JURIES
Margita Gosheva
Actor
Her performance in The Lesson earned her numerous Best Actress awards from festivals in France, Brazil, India, Romania, Lithuania, and Bulgaria. Her portrayal of Julia Staykova in Glory was equally acclaimed and awarded in Ireland, Iran, Montenegro, France, and Bulgaria.
Beyond cinema, Margita is a dedicated theater performer. She has had a long-standing collaboration with Sfumato Theater Laboratory and, since 2017, has been part of the ensemble at Plovdiv Drama Theatre. Among her most notable stage roles are Katherina Minola in The Taming of the Shrew, Anna Shepetz in Thessaloniki Dynamiters (for which she received the Icarus Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2023), and Pythia in Oedipus, which won her the prestigious Askeer Award in 2024. The same year, she also received the Golden Rose Award for her performance as Pirina Nyagolova in Triumph.
Margita Gosheva has served as a jury member at major international film festivals including Antalya (Turkey), Biografilm Bologna (Italy), TIFF Cluj-Napoca (Romania), and Kino Pavasaris (Lithuania).
Ceylan Özgun Özcelik
Director
Ceylan (b. 1980) is an Istanbul-based filmmaker with a law degree and a background in TV, radio and film criticism. For almost twenty years now, she has been making both shorts and feature films -fiction, documentary and experimental- that explore memory and violence.
She made her feature debut with INFLAME, a political thriller, premiered at the Berlinale’s Panorama Special and won the Gamechanger Award at SXSW in 2017. Ceylan was an artist-in-residence at Berlin-AIR in and an SFFILM grantee in with her project: WITCH TRILOGY that tells its tales in different forms by exploring violence against women. IN TEN SECONDS, a psychological thriller, set in a single school with only two women, directed and co-written by her, premiered at the Tokyo Film Festival in 2024.
Her films screened at Tokyo, SIFF, Ann Arbor, Sitges, Festival Du Nouveau Cinéma, Dokufest, Cork, London Short Film Festival, Sao Paulo, RIDM and many more. She is a member of the European Film Academy (EFA).
Pavel G. Vesnakov
Director
At the beginning he studied at two places – including at the Faculty of History at Sofia University.
His debut “German Lessons” (2020) premiered at Cairo International Film Festival where it won the Best Actor Award for Julian Vergov.
“Windless” is Pavel G. Vesnakov’s second feature film premiered at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Pavel’s short films have screened all over the world and have won more than 30 awards. In 2014 “Pride”, Pavel’s third short film premiered in Locarno International Film Festival and later won the Grand Prix at Clermont-Ferrand International Film Festival and was nominated for European Film Awards.
Pavel G. Vesnakov is Berlinale (2012) and Sarajevo (2011) talent campus alumni.
Margita Gosheva has served as a jury member at major international film festivals including Antalya (Turkey), Biografilm Bologna (Italy), TIFF Cluj-Napoca (Romania), and Kino Pavasaris (Lithuania).
Jarmo Valkola
Writer
Jarmo Valkola has worked as Professor and Associate Professor of Film History and Theory at BFM for 17 years. He has worked as Professor of Art Education at the University of Jyväskylä, Associate Professor of Media Education at the University of Lapland, and Invited Professor at Chaire Roger Odin, l’Ecole Doctorale Arts et Médias at Sorbonne-Nouvelle University, Paris III. He has worked also as Visiting Professor in about a dozen universities across Europe. Jarmo has written 19 books and over 60 scientific articles, published in ten different languages.
Part of his books and scientific articles are:
Hypermodern Documentary Discourse in Cinema, 31.8. 2022;
The Audiovisual Mode of Orchestration: Cognitive Analysis of Cinema,2021;
Pictorialism in Cinema: Creating New Narrative Challenges , 2016;
Landscapes of the Mind: Emotion and Style in Aki Kaurismäki’s Films, 2012;
Maya Deren — esteettistä etsintää ja heijastuvia kokemuksia.. ,2001;
Visual Thinking & Various European Cinematic Landscapes: Examples from Peter Greenaway, Theo Angelopoulos, Béla Tarr, and Andrei Tarkovsky, 1997
Slava Doycheva
Director
Slava Doycheva is a Bulgarian director, screenwriter and actress. She started her career in the world of cinema when she was a teenager with memorable roles in films such as Christmas Tree Upside Down and Crayfish.
Her desire to tell stories of her own takes her to the London Film School, where she graduates with an MA in Film Directing.
Her most recent short films Heart of lead, Marriage and Eggshells have won dozens of international awards and over 100 entries in festivals such as Locarno, Sarajevo, Palm Springs and Tallinn.
She is a winner of the European Short Pitch Award and member of the European Film Academy.
Roman Pessarov
Director