OFFICIAL JURY 2019

Violetta Bellocchio was born in Milan in the 20th century. She is the voice and main author of Daimon (Storielibere.fm), a podcast dedicated to both the danger and fascination of obsessive thinking.
She wrote four books, however the one that put her in the public eye was the biography Il Corpo Non Dimentica (Mondadori Strade Blu). Her best book was the last she published, the short novel La festa nera (Chiarelettere, published in the series Altrove, 2019). She also wrote for many magazines, such as Rolling Stone Italia, Rivista Studio, Link, Esquire, minima et moralia, Il Libraio, Not, Il Tascabile, Kobo Books and Robinson Repubblica.
She founded and cured for two years the online magazine Abbiamo le prove, the first in Italy dedicated to nonfiction only, as well as being the editor of the Quello che hai amato (UTET) anthology.
Her short stories were published in several magazines and anthologies, for instance L’età della febbre (minimum fax) and La fuga (Il Castoro). She was Artist in Residence in Bocs Art (Cosenza) during the program curated by Tommaso Pincio.

Sigrid Hadenius is the festival producer of Uppsala International Short Film Festival where she has been a part of the selection committee for the international competition since 2014. She also works as the industry producer at Tempo Documentary Festival in Stockholm. Besides being involved with these two festivals for many years, she additionally worked as guest manager at Stockholm Film Festival. Sigrid has a background in art history (Uppsala University) and film studies (Stockholm University) and is currently also active as a board member of Festivalcentrum, an association for festival organisations and workers, as well as of the Uppsala based arthouse cinema Fyrisbiografen.

Emilia Mazik has a degree in Cultural Managment and in Philosophy both from Jagiellonian University in Cracow. Since 2014 is a project coordinator at Ad Arte Foundation of Cultural Education in Poznan, Poland. She has worked on multiple interdiciplinary projects including educational activities, film programming and international short film distribution. In 2019 she has become a Festival Director of Short Waves Festival, which 12th edition will take place in Poznan in March 2020.

CEO/Festival Producer.
Alexander Stein was born in Koblenz as the youngest of six siblings. He moved to Berlin in 1990, during the summer of the German-German monetary union, to the so-called “democratic capital” of the then still existent German Democratic Republic. He spent many years living in the creative “Dunckerland” squat, which was also where he made his first animation film, “Revolting Appetite” after studying animation film at Kaskeline Filmakademie Berlin.
Furthermore, Alex studied film, theatre, ethnology and journalism at the Freie Universität and Humboldt Universität in Berlin. He joined the interfilm festival team in 1998. In those days the festival already being renowned was still run from a humble home office, with two computers attached to a modem. In 2000 Alex co-founded the limited company interfilm Berlin and celebrated the inauguration of new office spaces. From then on, Alex took on the role of producer in festival coordination and alongside with the artistic director Heinz Hermanns, became managing director of interfilm in 2003. Through his work as a (creative) producer and efforts in funding and sponsoring as well as networking around the world, the interfilm International Short Film Festival Berllin has grown to more than 20,000 visitors. In 2008 he co-founded KUKI & Teen Screen, the International Short Film Festival for Children & Youth, that he is still producing each year and from 2008 til 2012 he was also a board member of the German Short Film Association.

Neil Young (b. Easington, UK, 1971) is an freelance writer, curator and film-maker from the north-east of England, now mainly based in Vienna (Austria). He has reviewed new films at major festivals regularly for The Hollywood Reporter since 2008 and has contributed numerous features to Sight & Sound since 2010.
His most regular international outlets also include MUBI Notebook (New York), KINO! (Ljubljana) and Ny Tid / Modern Times Review (Oslo). He has lectured on film and/or criticism at—among others—the European Film College (Ebeltoft, Denmark), Belgrade Youth Centre, Riga International Film Festival, Warsaw Film Festival, Austrian Filmmuseum (Vienna) and at academic conferences in Moscow and St Petersburg.
A member of FIPRESCI and the London Critics’ Circle, he routinely attends 25+ film-festivals each year and has served on more than two dozen juries since 2001 including Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique (2013) and others at Venice, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam and Mexico City (Ficunam). He has been the president of Fipresci juries at both the Berlinale and the Venice Film Festival.
He currently works for several festivals in consultation, programming and/or moderation capacities including the Viennale, European Film Festival (Palić, Serbia, where he is the International Programmer), Vienna Shorts (where he is the head of the Austrian national competition section), Crossing Europe (Linz, Austria) and Kortfilmfestivalen (Grimstad, Norway). Between 2011-15 he was the Director of the Bradford International Film Festival at the U.K.’s National Media Museum.
He directed the 103-minute film Rihaction which premiered at the Diagonale film festival in Graz, Austria in March 2019. He also recently made his big-screen acting debut in Joanna Hogg’s fictional feature The Souvenir (executive producer Martin Scorsese) which premiered at and won the top prize in the World Dramatic Competition at the Sundance film festival in January 2019.
His favourite films are American Graffiti (George Lucas), Water Wrackets (Peter Greenaway), Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson), The Gratinated Brains of Pupilija Ferkeverk (Karpo Godina), Suspiria (Dario Argento), Gerdy the Wicked Witch (Ljubomir Šimunić) and casting a glance (James Benning), although his favourite director is John Carpenter.