Juries

Séverine Ballon is a composer and cellist. These two activities nourish each other in her musical research. Resident at Villa Médicis in 2023-2024, her work favors collaborations with other artists, as well as creations that connect her social commitment to her artistic work. She has released two solo albums, Solitude (2015) and Inconnaissance (2018), and composed two original film scores for João Pedro Rodrigues, The Ornithologist (2016) and Where Is This Street? or With no Before or After (2022, co-real. with João Rui Guerra da Mata). Her latest creations have been performed at the Ultraschall Berlin, Donaueschinger Musiktage and Transit festivals, and at Radio France.

photo © Pauline Rühl Saur

Filmmaker, teacher, and film curator, Carlos Muguiro is the founder and director of Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (EQZE), an international centre for thinking, research, and experimental practice based around the past, present, and future of cinema. Doctor of Humanities from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Film Directing from the ECAM, Madrid. With Sergio Oksman, he made Goodbye, America (2007), Notes on the Other (2009), A Story for the Modlins (2012) and O futebol (2015). Visiting Scholar at the Cambridge University Department of Slavonic Studies, he edited several publications, among them: Ver sin Vertov. (1955-2005) Cincuenta años de no ficción en Rusia y la URSS; Ermanno Olmi. Siete encuentros y otros instantes.

Erika Balsom is a reader in film studies at King’s College London. She is the author of four books, including After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017) and TEN SKIES (2021). Her writing has in appeared Cahiers du cinéma, Cinema Scope, e-flux, Grey Room, New Left Review, and Screen, among other publications. She is co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (2016) and Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (2022), and was the co-curator of “Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines” (Spike Island, Bristol/Kunsthall Stavanger, 2021–22) and “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image” (HKW Berlin/Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2022–23).

Ben Rivers has made around 40 films. His films tread a line between documentary and fiction, often following people who have in some way separated themselves from mainstream society, creating oblique narratives imagining alternative existences. He has won multiple awards including the EYE Art Film Prize; FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, 68th Venice Film Festival for his first feature film Two Years At Sea; Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel; and twice winner of the Tiger Award at Rotterdam Film Festival. He was commissioned by Artangel to make The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, shown at the former BBC Television Centre and The Whitworth Museum, Manchester. He recently finished a sequel to Two Years at Sea called Bogancloch.

photo © Lisa Whiting Photography

Lucile Hadžihalilović is a writer and director. In the early 1990s she founded the production company Les Cinémas de la Zone with Gaspar Noé, with whom she collaborated on several films. In 1996, she produced, wrote, edited, and directed La Bouche de Jean-Pierre, which screened in Un Certain Regard. In 2004, her feature debut, Innocence, won the Best New Director Prize at San Sebastian. In 2015, Evolution won the Special Jury and Best Cinematography Prizes at San Sebastian. In 2022, Earwig won the Special Jury Prize at San Sebastian. Her fourth feature, The Ice Tower, gets its premiere at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival.

Ulrich Ziemons is a film curator and festival programmer based in Berlin. He is the head of the section Forum Expanded of the Berlin International Film Festival. He has curated film programs for international film festivals and art institutions. His book “Aufzeichnungen eines Stormsquatters” was published in 2014.

photo © Guillaume Cailleau

Pablo Alvarez-Mesa is a filmmaker, cinematographer and editor working mainly in non fiction, whose films have played and earned awards at international film festivals including Berlinale, IFFR, Viennale, MoMA, Visions du Reel, and RIDM. His work in cinema lies in the relationship between fact and fiction; between what is recalled and what is inevitably constructed. Pablo is Sundance Doc Fund grantee, an affiliate member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, and a Berlinale Talents, Banff Centre for the Arts and Canadian Film Centre alumnus.

photo © Léa Rener

Marilou Duponchel is a film critic at Les Inrockuptibles and Trois Couleurs. She was a member of the short film committee of La Semaine de la Critique, then of the long committee until May 2024. She also programmed and presented a film club consecrated to short films, the Ciné-Court des Inrocks. She now writes for the magazine Bref, dedicated to this format.

