Jury and Awards

Abderrahmane Sissako (President of the jury)

An internationally renowned film-maker and producer, Abderrahmane Sissako is one of the first directors to initiate Europeans to African cinema in all its richness. Born in Mauritania, he spent his childhood and adolescence in Mali. In 1980, he set off for the Soviet Union where he studied at Moscow's Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. Upon his return, he settled in France where he began a brilliant career, becoming a regular at the Cannes Film Festival where he has presented numerous films. His films tell about Africa, its colors and smells, but also about its hegemonic absorption. He explores the themes of exile, of the lop-sided relationship between North and South, of the injustice of European policies towards immigrants. In his unforgettable film Bamako, he puts globalization and the sharks of international finance on trial. For Abderrahmane Sissako, cinema - the "seventh art" - is definitely capable of changing mentalities. It was this conviction that recently led him to launch the "Cinemas for Africa" project, the mission of which is to re-open movie theaters on the African continent.

Tarun J Tejpal

Tarun J Tejpal is a journalist, publisher, and novelist. In a 28-year career, he has been an editor with the India Today and the Indian Express groups, and the managing editor of Outlook newsmagazine. In March 2000, he started Tehelka, a news organisation that has earned a global reputation for its aggressive public interest journalism. BusinessWeek has declared him among 50 leaders at the forefront of change in Asia.

Tarun's debut novel, The Alchemy of Desire, published in 2005, was hailed by Sunday Times as "an impressive and memorable debut". Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul declared, "At last - a new and brilliantly original novel from India." Tarun's second novel, The Story of My Assassins was published in 2009 to rave reviews. Tarun's new novel, The Valley of Masks, has been longlisted for the Man Asia Booker. 

Michale Boganim

Everyone recalls her documentary Odessa … Odessa!, presented at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, about the exile of the Russian Jewish community in the Ukraine to Israel and of their wandering existence. Six years later, the French-Israeli director produced her first full-length fiction, Land of Oblivion, a poignant drama about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, filmed in the sadly notorious “forbidden zone.” This work is part of the official selection for the 2012 edition of the FIFDH. Memory, forced exile and the carnal attachment to a native soil and town, and the impact that certain events have on the existence of individuals make up the raw material of Michale Boganim’s work. Her numerous documentaries include Last Stop, Macao, selected at the Rotterdam Festival in 2004, and Dust, presented in the Forum section of the Berlin Festival in 2002.

Shumona Sinha

Assommons les pauvres is a powerfully committed novel that earned Shumona Sinha the honor of being nominated for the 2011 Prix Renaudot and of losing her job as interpreter with the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA). In this violent, autobiographical poem in prose, the author indeed criticizes the institution and holds up a mirror to French society, showing without indulgence the hypocrisy of its compassion for foreigners. The themes of exile, immigration and liberty crisscross her work and establish Shumona Sinha as an audacious novelist of razor sharp eloquence.

At the age of 17, she was awarded the Bengali best young poet prize; she emigrated to France ten years later to continue her studies in French literature and language at the Sorbonne. An Indian turned Parisian, she mastered the French language with talent, authored and translated several anthologies of French and Bengali poetry and, in 2008, published her first novel, Fenêtre sur l'abîme, a fable which introduces the theme of the difficulty of being a migrant.

Nicolas Wadimoff

Politically committed and convinced that cinema can influence the course of the world, Nicolas Wadimoff has authored ten films dealing face to face with burning issues. He films in Libya, Algeria, Yemen, and the Gaza strip; using either the documentary or fiction as his medium; he addresses issues such as life in the underground, the search for identity, and, on several occasions, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as in Aisheen, which earned him the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2010. His other works include Clandestins and Mondialito, as well asL'Accord, a full-length feature about the Geneva Initiative. 

He began his career at the French-language Swiss Television (TSR) as an independent film director. There he collaborated on various television programs including Temps présent. He went on to launch two production companies, Caravan Production and Akka Films, while at the same time pursuing his artistic endeavors. His works, which have received numerous distinctions, have travelled the circuit of international festivals. At present, he is working on Libertad, a scenario co-authored with Jacob Berger about an attack on the UBS by a group of extreme leftists in the late 1970s. 

László Rajk

The son of László Rajk, who was arbitrarily executed by the Stalinist regime, László Rajk Jr is a former Hungarian dissident of the communist regime and a fervent human rights militant. Architect, designer and professor of scenography at the Budapest Academy of Drama and Film, he has been the chief production designer for over 40 films. He has collaborated with, among others, the producer Costa-Gavras and Bela Tarr, who has won several awards for the recent movies The Man from London and The Turin Horse. In the 1970s, László Rajk became a member of the Hungarian avant-garde movement before joining the democratic opposition in 1975. He is also one of the founders of the Alliance of Free Democrats, the party he represented in the Hungarian parliament. More recently, along with a number of intellectuals and other political figures, he signed the appeal denouncing the destruction of democracy in Hungary, forcefully accusing the regime of Minister-President Viktor Orban.