Morelia International Film Festival

Mexican Short Film Jury

• Peter Brunette

Peter Brunette is a film critic for The Hollywood Reporter and Reynolds Professor of Film Studies at Wake Forest University, where he directs the program in film studies. He has written or edited seven books on film, including Roberto Rossellini, the definitive study in English of this director's films, a book on François Truffaut's film Shoot the Piano Player, and several books on film theory. In 1998, Cambridge University Press published his book The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni and, in 1999, Martin Scorsese: Interviews, was published by the University of Mississippi Press. His most recent book is a study of Wong Kar­Wai, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2005. He is also general editor of the Mississippi Interview series -nearly sixty books have already been appeared in this series- and has done voice­over commentary for the dvds of Blow­up, Shoot the Piano Player, and Amarcord. He is currently writing books on Michael Haneke and Luchino Visconti. Brunette has also written frequently for The New York Times Arts & Leisure section, The Boston Globe, and many other newspapers. He is artistic director of the Key Sunday Cinema Club, which has branches in ten us cities.

• Hannah McGill

Hannah McGill, daughter of two writers, was born in 1976, grew up in Sheltand, Germany, Lincoln and finally Glasgow. Having edited the Glasgow' University paper briefly, she went on to manage the List's Music pages, before being snapped up as tv critic for the Scotsman, which she left in 2001 to become film critic for The Herald. She is now Artistic Director of Edinburgh International Film Festival, which screens new work in fiction, documentary, animation and experimental film. She also writes for the film magazine Sight and Sound.

• Sandra Rudich

Sandra Rudich holds a Master in Philosophy. She has been working at Canal Plus for over 14 years. She began working in the talk show La grande famille in the society and psychology sections, and in the show Nulle part ailleurs as a journalist, and programmer for the cultural section, which includes film, art, fashion, theater, and sports. She then worked in the movie partnerships of Canal Plus, and in special events broadcasts, including the Cesar Awards, the Academy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Deauville Film Festival, and the Marrakesh Film Festival, among others. In the last five years, she has been in charge of the editorialization of Canal Plus group, and its other channels (Canal+Cinema, Cinecinema, tps) and of the section on movie special events. She works with all the all departments at the channels, including acquisitions (of Foreign and French film), documentary production and development, production of special programs, talk shows and events such as film premieres in France and special focus segments on foreign festivals. Rudich also manages the station's relations with the film industry, acting as a liaison to the producers, directors, actors, and other crew.

Mexican Documentary Jury

• Caroline Baron

Caroline Baron recently produced Sony Pictures Classics' Capote, nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture. Baron produced the cross­cultural hit Monsoon Wedding, winner of numerous awards worldwide. She be­ gan her career in 1983 working on the cult classic film, The Toxic Avenger. Caroline has served as the associate producer for the hit television series The Wonder Years and co­pro­ duced such films as Center Stage, Flawless, Addicted to Love, The Santa Clause, and Mira Nair's Kama Sutra. Caroline produced Witness to the Mob for Tribeca Produc­ tions with Robert DeNiro and Jane Rosenthal.

Caroline founded the non­profit organization FilmAid International in 1999. FilmAid's programs provide life­saving information on hiv/aids, landmine­awareness, health and hygiene, women's rights and conflict resolution. The programs ease psychological suffering, foster understanding, engage the mind and spark the imagination.

In 2005, Caroline and her husband and producing partner Anthony Weintraub established A­Line Pictures. A­Line's projects include film adaptations of two non­fiction books: Black­ water, an alarming look into the country's largest private military contractor, and Dangerous Doses an expose of counterfeit medicine in the United States. The team is also producing film adaptations of two books by the best­selling novelist Ann Patchett, Bel Canto and The Magician's Assistant. Caroline lives in New York with Anthony and their two sons, Asher and Emmanuel.

• Alex Rivera

Alex Rivera is a digital media artist and filmmaker. His fil­ mography includes four films: three shorts, Papapapá (1995), Why Cybraceros? (1997) and The Sixth Section (2003), and one feature, Sleep Dealer (2007), which premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and won two awards, including the Waldo Salt Award for best screenplay. He is also a Sun­ dance and a Rockefeller Fellow. His work, which addresses the concerns of the Latino community using humor, satire, and metaphor, has been screened at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival, and the Guggenheim Mu­ seum, among other international venues.

