Past Editions

Mexican Documentary Jury

Bill Guttentag

In 1988, Bill Guttentag won an Oscar for Best Documentary with the HBO film about a boy’s battle with cancer, You Don’t Have to Die. He obtained three Oscar nominations before winning another Oscar for his 2003 documentary Twin Towers and is the recipient of numerous awards, among them two Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and a Robert Kennedy Journalism Award. His films have screened and garnered awards at numerous American and international film festivals, and have enjoyed special screenings internationally and in the U.S., including at the White House. He is the creator and executive producer (along with Dick Wolf ) of the NBC series Crime and Punishment, which ran from 2002-2004.

In 2007, Guttentag directed two films: Live!, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, starring Eva Mendes, Andre Braugher David Krumholtz, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Jay Hernandez; and Nanking, a documentary about the Rape of Nanking during World War II, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Nanking won awards at Sundance and other film festivals, earned Guttentag a Writers Guild of America Award nomination, and went on to become the highest grossing theatrical documentary in Chinese history. Guttentag’s most recent film is Soundtrack for a Revolution, a film about music and the Civil Rights Movement. The film had its international premiere at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and U.S. premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. Since 2001, Guttentag has taught a course on the film and television business at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He recently completed his first novel, Boulevard, which will be published in 2010.

Nicolas Philibert

Nicolas Philibert began his artistic career at the age of 27, when he co-directed the film La Voix de son maitre in 1978 with Gérard Mordillat. He starred in Mordillat’s first films, Vive la sociale (1983) and Fucking Fernand (1987). But it was documentary filmmaking that especially appealed to him. His first feature documentary, Louvre City (1990), retraces the famous museum’s nocturnal activities. In the Land of the Deaf (1992) he examines the culture and daily life of deaf people. In 2002, he made the documentary To Be and To Have, this time taking his camera to a single-class school in rural France. The film won numerous prizes, including the César for Best Editing, and was widely acclaimed around the world. In 1975, he participated as an assistant on Moi, Pierre Rivère…, a film by René Allio, based on a true event that occurred in Normandy in 1835. The film tells the story of a 20-year-old peasant who slit the throats of several members of his family with a billhook. Most of the roles were played by the same farmers in the region. Thirty years later, Nicolas Philibert decided to return to Normandy, and find these people again, in order to evoke the adventure they shared so many years before, but also to film them in their present lives, in his recent film Retour en Normandie.

Eugenio Polgovsky

Eugenio Polgovsky (Mexico City, 1977). In 1994, he won the UNESCO-sponsored photography contest Living Together. He studied film directing and cinematography at the CCC film school. His thesis project and first documentary, Tropic of Cancer, won numerous awards around the world (Best Documentary at the Morelia International Film Festival 2004; Ariel for Best First Feature; Joris Ivens Prize at the Festival Cinéma du Réel; Best Documentary at DocuDays in Beirut, Corea and FICCO, and Golden Prize at the Al Jazeera Festival in Qatar). Tropic of Caner also had a screening during the International Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2005, and was included in the Frontier section at Sundance. It has been screened in over 100 festivals around the world.

In 2004, Polgovsky received the National Youth Award in Mexico. He has worked as a cinematographer in a number of documentary, narrative feature, and visual arts projects, collaborating with artist Jae Eu Choi and renowned butoh dancer Yuzhio Amagatzu in Japan, among others.

In 2008, with this production company Tecolote Films and the support of the Hubert Bals Boundation and Vision Sud Est in Switzerland, he directed, photographed and edited Los herederos (The Inheritors), a documentary about the children who work in the Mexican countryside. He spent three years working on the project, which premiered at the 65th Venice International Film Festival. Los herederos was the first documentary invited to participate in the competition section Generation Kplus at the Berlin Film Festival. It has garnered a number of awards, among these, two Ariel Awards (Best Documentary and Best Editing), the Coral at the 30th Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana, Best Documentary at FIDOCS, Chile, the Zapata Award at the Festival of Memory, and two awards from Amnesty International (Slovenia and Lisbon). In 2009, the documentary received the support of UNICEF for its distribution in Mexico and the world as part of an effort to raise awareness about child labor in the countryside.

Polgovsky is currently working on a documentary about children suffering from parasitic infections in Africa, which will be part of a campaign to combat this widespread health problem.