Kaori Kinoshita is a visual artist and filmmaker. Born in Tokyo, she lives and works in France. Together with Alain Della Negra, she has co-directed a number of short films and three feature-length films released in cinemas (The Cat, the Reverend and the Slave in 2010, Bonheur Académie in 2017) or broadcast on Arte (Petit ami parfait, la Lucarne, in 2021). Playing with devices akin to cinéma-vérité, they transform the artifices of fiction into documentary tools. Their installations are shown in art centers and museums such as the Centre Pompidou, the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. At Cinéma du Réel in 2018, they presented Tsuma Musume Haha, a medium-length film exploring a story of unrequited love between humans and non-humans in Japan.

Luís Urbano is an economist, a movie producer and the CEO of the production company O Som e a Fúria; he is also a member of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, European Film Academy and European Producers Club. He obtained the prize for co-production Eurimages/EFA in 2020. He has produced more than sixty films since 2005 including feature films, short films and documentaries. His noteworthy productions include the two last movies by Manoel de Oliveira (the short films O Gebo e a sombra and O Velho do Restelo), the applauded feature films by Miguel Gomes (Tabu, As 1001 Noites and Diários de Otsoga), and recently Bad for a moment by Daniel Soares.

After his university years in Bordeaux, Xavier Marquier has moved toward live performance, music, jazz in particular. He later had the opportunity after a brief career as a musician to write about this music and to produce a few artists. Writing led him to images and production. He developed this activity on all types of media and formats by producing reports, recordings, writing documentary and fiction projects.

How do we carry on living, afterwards, when we’ve grown up with a dictatorship, when we shaped our lives under this dictatorship, when it’s part of us ? Digging where it hurts is what Vanina Vignal has done in Roumania for her first films (Stella, Dimi, After the silence) and for her films in progress : in France (consequences of incest for 8 generations of her paternal family / French colonisation in the 19th century based on the archives of her “explorer-pacifier” ancestor), and in Germany (on borders and her own (lack of)-freedom). Her activity as a cineast is including cinema lectures she is giving in french and Romanian colleges, she is a film translator and a programer : for ADDOC (French Association of Documentarist Cineast), ACID (Association for Distributing Independent cinema), ACID Cannes, and lately she was the artistic director, together with Andrei Rus, for the International Documentary and Human rights Film Festival ONE WORLD ROMANIA.

Anne Morin has been involved in documentaries for around thirty years. She directs films : Roofs Over My Head, a story of family homes seen at Locarno, Buenos Aires and Trieste festivals; It’s Always The Same Story, an animated film that went to Ottawa, Sao Paulo and Liepzig festivals; Child’s Play, a burlesque and poetic story of an adoption awarded at the Ciné Rencontres and the New Delhi Film Festival. Scriptwriter, Anne Morin also contributes to the writing of documentary projects and has collaborated for a long time with Arte in the selection of documentary projects.

Born in 1989 in Paris, Hadrien Frémont studied Fine Arts at the Sorbonne University where he obtained a Master’s degree “Spaces, places, exhibitions, networks”. He then continued to study at the IESA Arts and Culture where he obtained the title of Expert in the marketing and distribution of contemporary art works. Since the end of 2020, he is working as a freelance for the Clarens Foundation striving to promote any activity aimed at redefining humanist values in contemporary terms. In this context, Hadrien Frémont will be part of the Jury, representing the Foundation, at the Clarens Foundation Humanist Documentary Award.

Born in Liechtenstein, Ina Seghezzi worked, after studying theater, film and literature at the University of Vienna and in Paris, as a director, assistant director and dramaturge in theater and opera. In 2004, she trained in documentary filmmaking at Ateliers Varan in Paris, and made her first short film, Chair de ta chair. Since then, she has directed the documentary films minimal land (2007), Stéphane Hessel, a history of commitment (2008), Avenue Rivadavia (2012), insomnies (2015), Stories of the plains (2017), Les cavaliers fantômes (2019), Oussama (2022)… Ina Seghezzi is a member of Ateliers Varan, where she teaches documentary filmmaking, as well as at Université Paris Cité and Esec.

