Juries

Alexe Poukine

Since she doesn’t have a biographer, Alexe Poukine is writing her own biography. Apart from the fact that she has two children and two stepchildren, and wishes she were more athletic, Poukine is known as a French-born, Belgium-based film director and screenwriter.

After taking drama classes, she studied anthropology, documentary filmmaking, and screenwriting. Her feature-length documentaries—Dormir, dormir dans les pierres (2013), That Which Does Not Kill (2019) and Who Cares (2024)—were screened at numerous international festivals and won several awards. Poukine also completed a medium-length self-fiction film titled Palma (2021), in which she plays the lead role. Her first narrative feature film, Kika (2025), premiered at Cannes Critics’ Week.

Mostly as an excuse to avoid going to the gym, she is currently working on two new projects, while desperately searching for a biographer so she can finally stop talking about herself in the third person.

Ana Peláez

Director of Arts and Knowledge at RTVE

With over 30 years under her professional belt in communication media, press, radio, agencies and television, she is currently Executive Producer of Co-Production Documentaries at RTVE. She has been working full-time on documentaries at RTVE since 2007, initially as scriptwriter and director of in-house documentary productions for various spaces (La aventura del saber, Monográficos, Los oficios de la cultura) and subsequently as director of Imprescindibles (2013-2021) and Los oficios de la cultura (2009-2013). She has held the post of Director of Arts and Knowledge at RTVE since January 2026.

Iratxe Fresneda

Irtaxe Fresneda is a Basque film director, scriptwriter, producer and film critic, acclaimed for her distinctive focus on audiovisual work. After a decade directing and scriptwriting at the Corporación de Radiodifusión Pública Vasca, she made the leap to independent films, where her work combines audiovisual research and teaching at the university with artistic practice. She has lectured at the Audiovisual Communication Department of the UPV since 2004 and her film usually take the form of travel diaries that reveal hidden narratives in the personal and collective memory.

A Member of the Spanish Film Academy represents a new generation of directors that are redefining contemporary film language. Her works have been screened at international festivals and film archives, garnering critical and popular acclaim. One of her career milestones is La Trilogía del Registro, a documentary film series that was featured at a retrospective at ARSENAL (Berlin), along with the work of Mirentxu Loyarte. Her written and visual work has also been published in international film studies.

Paola Populin

Paola Populin lectures in Italian Studies at Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea. She has a PhD in Cultural Heritage and Comparative Literature (Literature and Cinema) from the University of the Basque Country and – under international joint supervision (cotutelle) – from the Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata. Paola has taken part in international and national conferences, both as a speaker and as a member of organising committees. Since 1999, she has coordinated projects related to film pedagogy, commissioned by the Italian Minister of Culture and Education. She has lectured on Film Languages and Techniques, along with seminars on cinema at European universities. Her main lines of research cover the relationship between cinema and literature, film criticism, comparative literature, cinema and European avant-garde movements, gender studies and transgender movements. As the head of an independent film production company, Paola has been involved in designing and organising international short-film festivals.

Varya Yakovleva

Varya Yakovleva is an animation director, artist and illustrator based in France (originally from Russia). Her short films Anna Cat and Mouse (2019), Life is a Bitch (2020) and Oneluv (2022) have been screened at more than 200 international festivals and received over 25 awards, including the Grand Prix at Animafest Zagreb and the Jury Grand Prix for Animated Short Film at the 35th Edmonton International Film Festival; she is currently completing her new animated short Guilty Girl (2026). She has served on juries at Insomnia, Animafest Cyprus, Animakom and Supertoon. Alongside filmmaking, she works in illustration, comics and books, and creates visual identities, posters and trailers for cultural and animation projects.

Anuska Ariztimuño

Anuska Ariztimuño (Errenteria, 1984) is a director and screenwriter. She studied Humanities and Communication at the University of Deusto and completed a master’s degree in Audiovisual Production at La Salle in Barcelona. After several years working in the camera department and as a cinematographer, she made the move into directing in 2017.

Her first feature-length documentary, Hombre Bala (2025), premiered at the San Sebastián Film Festival and was selected for festivals such as In-Edit and Get Back Fest. Her short film 3 Días, 3 Noches (2026) has been screened at the San Sebastián Human Rights Film Festival, Lucania Film Festival —where it received a special mention—, the San Sebastián Film Festival and Filmets.

She is currently working on the film adaptation of Ni, Vera, a novel by Itxaso Martin.

Gentzane Martinez de Osaba

She holds a PhD in Audiovisual Communication from the University of the Basque Country (EHU) and works as a film producer, lecturer and researcher. In 2011, she co-founded Marmoka Films, a production company based in Bilbao specialising in documentary cinema, through which she has participated in more than a dozen feature films, including El Drogas (Natxo Leuza, 2020), Tetuán (Iratxe Fresneda, 2022) and Altsasu Gau Hura (A. Arzallus and M. Parramon, 2022).

A member of the Spanish Film Academy and a participant in the EAVE Producers Network, in 2024 she spearheaded the creation of Bide Guztiak AIE, a company focused on film projects with a social and cultural dimension.

She currently combines audiovisual production with university teaching and research, with a particular focus on film production from a gender perspective.

Jone Arriola Lobete

Jone Arriola Lobete (1998) graduated in Audiovisual Communication from the University of the Basque Country and later completed a master’s degree in Film Directing at Bande à Part film school in Barcelona.

She currently works as a director and screenwriter in both fiction filmmaking and television. In 2023, she made her first short film, Dena Asmatuta Dago, which won the Golden Goose Award for Best Short Film at the Lekeitio Film Festival. A year later, in 2024, she premiered her second short film, Hor Konpon, which received the Berria Award at the HuheZinema Festival.

In 2026, she took an important step forward in her career with the production of Lehen Aldiz, a miniseries made with the support of ETB, which will soon be available on the Primeran platform.

Nacho Ávarez González

Nacho Ávarez González graduated in History of Art from the Compultense University of Madrid where he majored in Contemporary Art and Cinema, and then went on to a Master’s Degree in Theory and Criticism of Culture at Carlos III University of Madrid; his respective research papers were on Terence Davies and Terrence Malick. After completing a Master’s Degree in Film Criticism at ECAM, he founded Colectivo Termita (film programming, criticism and creation). His current work is divided between programming for festivals and institutions, contributing to the SEMINCI (Valladolid International Film Week) editorial team; and writing as a film critic for different media outlets including Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, El antepenúltimo mohicano and Revista Mutaciones (where he is a member of the editorial board).

Ione Monje Martínez

Ione Monje Martínez graduated in Law from the University of the Basque Country (EHU) and has a Master’s Degree in Film Criticism from the ECAM. She writes for specialist media outlets such as Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, Jot Down, Pickpocket and Mutaciones, and creates video essays (María Luz Morales runner up for Bong Joon-ho y La comida). She has worked with the Spanish Film Archive where she prepared programmes and watchlists on filmmakers such as Chloé Zhao and Kelly Reichardt. She is also a screenwriter and her accolades include the Young C. Award of the CIVIS Media Prizes, the prestigious European award for integration, cultural diversity and social cohesion in the media. Her favourite type of films is the one that challenges the limits of language.