“GOLDEN OLIVE TREE” JURY
Mira STAlEVA
After her studies in Teology and Psychology Mira Staleva followed her passion for cinema and got involved in Sofia International Film Festival since its very beginning. Beside the festival she has been involved in different areas of audiovisual world in the last 20th years. Managing director of Sofia IFF and head of Sofia Meetings, a coproduction market in the frame of the festival, she is also busy with production, distribution and exhibition. She is coproducer of Barefoot Emperor and King of the Belgians by Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens and Brighton 4 by Levan Koguashvili. Member of EFA, CICAE Board and Lux Prize selection board.
Bonifacio ANGIUS
Born in Sassari in 1982, he is a director, screenwriter, actor, director of photography and producer. He has made several short films awarded in several international film festivals. His first feature film, Perfidia (2014), besides being a finalist at the Solinas Award, was presented as the only Italian film in competition at the 67th Locarno International Film Festival, where it won the Junior Jury Award and obtained an extraordinary critical success. The film has participated in festivals including, among others, Montreal, Hamburg and Annecy (Special Mention of the Jury). It was a finalist for the Verdone Award and has been included by MiBACT among the thirty films of excellence released in the calendar year 2014/2015. His second feature film, Ovunque proteggimi, was presented with great reception from critics and audience at the 56th Turin FF, Santa Barbara IFF (USA), London, Barcelona, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Warsaw, Los Angeles, Berlin, and at the Karlovy Vary IFF. Ovunque proteggimi was also awarded in 2019 as Best Film by the Popular Jury of the Cineteca di Bologna at the festival Visioni Italiane, and it also obtained a nomination for Best Story at the Silver Ribbons and a nomination for Francesca Niedda as Best Leading Actress at the Italian Golden Globes. His latest short film entitled Destino, of which he is also the leading actor, was presented at the 76th Venice International Film Festival – International Critics’ Week as Closing Special Event. Since 2013, Angius has been CEO of the film production company Il Monello Film. The Giants, his latest fiction feature film, premiered at Locarno as the only Italian movie in Competition. The film, awarded by the Union of Italian Film Critics as Film della Critica (Special Critics Award) 2021, also won the Best Director and the Junior Jury Awards at the Annecy Film Festival.
Marisella ROSSETTI
For the last twelve years, Marisella has been responsible for the Lux Award, the film prize now jointly awarded by the European Parliament and the European Film Academy, in all its multifaceted aspects. Since the inception of the Lux Award, she has developed partnerships with festivals, associations, professional and international organisations in the audio-visual and cinema European landscape, while reinforcing and consolidating the award position within the European institutions. Producing the Lux award ceremony as well as a number of related events such as screenings of Lux films across all Europe, live debates simultaneously webcasted in theatres, as well as workshops and seminars for press and journalists, she has constantly built bridges among cinema professionals and authors, European audience and the political sphere. Very well experienced in managing contacts diplomatically and activities with international film festivals, European partners, film directors and storytellers, distributors and producers. Managing the Lux selection panel, in charge of choosing each year the three films of the Lux Audience Award, she has also coordinated the 27 Times Cinema project, a collaboration with the Giornate degli Autori- sidebar section of the Venice film festival, and Europa Cinemas, in partnership with Cineuropa.org. Co-founder of Polarise- Nordic Film Nights, the Brussels-based association aiming at promoting Nordic films and culture which first edition will take place in January 2022. Member of several short and feature films’ juries.
Teona STRUGAR MITEVSKA
Teona Strugar Mitevska was born in 1974 in an artistic family in Skopje, Macedonia. She started as a child actor, trained as a painter and a graphic designer and later studied at M.F.A program in film at the Tisch School of Arts, New York University. She made her debut as short film director in 2001 with Veta (Special Mention of the New York Film Academy at Berlinale), and has been making films ever since: How I Killed A Saint, 2004; I Am From Titov Veles (Special Jury Award in Sarajevo IFF and in Lecce European Film Festival), 2007; The Woman Who Brushed Off Her Tears, 2012; Teresa And I, 2013; When The Day Had No Name, 2017 (Cineuropa Award in Lecce). Her last film God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunija was shot in January of 2018 and won varius awards including the Lux Prize and the Berlinale Guild Film Prize and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Since 2016 Sisters and Brother Mitevski, a company she established together with her brother and sister have co-produced The wild Pear Tree by Nuri Bilge Ceylan; Nightlife and Half-sisters by Damjan Kozole, Sieranevada and Malmkrog by Christi Puiu. In 2018 she was nominated to the rank of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France. Teona Strugar Mitevska lives in Brussels, Belgium with her son Kaeliok.