Marie-Pierre Brêtas spent part of her childhood in Toulouse and also Oran, following the Algerian independence, and Thiais, in the Parisian suburbs.
After an intensive foundation degree in literature, she became a journalist for Le Matin de Paris and then moved to New York where she did a series of odd jobs like cleaning lady, cook at the Hotel Chelsea or design assistant. Back in Paris, she began film direction as an autodidact, then taught herself in the Ateliers Varan. She co-directed Mon travail c’est capital for Arte, made La campagne de Saõ José in the Brazilian Nordeste, which was chosen in the ‘Marseille Festival of Documentary Film’ (in French Festival international de cinéma de Marseille) and won the ‘Grand Prix du Fidadoc’, then Hautes Terres, that won a special mention from the jury at ‘Cinéma du Réel’ in 2014. Her two last movies competed in ‘Cinéma du Réel’: La lumière des Rêves in 2022 and Leaving Amerika in 2024.

Humanities studies and a taste for books led Christelle Bernard to work in a library. She first worked in the adult book section of a local and regional library for twenty years ; she then discovered documentary films and loved their diversity that is so different compared to television, cinema or platforms. Then she satisfied her appetence for cinema by managing the videotheque of the regional multimedia library of the Territoire de Belfort. Added to DVD stock, documentaries are highlighted in that department during the ‘Prix du Public-Les Yeux doc’ in march, which is organized by the ‘BPI’ (Bibliothèque publique d’information in French), and the ‘Mois du film documentaire’ in November, which is initiated by Images en bibliothèque.

Librarian within the Sciences & Techniques and Arts sections of the public library Alexis de Tocqueville at Caen, Benjamin Genissel studied Non-fiction films at Paris 7 Denis Diderot university. He has contributed as critic and interviewer for the Blog documentaire since its creation in 2011. In 2024, he participated with the BPI in the films programming “Les yeux doc à midi” at the Georges Pompidou Center. He is also a photographer and author of on essay about “Phantom india” by Louis Malle.

Hélène Kretschmar worked as a music librarian in the music section of a multimedia library from a great network in the Île-de-France west before entering in the local multimedia library of Vélizy-Villacoublay and working as a Music & Cinema manager since 2018. That library opened in 1985 and has included a consultation video library since its opening; it also has a collection of 5,000 DVDs including a quarter of documentary films. She is a great fan of documentary cinema since she discovered the movie Reporters by Raymond Depardon in the late 80s; therefore she developed funds of documentary films and implemented the participation of that multimedia library at the Mois du film documentaire every year in November.

Stéphanie Mercurio films homeless people in Cherche avenir avec toit, prisoners’ families in À côté, which is her first film about imprisonment: she even made a trilogy about prison. Each of her project knew experimentations such as photography in À côté, À l’ombre de la république and Quelque chose des hommes. She directed Petits arrangements avec la vie with Christophe Otzenberger which was his last film before passing. She filmed and edited freely alone a “balade documentaire” (literally a “documentary ride”) entitled Les parisiens d’août and daily published. In the scenery of Les habits de nos vies, people talk to each other through a clothing item. In 2024, the ‘Cinématique du documentaire de la BPI’ gave her a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou entitled ‘Stéphane Mercurio, la parole aux invisibles’.

