@AbuDhabiFF ADFF NAMES MEMBERS OF 2013 JURIES

TWO-TIME ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE JACKIE WEAVER LEADS NARRATIVE JURY
INAUGURAL JUDGING OF CHILD PROTECTION AWARD
 

The identities of the illustrious members from the world of cinema who have been selected to judge the films in competition at the seventh Abu Dhabi Film Festival, have been revealed today.

The NARRATIVE COMPETITION jury President is Australian actress Jacki Weaver, best known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom (2010). She also received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in David O. Russell’s The Silver Linings Playbook. Joining her on the jury are Black Pearl Career Achievement winner, Hiam Abbass, chief executive of Film London and the British Film Commission, Adrian Wootton, Tunisian producer Dora Bouchoucha and Sandra den Hamer, current CEO of EYE Film Institute Netherlands.

The NEW HORIZONS COMPETITION jury is lead by Yeşim Ustaoğlu, director of the 2012 Black Pearl for Best Film winner, Araf. She made feature film debut with The Trace (1994). and received international recognition with Journey to the Sun (1999) winning honours at Cannes, San Sebastian, Venice, Berlin and Toronto and sweeping the awards at the Istanbul Film festival. Ustaoğlu is assisted by Irene Bignardi, co-founder of daily newspaper La Repubblica and director of the Locarno Film Festival from 2000–05, Nour-Eddine Lakhmari, a renowned filmmaker from Morocco, Valery Todorovsky, whose musical Hipsters (2008) won the Black Pearl Award for Best Narrative Film in 2009, and internationally known Lebanese director Michel Kammoun.

President of the DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION is the co-director and artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Cameron Bailey. For more than 20 years, he has held positions as a programmer, a journalist and a writer and has curated film programmes for Cinemathèque Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the National Film Board of Canada and the Sydney International Film Festival. He is joined on the documentary jury by Dutch screenwriter Leonard Retel Helmrich, director of multi-award winning SANAD film A World Not Ours (2012) Mahdi Fleifel, one of South Africa’s most respected arts and film writers, Peter Machen and Algerian film critic, journalist and filmmaker Nabil Hadji.

The inaugural CHILD PROTECTION AWARD will be judged by famous Egyptian actor and producer Khaled Abol Naga, supported by Jurors Afaf Al Marri, Chairman of the Department of Social Services and member of Executive Council of Sharjah; Lt. Col. Faisal Al Shamari, Director of the UAE Ministry of the Interior Child Protection Centre, Award-winning Emirati film director Juma Al Sahli, (The Goat’s Head, Sara’s Secrets) and Mona Al Bahar, member of the Federal National Council and the UAE National Higher Committee on child protection.

The SHORT FILM COMPETITION will be judged by President Mohamad Malas, a pioneer in Syrian auteur cinema whose latest film Ladder to Damascus premiered at Toronto, Egyptian writer director Hala Khalil (Best of Times, 2004), groundbreaking Danish director and playwright Jenle Hallund, who was a consultant for Melancholia and Nymphomaniac by Lars von Trier, prize-winning Abu Dhabi director Khalid Al Mahmood (Sabeel, 2010) and Matthieu Darras, French film critic and founder of NISI MASA, the European Network of Young Cinema.

Veteran Algerian director and screenwriter Ahmed Rachedi is President of the EMIRATES FILM COMPETITION jury. He is supported by celebrated Iraqi director and writer Oday Rasheed, Chair for the prestigious International Prize for Arab Fiction and the founder and chairman of the Cultural Circle in Kuwait Taleb Al-Refai, Hafiz Ali Abdulla Arts program manager at Cultural Development Centre at Qatar Foundation and acclaimed filmmaker in his own right, and Fadel Al Muhairi, filmmaker from the UAE who won the competition for Emirati filmmakers at Abu Dhabi’s Middle East International Film Festival (2007) for his first feature film A Corsair’s Tale.

FIPRESCI, the International Federation of Film Critics, has sent a jury which will focus on Arab Films from the Narrative Feature, New Horizons and Documentary Feature Competition sections. The FIPRESCI jury is lead by Wilfried Reichart (Germany) and includes Janusz Wróblewski (Poland), Madhu Eravankara (India), Mostafa Messnaoui (Morocco) and Vicky Habib (Lebanon). NETPAC, the Network for the Promotion of Asia Cinema, is the leading platform for the discovery and promotion of Asian cinema. The NETPAC Jury will select an Asian film from the from the Narrative, New Horizons and Documentary Feature competitions as the feature winner of the NETPAC Award. The jurors are: Gulbara Tolomushova (Kyrgyzstan), Deborah Young (USA) and Ziad Khatlan (Iraq / U.K).