Michele VENITUCCI
A theatre, film and television actor, he made his big screen debut in 2000 with the film All the Love There Is by Apulian filmmaker Sergio Rubini, who also directed him in the 2002 film The Soul Mate. In 2006 he returned to the big screen with Out of Bounds, which earned him the Silver Leopard for Best Actor at the Locarno Film Festival. His auteur cinema experiences went on the following year with Waiting for the Sun, directed by Ago Panini, Il seme della discordia, directed by Pappi Corsicato, and Italian Movies by Matteo Pellegrini. Meanwhile, he started to collaborate with several foreign productions. He acted in A Woman (2010) by Giada Colagrande with Willem Dafoe, Road 47 (2013) by Vicente Ferraz, Angelo Orlando’s Rocco Keeps Your Name (2015), with which he won Best Actor at the Prague Film Festival, Tulips by Oscar-winning director Mike van Diem, and The Food Club (2020) by Barbara Topsøe-Rothenborg. He also became known on the small screen for his participation in Canale 5 channel’s TV series R.I.S. 3 – Imperfect crimes, where he played the role of lieutenant Giovanni Rinaldi from 2007 to 2009. His other television credits include TV series Diritto di difesa (2004), broadcast on Rai 2 channel, and Codice rosso, broadcast in 2006 on Canale 5 channel. In 2014 he played Stefano Valenti in season nine of Un medico in famiglia. He acted alongside Alessandro Haber in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, directed by Leo Muscato. Indie cinema has remained his main passion and commitment, with more than 20 films under his belt.
FIPRESCI JURY
Francesco MAGGIORE
Francesco Maggiore is a teacher at the Fourth Circolo Didattico (Grouped primary and infants schools) in Lecce. Graduated in Humanities and Contemporary History (University of Salento), he earned Masters in Dramaturgy and Screenwriting – Theatre, Cinema, Television (Silvio D’Amico National Drama Academy, Rome), and Film and TV Production and Cross-media Communication Analysts (SAA – School of Management, Turin). He collaborated with the Aiace Torino association for the Sotto18 Film Festival (2012), and as organising secretary for the M. De Baggis Award – International Documentary Film Festival (Taranto, 2013). He has published poems, short stories and essays on cinema, receiving a Special Mention at the Gabriele Inguscio Festival for his short film 41 gradi 17 primi Memorie dal Regina Pacis (2011), directed together with Alberto Chironi and also screened at other festivals including the European Film Festival and BiFest. He wrote the screenplay for the short film Gangsteril, a finalist at the “50 ore” contest (Turin, 2012). A member of the Methexis Jury at the MedFilm Festival (Rome, 2016) and author of the play Il male minore staged at the Belli Theatre (Rome, 2017), he also had experience writing TV formats at Dinamo Film (Bari) and film screenplays at Film and Music Entertainment (London). A film critic and member of the SNCCI (Union of Italian Film Critics), he currently carries out in-depth analyses on the seventh art for Il Titolo Tv network, also broadcast on Rete 8 Emilia Romagna network, in addition to interviewing the best Italian film and TV screenwriters for Writers Guild Italia.
Cédric SUCCIVALLI
Cédric Succivalli is a film critic and programmer. He studied under Positif critic Michel Ciment and graduated from the University of Aix-Marseille with a Master’s thesis on My Own Private Idaho by Gus Van Sant. He went on to study at the University of Paris VII Denis Diderot, with a thesis on David Cronenberg’s Crash. He subsequently taught French and cinema at the University of Bath and UWE Bristol and worked for Arte France Cinéma as part of the film funding committee. He has served as President of the International Cinephile Society for fifteen years, and during that time he has been regularly attending and writing about festivals around the world. He has served on juries at festivals such as the Noir In Fest, the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival, the Morelia International Film Festival, the Istanbul Film Festival, the Göteborg Film Festival and the San Sebastián International Film Festival. In 2018 he became a programmer for the Giornate degli Autori sidebar section of the Venice Film Festival. He is a member of the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics (SFCC), L’Académie des Lumières and FIPRESCI.
