Past Editions

Documentary Competition

Marcelo Panozzo

A journalist and film critic, Marcelo Panozzo began working at 21 for the Buenos Aires newspapers Sur and Página/12 and the magazines Caín and Fierro. In 1992 he joined the staff of Clarín, the most widely read daily in Argentina, where he would remain for nine years, first as director of the youth culture supplement, then as director of the film section. At the same time he wrote film critiques for the magazine El Amante and, towards the end of 2000, was invited to become a programmer for the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival. He has participated actively in the last four editions of this festival (2001-2004) and is currently working on the next one. He still writes for El Amante and is Associate Editor for TXT, a Buenos Aires news weekly. He is also editing a book on the films of director Tsai Ming-liang for the Gijón International Film Festival and working on a compilation dedicated to the New Argentinian Cinema to be edited by the Argentine branch of the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics).

Jesse Lerner

esse Lerner is a documentary film and video maker, professor, curator, and writer based in Los Angeles. His work has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Sydney Biennale, the Sundance Film Festival, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the Los Angeles International Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and other festivals and museums internationally. His films Natives (1991, with Scott Sterling), Frontierland/Fronterilandia (1995, with Rubén Ortiz-Torres), Ruins (1999), and The American Egypt (2001) have won numerous awards at film festivals in the United States, Latin America, and Japan. He has received grants and fellowships including the Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowship (N.E.A.), the California Arts Council Fellowship, the Brody Family Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Fideicomiso para la Cultura México-EE.UU. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, his critical essays on photography, film, and video have appeared in Afterimage, History of Photography, Visual Anthropology Review, La Pusmoderna, Wide Angle, and other media arts journals. He has taught at the University of California San Diego, Bennington College, California Institute of the Arts, the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, and holds the MacArthur Chair of Media Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. In 1999 he was a Fulbright fellow at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán in Mérida.

María-Christina Villaseñor

Associate Curator of Film and Media, Maria-Christina Villaseñor curates film and media arts exhibitions for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York as well as the Guggenheim Museums in Berlin and Bilbao. Among her recent projects are the exhibition Bill Viola: Temporality and Transcendence, and Fellini!, an exhibition of Federico Fellini’s drawings and other graphic works accompanied by a full film retrospective. She has also organized and toured film programs internationally at venues including the Havana International Film Festival, the Museo de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires, and the Febio Fest in Prague. She writes on film, video and photography for a number of publications and is a co-editor of the exhibition catalogues Conversations between Shadows and Light: Italian Cinematography, and Tom Sachs: Nutsy’s. Among the panels and juries she has served on are the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowships Panel, the National Endowment for the Humanities Documentary Panel, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Student Academy Awards.