Feature Documentary Award
Dimitris Kerkinos was born in Athens. He studied Film Studies at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He joined the Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF) in 1999, where he is the Head of Tributes for both the fiction and documentary festivals organized annually by TIFF. He is also the Head of the Survey Expanded section, which he curated for 22 years. He has curated numerous retrospectives for directors, thematic tributes, and spotlights on national cinemas for TIFF and festivals abroad.
He has published essays and academic papers on cinema and anthropology and has edited documentary and fiction film monographs, including works on Carol Reed, Goran Paskaljević, Cristian Mungiu, Patricio Guzmán, Peter Wintonick, and Yorgos Panousopoulos. He lectured on Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic Documentary at Panteion University in Athens from 2004 to 2008. Since 2019, he has also served as the Artistic Director of the fARAD Documentary Festival in Romania.
Nadia Kamel was born in Cairo, where she continues to live and work as a filmmaker, writer and producer. Kamel grew up in a house steeped in progressive politics and a passion for the arts and popular culture. In 1990 she turned her full attention to her life-long romance with cinema. She worked as an assistant director to leading independent filmmakers in Egypt, Atteyat El-Abnoudy, Youssef Chahine and Yousri Nassrallah.
Kamel first began to work on her own projects in 2000. Eventually, she concluded that addressing the often-taboo topics that she hoped to engage with would need her to take the risk of producing her own low-budget films. Prize winner Salata Baladi has been produced in this spirit of independence. Later she directed and produced Green Mirage, in Tunisia. Her most recent work, a documentary novel Al Mawlouda, won the Sawaris prize for best novel in 2018.
She is currently working on a hybrid fictional documentary experimental film about the daily tension between youth, arts and fascism in Egypt
Raed Andoni is an award-winning Palestinian filmmaker based in Paris who is a member of the Oscar Academy. He is best known for his personal documentary Fix ME, which screened at Sundance, Cannes, and other festivals and won numerous awards, as well as his hybrid documentary Ghost Hunting, which won several international awards, including Best Documentary at the Berlin International Film Festival and Best Arab Film Award at the Cairo International Film Festival 2017.