We are very pleased to announce that this year’s Jury includes:
Katarzyna Borowiecka
(Mainly film) journalist. Formerly: on the Polish Radio 3, where she prepared, among others, the ABCpopkultura program awarded with MediaTOR. At Canal + she ran the News Film magazine.
Now: presents film music on Radio 357’s Soundtrack and talks about cinema on Screenplay; hosts Netflix Studio on YT and she runs her own POPcast. Podcast about pop culture.
photo by Honorata Karapuda
Janis Abele
Latvian film director. He has started film making during his Philosophy studies in university. He graduated Latvian Academy of Culture in 2014 with thesis film “Six feet above”. The film won Grand Prix at 33rd International short film festival Tous Courts in France so it was the foundation for his debut feature film “7 Billion Years before the End of the World” which was released in 2018. Just one year later he finished his second feature film “Jelgava ’94”. It is an adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Janis Jonevs with the same title. “Jelgava ’94” had a good box-office run in Latvia and received 4 national film awards including Best Directing for Janis Abele at the age of 29.
Both feature films by Janis Abele took part in the competitions of the Lublin Film Festival, where they received awards.
photo by Rromir Imami
Denis Viren
Born in 1988 in Moscow. Graduate of VGIK, the Film Studies Department. Ph.D. He’s been publishing since 2005 as well as translating from Polish into Russian. The main subject of his research is art of Central Europe, particularly Polish. Author of the book Experiment in Polish cinema of 1970’s (Moscow, 2018) and co-author of the book I can speak. Cinema and Music of the Thaw (Moscow, 2020). In 2010-2015 he worked as a film expert at Polish Institute in Moscow. Scholarship holder of Gaude Polonia (2015) and The Center for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding (2017). Since 2015 he works in the State Institute for Art Studies in Moscow (now as the Head of the Department of Contemporary Western Art) and teaches film history in the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow). He regularly participates in scientific conferences in Russia and Poland, he was a juror at film festivals in Russia and abroad.
photo by Alexandr Brezhnev