Official Selection
Short Film International Competition Jury
Florian Fernandez
Fernandez holds a Master’s degree in Film Studies. He coordinates the various industry initiatives elaborated as part of the Short Film Corner – Rendez-vous Industry. This four-day forum organised by the Festival de Cannes aims to highlight short film forms, emerging talents and facilitate the interactions between the filmmakers and the industry. Florian is also part of the programming committees serving as pre-selector for Encounters Film Festival, Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, as well as SXSW -South by Southwest Film Festival-Doc Shorts. He yearly collaborates as part of The Short Film Lab training program and the European Short Pitch reading committee. Since 2023, he partners with Protest Studios to take care of the festival distribution & sales of a handful of short films carried by unique voices.
Haruka Hama
Member of the Tokyo office of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival-YIDFF since 2001, she has been director of the festival since 2015. She coordinated “Nexus of Borders: Ryukyu Reflections” (YIDFF 2003), and the programmes for “Vista de Cuba” (YIDFF 2011) and “Latinoamérica” (YIDFF 2015). She also works for Cinematrix, a Tokyo-based film distributor, which premiered Takamine Go’s feature-length film Hengyoro (Queer Fish Lane), which she also produced. She helps to coordinate national and international screenings, including curating the film programme at the 2016 Aichi Trienniale.
Mariana Hristova
Hristova is a Bulgarian film critic, culture journalist and programmer specialized in films produced by Balkan countries and Eastern Europe, and also takes an interest in cutting-edge, amateur and underrepresented cinema. A habitual associate of Cineuropa, Talking Shorts, Klassiki Journal and at the Bulgarian Film Society’s site Filmsociety.bg. She won the Film Critic Award given by the Balkan cinema web page Altcine.com. She is a member of the FIPRESCI federation, as well as delegate of the international assembly Camira for Bulgaria. She is also part of Sheffield International Documentary Festival-SIDF selection committee.
Estibaliz Urresola
Graduate in Audiovisual Communication (UPV/EHU – University of the Basque Country) and Edition and Editing Theory (International Film and Television School – EICTV Cuba), she also holds a Master’s in Film Directing and another Master’s in Film Business (Catalonia’s Higher School of Cinema and Audiovisuals – ESCAC). Since 2011 she has written, directed and produced a number of short films such as Polvo somos (Sirimiri Films), which won the international Festival of Documentary and Short Film of Bilbao ZINEBI’s Basque Cinema Grand Prix 2020 and two Biznaga awards (the Audience and Best Actress awards for Goize Blanco) at the 2021 Málaga Film Festival. Her short film Cuerdas was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week, it was a contender at several national and international festivals, and eventually won the Forqué Award for best short film, and was also nominated for Spain’s 2023 Goya Awards. This year Urresola also premiered 20,000 Species of Bees, her first fiction feature film, in the Official Competition Section of the Berlin International Film Festival – Berlinale. The film took the Silver Bear Award for the best main actress performance by Sofía Otero, in addition to the General Public Award and the German Exhibitors’ Award. The film also won the Gold Biznaga Award for Best Film at the Málaga Film Festival, and awards for best debut and best directing at the FICG Guadalajara International Film Festival (Mexico), and also at the Frameline Festival in San Francisco (USA).
Alberto Vázquez
Animation director, illustrator and cartoonist. His books and comics have been published in countries like Spain, France, Italy, Brazil and Korea and his illustrations have been published in magazines and newspapers around the world. He has written and directed short animation as Birdboy, Unicorn Blood, Decorado or Homeless Home based in his comics. His works have won four times the Goya Awards (best animation film twice and best animation short film twice). His works have been exhibited in prestigious festivals worldwide as Cannes Film Festival, EFA-European Film Awards, Toronto International Film Festival-TIFF, Annecy, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, World Festival of Animated Film Zagreb or ZINEBI.Official Selection
ZIFF – ZINEBI First Film International Competition Jury
Diana Bustamante
Filmmaker and programmer, studied Cinema and Fine Arts at the National University of Colombia. As a producer, she has been known for supporting authors with or without experience, whose vision and voice explore new perspectives. She has produced films like Ciro Guerra’s Journeys of the Wind, Cannes 2009; and La tierra y la sombre, by Cesar Acevedo (Cannes Golden Camera 2015), among others 12 titles. In 2021 she produces the film Memory, by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Cannes 2021 Official Competition, Jury Prize). From 2014 to 2018, she was the Artistic Director and main programmer of the Cartagena International Film Festival-FICCI. As a curator she has collaborated with the Bogotá District Cinematheque, the French Film Festival in Colombia and the Biarritz Film Festival, among others. Her first middle-length documentary Oposición fusión was at Muestra Internacional de Cine Documental de Bogotá-MIDBO in 2009. On 2020 she got the creative grant from the Ministry of Culture to create a documentary piece based on archives, with the project El león. Our Movie, is her first feature documentary, supported by the Colombian Film Fund and the Cinema Fund from Aquitane Region in France.
Birgit Kohler
Head of Programming at Arsenal–Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin. In addition, she was a member of the Berlinale Forum selection committee from 2002-2019 and responsible for the 2019 Forum main program as interim director of this festival section. The focus of her curatorial work is on the diverse forms of contemporary documentary filmmaking and a large range of artistic approaches in current international cinema. She is also a lecturer at universities and film schools and the editor of Performing Documentary (Berlin 2011). Her last publication is “Variations on the Documentary–Politics and Aesthetics in the Films of Anja Salomonowitz”, in: A Story of Its Own: Women Film Austria since 1999, ed. by Isabella Reicher (Vienna 2020).
