Past Editions

The members of the Jury for the I Mexican Documentary Forum

Arthur Dong

Arthur Dong is a producer, director, writer and self-distributor of independent social issue documentaries for over 20 years. His first, Sewing Woman, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. His other credits, including Family Fundamentals, Forbidden City, U.S.A., Coming Out Under Fire, and Licensed to Kill have earned him the Peabody Award, the Berlin Film Festival’s Teddy Award, three Sundance Film Festival awards, five Emmy nominations, two GLAAD Media Awards, and over 100 other film excellence honors worldwide. Arthur has been awarded both the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Film Fellowships to support his artistic vision. In addition to serving on the IFP/Los Angeles Board of Directors’ Executive Committee, he is on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, representing the Documentary Branch. Arthur is currently developing a documentary for HBO and a series on Asians in Hollywood for PBS.

Ilse Hughan

Born in Amsterdam, Ilse Hughan entered cinema through subtitling after studying French and Italian in college. She collaborated in many Dutch fiction films as assistant producer, director and editor. From 1988 to 1992 she distributed independently produced fiction and documentary films at the Amsterdam Cinematheque. For the past 10 years she has been working for the Rotterdam International Film Festival and is a member of the Hubert Bals Fund selection, which supports films from developing countries. Lately she is feeling more and more drawn towards film production, which she considers an intimate form of commitment. She will be the associate producer of Sangre, the new film from Lisandro Alonso (Argentina), whose disarming and original feature debut, La Libertad (2000), received much recognition from various international film festivals and elsewhere. In 1992, Ilse Hughan decided to revive Amsterdam-based Fortuna Films, a company establishes by her grandfather in 1911. Fortuna Films specialized in selling and distributing documentaries from filmmakers such as Heddy Honigmann, Jos de Putter, Andreas Hoessli and Peter Liechti.

Juan Carlos Rulfo

Juan Carlos Rulfo studied a B.A. in Communication Sciences at the UAM specializing in cinema, with a thesis on the work of Andrei Tarkovsky. He studied film at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC). His thesis project, El Abuelo Cheno y otras historias (1995), participated in many national and international festivals and received numerous awards, among them the Danzante de Plata for Best Documentary Short Film in the 23rd Huesca Film Festival in Spain and the Best Documentary Prize at the International Film School Festivals, both in Buenos Aires, Argentina and in Mexico City at the CCC. He directed his first feature, Del olvido al no me acuerdo, with the support of the FONCA, IMCINE, and the Rockefeller and MacArthur Foundations. This film also participated in various festivals around the world: in 1999 it was awarded the Best First Feature Prize at the Festival des Films du Monde in Montreal, Canada and at the Biarritz International Film Festival in France. He has also received four Ariel prizes from the Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best First Feature, Editing, Photography, and Sound. He is a member of the FONCA’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte and was.