Jury for the International Competition

Barbara Orlicz-Szczypuła is a Krakow-based cultural manager, festival programmer, consultant, and specialist in the international promotion of documentary and short film. She is President of the Board at the Krakow Film Foundation and, since 2026, director of the Krakow Film Festival, Poland's leading showcase for documentary and short films from around the world, with which she has been involved for over two decades. In 2005 she founded KFF Sales, an agency dedicated to bringing Polish documentaries, animations and short films to the international market. Her career has also included work in a film distribution company, Polish and international projects related to film, jury duties at numerous festivals, and appearances as a panelist at industry events. She lectured at the Faculty of Film Production at Krakow University and is a member of the Polish Film Academy.  

Hania Mroué is a Lebanese film programmer, distributor and founding director of Metropolis Cinema, the first and only arthouse theatre in Lebanon, opened in 2006. In 2010 she started MC Distribution, a company selling and distributing exclusively Arab independent films in the MENA region.  She partnered with Berlinale Talents in 2014 to initiate Talents Beirut, an intensive yearly training program for Arab Cinematographers, sound designers and editors which she headed until 2023. In partnership with the Locarno Film Festival, she launched the Beirut Locarno Industry Academy International in 2018, a yearly training program dedicated to emerging Arab programmers and distributors. She is a founding member of Aflamuna (formerly Beirut DC), a non-profit organization committed to the circulation and support of independent Arab cinema. Between 2000 and 2010 she was the managing director of its flagship Arab film festival Cinema Days of Beirut. She served as Chief Arab Programmer at the Doha Tribeca Film festival from 2010 to 2012 and has consulted the Marrakesh International Film Festival for Arab film programming and industry events (2020-2024).

Katy Léna Ndiaye is a producer and director. Established in the film industry since the early 2000s, her trajectory has developed between Brussels and Africa. Through her Dakar-based company IndigoMood Films, which has been active for over a decade, she develops debut and second feature projects with a strong artistic identity. She works closely with emerging auteurs bridging cinema and visual arts, including Alassane Diago, Rosine Mbakam, Samira Hmouda, Moïse Togo, Hamedine Kane, Joel Karakezi and Mbaye Diop. Together, they have built a catalogue of works that have connected with audiences worldwide and screened at premier venues such as IDFA, IFFR, Locarno, FESPACO, Cinéma du Réel, Hot Docs, and Sheffield DocFest. This producing practice goes hand in hand with Ndiaye’s own directorial work, an award-winning body of cinema rooted in memory, spanning from the intimate to the political. Through her films, she frames the spoken word as a living archive to explore contemporary Africa and, more broadly, the global trajectories of Black histories.

Laura Poitras is an Oscar, Pulitzer Prize, and Golden Lion winning filmmaker and journalist. Her film Cover-Up (2025) was nominated for BAFTA, DGA and Emmy awards. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award. Her film Citizenfour (2014) won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, along with awards from DGA, BAFTA, and Independent Spirit Award. Poitras received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for her reporting on the National Security Agency’s global mass surveillance programs. Her film about the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq, My Country, My Country (2005), was nominated for an Academy Award. Following the release of the film, the U.S. government placed her on a terrorist watchlist. In 2015 she successfully sued the U.S. government to obtain her FBI files. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and is a founding board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. She is a co-founder of Field of Vision and The Intercept. She was Guest of Honor at IDFA in 2022.

Luuk Bouwman is a Dutch documentary filmmaker, cinematographer and musician. His films include The Propagandist (2024) and Gerlach (2023), which both won an IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film, as well as the upcoming The Eighth Continent. His works are characterized by extensive research, long-term engagement with his subjects, and an essayistic, layered approach to storytelling.