Bartosz Zurawiecki
Bartosz ?urawiecki – born 1971 in Poznan (Poland). Journalist, film critic, writer, columnist, playwright. Author of the novels: Three Men in Bed, To Say Nothing of The Cat (2005), Me or my 66 loves (2007), Absent (2011), To Lolelaj (2017), non-fiction books Cursed Festivals (2019) and People, not ideology (2021). Co-founder of Campaign Against Homophobia. Working in monthly magazine Kino and bi-monthly LGBTQ magazine Replika.
CINEUROPA JURY
Valerio CARUSO
Valerio Caruso is the manager of website www.cineuropa.org, a portal in four languages on European cinema offering news, databases, services, and promoting the European cinema in Europe and abroad. As a consultant, Valerio has provided technical assistance to several Italian national authorities, to the European Commission and to UNESCO in the field of cinema, culture and audiovisual. Since November 2018 he has been a Team Leader on the project in support of European Union delegations all over the world for the organisation of film festivals.
PUGLIA SHOW JURY
Luigi ABIUSI
Luigi Abiusi (Altamura 1974). Writer, literary, film and music critic. He writes for the culture section of daily newspaper Il Manifesto. He was a selector for the International Critics’ Week at the Venice Film Festival. He is editor of film culture magazine Uzak.it and writes about literature, cinema and music for periodicals Critica letteraria, Filmcritica, Duels.it, Filmparlato.com, Alias, Cinecritica. He collaborates with the Treccani film encyclopedia, for which he edited the entries about, among others, the late Angelopoulos, Weerasethakul, Alber Serra, Tsukamoto. He is a contract professor at the University of Bari, where he teaches Literary History and Film Aesthetics, at the University of Salento, where he teaches Cinema, Photography, Television, and at the Carlo Bo University for Linguistic Mediators, where he is a professor of Contemporary Italian Literature. His publications include the volumes Per gli occhi magnetici. Campana Pasolini Erice Tarantino (2011) and Tempo di Campana. Divenire della poesia tra Nietzsche e Deleuze (2008). He edited the book Il film in cui nuoto è una febbre. Registi fuori dagli scheRmi and is the director of the international film festival inspired by the latter. He manages the Rewind section at the Trieste ShorTS International Film Festival. He is a member of the Study Centre of Apulia Film Commission. As a poet he has published the volumes Non un segno (2002) and Dei comprimari riflessi (2008). He is also the author of some short stories, published on anthologies and literary magazines.
Giulio MASTROMAURO
Giulio Mastromauro is an Italian director. After graduating in Law from the University of Bari, he moved to Roma, where he approached filmmaking on his own. He has written and directed several short films including Timo’s Winter (2020), winner of the David di Donatello Award and nominated for the Silver Ribbons in 2021. In the same year, the film became eligible to run for the Oscars, being included in the Longlist for the Live Action Short Film category. Distributed in 80 countries, Timo’s Winter can boast being one of the most successful Italian short films, with over 200 international selections and 80 awards won.
In 2021 Mastromauro has become a member of the Accademia del Cinema Italiano (Italian Film Academy) and has been awarded the Medal of Honour of the César Academy (France), an accolade awarded every year by the Monnaie de Paris to the best emerging filmmakers in the world. He is founder and member of distribution company Zen Movie.
Marco MORABITO
Roman born and horror fanatic, Marco Morabito is an Italian producer and editor, best known for producing the film Call Me by Your Name, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 90th Academy Awards. He also produced the internationally acclaimed Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love in 2009, nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes and for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design. He also produced The Landlords by Edoardo Gabbriellini, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in Competition and Antonia. by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, presented at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. In 2015 he served as executive producer on Luca Guadagnino’s feature A Bigger Splash. 2016 was a very intense year cause he produced the Oscar winning masterpiece Call Me By Your Name, and Suspiria both directed by Luca Guadagnino. Along with short movies and documentaries, he recently produced Beckett, Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s second feature presented at the Locarno Film Festival and Bones and All by Luca Guadagnino, currently in post production.