• Steve Seid

Steve Seid is the Video Curator at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. During the last two decades, he has or­ ganized over 700 programs of video art, film, and new media. These programs typically circulate around cultural and aesthetic ideas with experimental media being the prevalent form showcased. Seid also oversees an on­going video preservation project and conducts workshops on visual literacy for high school teachers. He has taught video aesthetics and history courses at the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State University, the California College of Arts, and the San Francisco Art Institute. His large­scale program, "Whose Side Are You On?: The Border," toured Brazil under the sponsorship of Itau Cultural. He co­curated the first museum retrospective of Ant Farm, the '60s/'70s art collective and creators of Cadillac Ranch and Media Burn, which toured through 2006. Seid also curated the 52nd Robert Flaherty Film Seminar which took place at Vassar College in spring, 2006. In progress is a fifty­ year history of moving image art from the San Francisco Bay Area, a co­edited book and exhibition scheduled for 2009.

Jury for the Michoacán Section

• Nouredine Essadi

Nouredine Essadi is the Audiovisual Attaché of the French Embassy in Mexico. He obtained his Master's Degree in Economics and International Relations from the Sorbonne University, Panthéon. He worked as Assistant Director for Melvin Van Peebles, with whom he made the French adaptation of the musical comedy Don't Play Us Cheap, La Fête à Harlem. From 2004 to 2007 he was in charge of the Africa Cinemas program, included in the Europa Cinemas structure, whose mission is to promote and improve the distribution of African movies, particularly francophone films. He is also founder and organizer of the French Film Festival in Cuba, which has be­ come one of the most important film events in the island. He has created numerous cultural events in Paris, among them, the African­American cinema retrospective, as well as other events dedicated to urban culture. He is also the founder of the record label Hipi Music, and programming director of the jazz venue Hot Brass, in Paris.

• Lucila Moctezuma

Lucila Moctezuma is originally from Mexico City and lives in New York since 1996. She is Director of the Media Arts Fellow­ ships at the Tribeca Film Institute, a program that has supported media artists in the us and Latin America and has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation since 1988. Lucila has worked in New York's independent film community since 1996, including the Independent Feature Project (IFP) and the Latin American Video Archive (LAVA). She is on the Board of Trustees for the Flaherty Film Seminar and on the Advisory Board for Rooftop Panorama, New Children/New York, Impacto Foundation and the Fórum Internacional de Cine de Monterrey. She has collaborated with several national and international film festivals, among them the Margaret Mead and the Media That Matters festivals in ny, and is the us Del­ egate for the Huesca Film Festival in Spain. Lucila has worked in different areas of film and video production, including the pbs series The New Americans, produced by Kartemquin Films, and the series Shocking and Awful produced by Deep Dish, which was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Lucila studied Philosophy at the Universidad Iberoamericana, where she also taught from 1991 to 1995.

• Ana Carolina Rivera

Born in Mexico City, Carolina Rivera studied Communications and Media Studies at the Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente in Guadalajara, Jalisco (iteso), and screenwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles (ucla). She began her writing career in radio, as the producer of the Spanish rock program, "Ecos de un aliento des congelado", broadcast by Radio Universidad de Guadalajara, and the program "Buenos días" broadcast by Radio Metropoli. She wrote a number of episodes of Sesame Street (Televisa, 1994­1995) and was the head of writing and development of the children's programming division at Canal 11 (1996­1999). She was also the creator and supervising writer of the children's show "Bizbirije" (1995­1999), as well as of the mini series "Mi gran amigo" (1998­2002), "Camino a casa" (2002), and "El diván de Valentina" (2002)-all produced by Ca­ nal 11 at the Instituto Politecnico Nacional (ipn). She also worked as a writer of the series "Cash y amor" (Telemundo) which was broadcast in Puerto Rico and the United States. In 1995, her first feature length screenplay, Recipes to Stay Together (Cilantro y Perejil), was made into a film directed by Rafael Montero. The film received nine Arieles (1997), among them, Best Original Screenplay, Best Screenplay, and Best Original Music (composed by Carolina herself, along with Enrique Quezada and Fernando Sariñana). In 1999, she collaborated in the screenplay of Gimme the Power (Todo el poder, dir. Fernando Sariñana, 2001). She then wrote A Second Chance (El segundo aire, dir. Fernando Sariña­ na, 2001), Amar te duele (Dir. Fernando Sariñana, 2002), Amor extremo (Dir. Chava Cartas, 2006), Las niñas mal (Dir. Fernando Sariñana, 2007), Enemigos íntimos (Dir. Fernando Sariñana, 2007). In 2006, she wrote and directed the segment "Dos meses de renta" of the film Sexo, amor y otras perversiones.

