Maya Daisy Hawke is credited as editor on Oscar and Sundance Audience Award-winning Navalny (2022) and Oscar nominated Sugarcane (Sundance Directing Award 2024). She co-edited Cave of Forgotten Dreams (dir. Werner Herzog, 2010) with partner Joe Bini. Supervising and Consulting Editor credits include Oscar nominee Black Box Diaries (2024), A Photographic Memory (2024), Joonam (2023), After a Revolution (2022), Band (2022), and recently The Dating Game (2025) and River of Grass (2025). She was an assistant editor on eight films with Werner Herzog, including Grizzly Man (2005).

Her own experimental films have been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Moving Image NYC, Sundance FF, ICA Frames of Representation, LACMA, Camden International FF, and IDFA. She is the co-director, with Joe Bini, of live documentary Little Ethiopia. She has been an advisor at Sundance labs since 2017, a fellow at the 2018 Sundance Nonfiction Directors Residency, and a Sundance Interdisciplinary Fellow in 2020. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Michel K. Zongo was born in 1974 in Koudougou, Burkina Faso. He trained in cinematography at the National Center for Cinematography and later interned as a cameraman at the National Television and as a first assistant operator for the production company Cinédoc Films in France. In 2009, he directed his first documentary films, Ti Tiimou and Sibi, the Soul of the Violin. 

After completing training in documentary film production in France in 2010, he became the co-manager of Diam Production, a production company based in Burkina Faso. Since 2014, he has served as the artistic director of the KOUDOUGOU Doc Festival, a documentary film gathering in Koudougou. In July 2020, he was inducted as a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 

Myriam Sassine produced Lebanese and Arab award-winning films that premiered in prestigious film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Locarno, Karlovy Vary and IDFA, including Costa Brava, Lebanon (2021) by Mounia Akl, 1982 (2019) by Oualid Mouaness, Amal (2017) by Mohamed Siam, Panoptic (2017) by Rana Eid, and more recently Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano (2023) by Cyril Aris and Diaries from Lebanon (2024) by Myriam El Hajj.

She co-founded Maskoon Fantastic Film Festival, the only festival dedicated to genre films in the Arab region, and currently manages Aflamuna Connection, a co-production platform for Arab projects and Full Circle Lab Nouvelle-Aquitaine Hessen, a capacity building international training program. In 2025, she received the Raimondo Rezzonico Award at Locarno Film Festival, which honors figures who played a major role in international production. She is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.