After studying history and film, Raphaël Pillosio went on to produce many documentary filmswith L’Atelier documentaire, a Bordeaux-based company that he co-founded with Fabrice Marache in 2007. Among the latest films he has produced: Ana Rosa by Catalina Villar, À pas aveugles by Christophe Cognet, Le fleuve n’est pas une frontière by Alassane Diago, Mon pire ennemi and Là où Dieu n’est pas by Mehran Tamadon, Thun-le-paradis by Eleonor Gilbert, L’Évangile de la révolution by François-Xavier Drouet. As a director, he has made three films focused on the Roma people: Route de Limoges, Des Français sans histoire and Histoires du carnet anthropométrique. Après Algérie, d’autres regards, a documentary devoted to the filmmakers who stood against the Algerian War. Les mots qu’elles eurent un jour continues his exploration of the links between activist cinema and Algeria.

photo © Léa Rener

Pierre Tonachella lives in Paris. He made documentary films such as Jusqu’à ce que le jour se lève in 2017 and Longtemps, ce regard in 2023, and still writes articles, scenarios and poetry today. His work manages with the way in which links, whether intimate and political, are made and broken over time, and also how the idea of a dreamed community goes through History.

photo © Léa Rener

Marion Bonneau arrived in 2018 in the team of ‘La Cinémathèque du documentaire à la BPI’ and works there as a programmer since 2022.
For instance, she led there a tribute to the German filmmaker Helga Reidemeister, an exploration of Canadian documentary cinema and its native representations, a retrospective of the work of Claire Simon, a cycle coming back on fifty years of collective and feminist struggles from the collection of the ‘Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir’…
She extends her transmission gesture by occasionally acting in higher education (DEMC, La Fémis, Paris 8).

photo © Victor Calsou

Following anthropology studies, Agnès Jahier enlists in several associative projects to impart the knowledge of that discipline and work on the spreading of documentary film. Since 2018, she runs an association called Périphérie that is dedicated to documentary film and that supports creation thanks to the reception of filmmakers into residences, image education workshops and annual meetings of documentary film.

Thomas Carillon, founding president of Préludes

With a degree in Cinema and Art History from La Sorbonne and a Masters in Audiovisual Heritage from INA, Louise Gerbelle has been involved in a number of organisations, including the Cinémathèque Française, Potemkine Films and the Le Cinéma Club platform in New York. From 2019, she will specialise in festival coordination and programming, after several years on the team of the Fête du court-métrage and the Festival Off-Courts in Trouville, as well as the Cannes Classics selection at the Cannes Film Festival. She is currently in charge of distribution for the Préludes platform, and continues her programming activities, notably for the Aegean Film Festival in Greece.

In 1980, Claudine Bories directed her first film, Juliette du côté des hommes, which was selected for the 81 Cannes Film Festival (Perspectives du cinéma français). This film won the Prix Préludes in 2023 at Cinéma du réel. Between 1983 and 2002, she directed Périphérie, a creative centre devoted to documentary cinema. In 1992, she helped found the ACID, an organisation promoting independent cinema. In 1994 she co-founded ADDOC, a think-tank for documentary filmmakers. It was there that she met Patrice Chagnard. From 1995 they worked together on each other’s films. They have been co-directors since 2005. Her filmography includes Juliette du côté des hommes, La fille du magicien, Monsieur contre Madame, Les Arrivants, Les règles du jeu, Nous le peuple and Vedette.

Born in the shadow of the Théâtre du Peuple de Bussang, Bruno Deloye began his career with Région Câble as deputy director of development, launching France’s first Pay per View channel in 1991. In 1995, he joined the MCM-Euromusique group, where he was responsible for creating the first television channel dedicated to classical music and jazz, Muzzik. In 2000, he joined Canal+ Thématique, where he was successively Director of Ciné + Classic in France, Spain and Italy. Today he is director of the Ciné + Festival channel, dedicated to auteur films and emerging talent, and of the Ciné + Classic channel, dedicated to repertory films.

Thomas Choury has worked at a number of festivals, including the Semaine de la critique, the ACID and – since 2022 – Cinéma du réel, for which he coordinates several programmes in the ParisDOC professional section, including the Matinales, the Public Forum and the Classic Documentary Film Rendez-Vous. He has also published regularly in the magazines Critikat and Trois Couleurs, and is currently working on a thesis in Research-Creation at the ENS, as part of the SACRe programme, entitled Éclats du direct sportif.