Mexican Feature Film Jury

• Mike Hodges

Best known for his debut Get Carter (1971) and for the surprise hit Croupier (1998), made nearly three decades later, Mike Hodges has never really enjoyed the acclaim he deserves. One of the most distinctive filmmakers to have emerged from Britain in the modern era, he has seen a number of his films fall foul of studio interference or lacklustre distribution; but the longevity of his career and the excellence of his most recent films demonstrate both his unwillingness to compromise and his determination to continue working, however greatly his own ambitions as an artist may differ from those of a profit­mo­ tivated industry.

Before moving into fiction features with Get Carter, Hodges worked in television, producing and directing programmes on current affairs and politics for the World in Action series and on the arts for the Tempo strand; filmmakers covered for the latter included Orson Welles, Jean­Luc Godard and Jacques Tati. But he was also a great fan of crime thrillers, and in 1969 he wrote, produced and directed a one­off film for television entitled Suspect. After Rumour (1970), a second, rather more experimental drama (centred, like Croupier, on a writer), Hodges hit paydirt with his first theatrical feature, Michael Caine's Jack Carter becoming one of the most genuinely iconic charac­ ters ever to have appeared in a British film.

Profoundly alert to the fact that simplicity of expression need not preclude complexity and sophistication of nuanced meaning -Hodges has often spoken of his admiration for filmmakers like Jean Vigo, Abbas Kiarostami and the Taviani brothers- Hodges is still seeking out ever more eloquent ways of communicating, clearly and directly, his very distinctive vision of the human condition.

• Cristian Mungiu

Writer and director Cristian Mungiu was born in 1968 in Iasi, Romania. He studied English Literature at the University of Iasi and Film Directing at the University of Film in Bucharest. He worked as a teacher and a journalist for written press, radio and television until 1994. During his film studies, he worked as an assistant director in a number of films for renowned directors like Bertrand Tavernier and Radu Mihai­ leanu. Since then, he's directed and produced various short films, documentaries and several foreign productions shot in Romania. His first feature, Occident, was premiered in the Director's Fortnight in Cannes in 2002 and was later screened in over 50 festivals worldwide. He co­founded Mobra Films in 2003. His most recent film, 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days won the Palme d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

• Julia Ormond

British actress. After a brief stint at the prestigious fine art school West Surrey College of Art and Design, Julia Ormond attended acting school at the Webber­Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts, in London. Her exceptional talent for the stage immediately attracted the attention of the film and television industry. Her breakthrough role came in 1991, when she played the lead character in the made­for­tv biopic of Catherine the Great, Young Catherine. Through the early '90s, Ormond held a string of interesting roles, most notably in Peter Greenaway's The Baby of Mâcon (1992). But her greatest break­ through came in 1994, with Legends of the Fall (dir. Ed­ ward Zwick) starring alongside Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins and Aidan Quinn. She delivered an extraordinary performance, which earned her international recognition. She followed the success of Legends of the Fall with Sabrina (dir. Sydney Pollack) and First Knight (Jerry Zucker). Aware of the limi­ tations of Hollywood cinema, Ormond then turned to European cinema. She played the lead role in Bille August's Smila's Sense of Snow (1997), and the following year, starred in the Russian production The Barber of Siberia (dir. Nikita Mikhalkov), as a young American girl who falls in love with an officer of the Czarist army. At the same time, and with the intention to engage in more personal projects, Ormond found­ ed her own production company, Indican. In 1999, she lent her voice to a tv production of George Orwell's Animal Farm, and the following year she returned to the Hollywood film scene with The Prime Gig, featuring Vince Vaughn. In 2001, she served as a member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. The most recent additions to Ormond's impressive resume are Resistance (2003) the hbo film Iron Jawed Angels (2004), Inland Empire (2006) from acclaimed di­ rector David Lynch, The Curious Case of Benjamin But­ ton (2008), and Steven Soderbergh's Guerrilla (2008), a film based on the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Besides her acting work, Ormond has contributed generously to humanitarian causes. She is a founding chair of FilmAid International, a celebrated nonprofit organization that uses the power of film to address the needs of displaced people around the world. In 2003, she won the prestigious Crystal Award for using her art to transcend cultural boundaries.

• Jorge Volpi

Jorge Volpi holds a ba degree in Law, and a Master's degree in Mexican Literature from the National Autonomous Universi­ ty of Mexico (unam), as well as a Ph.D. in Spanish Philology from the University of Salamanca. He published his first novel in 1993. In 1999, he was awarded the "Biblioteca Breve" award for his novel In Search of Klingsor (which has been translated into twenty­one languages), the first in his "Trilo­ gy of the Twentieth Century," which also includes The End of Madness (2003) and No será la tierra (Alfaguara, 2006). He is currently General Director of Channel 22 (Canal 22).