Jury & Awards
Hungarian Competition Jury
This year, the Hungarian Competition will be sponsored by the City of Budapest again. The winning film will be decided upon by an international jury. The director of the winning film will receive a prize of gross 400,000 HUF.
Hungarian Competition Jury
Rita Boronyák
Rita Boronyák is a film critic. She graduated in Hungarian and French literature (1985), and Aesthetics (1987) at ELTE in Hungary, and studied French literature and literary theory at the Sorbonne (1984). She worked at the National Széchényi Library, and analyzed French advertising. She graduated from the MÚOSZ School of Journalism in 1995. Since 1998, she has been working in the documentary department of the National Film Archive. From 1998 to 2013, she ran a documentary film club. Between 2007 and 2010, she studied at the ELTE Doctoral School (Film, Media and Cultural Theory). She writes film and festival reviews, and translates from French to English. She has been a member of several Hungarian and international juries (Visegrad Documentary Library, Magyar Filmszemle, Bratislava Film Festival, KAFF Kecskemét, Cinefest Miskolc, FIKE, PÖFF Tallinn, Primanima Budaörs, and Cinélatino Toulouse), and is a member of the Film Critics Section of MÚOSZ.
Frederik Nicolai
Frederik Nicolai is an award-winning documentary film producer, based in Belgium. He started his career by executive producing fiction series, feature and short films in Belgium and the Netherlands, then he dedicated himself to documentaries. His documentaries tell stories that fight taboos and stigmas, create new insights, and point-of-views, and provide a broader and more critical world view. Besides producing, Frederik is also scriptwriter, coach for young filmmakers and lecturer and board member of DocNomads.
Jannik Splidsboel
Born in 1964, Jannik Splidsboel studied film and art in Copenhagen and Rome, before graduating from EAVE. He has worked as a producer since the early 1990s, for RAI and ZDF, among others, on art, culture, youth, and more. Since 2004, he has been active as a documentary film director, with a dozen long and short films to his credit. His films have been praised internationally, including at the Berlinale and IDFA. He both wrote and directed Misfits, about LGBTQ young people in the American Bible Belt. The film was nominated for the Danish film critic award, Bodil. He has been a dramaturgical and artistic consultant since 2008, and teaches creative writing, pitch, development, and production.
International Jury for Student/Debut Documentary Competition
An international jury will award the best film in the Student/Debut Film Competition based on professional excellence and creative approach. The director of the winning film will receive a prize of gross 1000€ to support their further professional development.
Student and Debut Competition Jury
Yuliia Kovalenko
Yuliia Kovalenko is a film critic and programmer at Kyiv’s Docudays UA IHRDFF. She was a lecturer at the Department of Cultural Studies and Arts History of Odessa National Polytechnic University, and at the Department of Fine Arts of Odessa State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture. In 2017, she received a PhD in Cultural Studies. From 2015 to 2017, she was a program director at independent movie theatre “Inotheatre”, in Odessa, where she held a special program on Ukrainian art cinema, “We Are Here”. As a film critic, she has been published in Ukrainian and international journals (Korydor, LB.ua, Filmar.online, Cineticle, La Furia Umana, etc.). Between 2016 and 2018 she was co-editor of Cineticle Magazine, devoted to art cinema. In 2019 she joined the program department at Docudays UA. In 2022, she co-founded the sloїk film atelier (sloik-film-atelier.com) – an independent Ukrainian film curators union, giving space for underrepresented voices and promoting them internationally. She runs her own blog about art cinema, kinotabs.com, and is a member of the Ukrainian Film Critics Union and the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine.
Anna Ladinig
Anna Ladinig is the director of IFFI - International Film Festival Innsbruck since 2019. IFFI focuses on topics and regions that are underrepresented in global film networks. Anna graduated in Slavonic Studies at the University of Innsbruck and is currently working on her dissertation on Central Asian cinema. Since 2022 she is co-spokesperson of FÖFF, the Austrian Association of Film Festivals.
Bálint Révész
Bálint Révész is a director and producer from Hungary. He graduated from the University of Brighton in 2012, and founded his own production company, Gallivant Film, in the UK. His first feature documentary, Granny Project, was made over the course of seven years. The film received the MDR Prize at DOK Leipzig, Best Documentary and Editing from the Hungarian Film Critics Association, Next Generation Award at Taiwan IDFF, Doc Alliance nomination, and was featured at Hot Docs, CPH:DOX, among others. Another News Story, a film he produced about journalists documenting the refugee crisis across seven countries, was in competition at KVIFF, ZFF, and IDFA in 2017. He is currently working on KIX - The Story of a Street Kid (to be completed in 2023), as a director. It is being financed by ARTE France, CNC, and HBO Max, among others.
Student Competition for the Best Human Rights Film
The Student Jury is selected on a competitive basis and is comprised of five university students who demonstrate a commitment to human rights and an interest in documentary cinema. Together, they will decide which film will receive the The Best Human Rights Film Award from this year’s International Competition. The director of the winning film will receive a 1000€ prize.
International Competition Jury
Amina Ghazouani
I am Amina Ghazouani, a young film enthusiast. I am 24, a student at ELTE, and have always loved observing the dreamy world of cinema.
Ramona Aristide
Ramona Aristide is a film critic finishing her MA in Film Studies at UNATC. She collaborates with various publications, such as Films in Frame and Observatorul Cultural, has been on the editorial board of FILM MENU for the past year, and was selected in the Talents Press at Sarajevo Film Festival 2022. Currently based in Bucharest, she is obsessed with Nordic landscapes, Hungarian literature, and animal rights.
María Belén Soriano
María Belén has a background in international relations and political sciences, with a deep interest in film and performing arts. At the moment, she is pursuing her Master's degree in communication and media studies at ELTE University, with the hope of combining her knowledge on socioeconomic issues and human rights with arts and media representation. She has experience working on international cooperations, and considers documentaries a very powerful tool to bring about awareness on multiple issues, and to promote research, accountability, and social transformation.
Blanka Mucsi
My name is Blanka Mucsi, and I am a young journalist and first-year student at Budapest Metropolitan University's Master’s program in television production arts. I previously studied Communication and Media Studies. I’m really happy to be a member of the Student Jury, because the topics at Verzió, such as global social problems, inequality, human rights, and climate injustice interest me on a daily basis, both in my private life and in my work. I believe that documentaries are the perfect tool to fight for a better world, because they have the power to make an impact through their visual world and their topics. In the future, I would like to make documentaries and bring the most important social problems closer to people, not only through writing, but also through films.
Márk Nagy
I'm Márk Nagy, a student of theoretical studies in ELTE’s Film Studies Master's program, where I have been working on the analysis and criticism of documentaries for a long time. I think documentary film is extremely important because it is a medium and art form that has real stakes in amplifying voices and stories that we would otherwise not hear in these turbulent times. In this light, I think it is very important to examine and evaluate these works with a critical attitude commensurate with their stakes. Verzió provides an excellent platform for this. It is a great honor to be on the Verzió student jury this year after previously serving as a moderator at the festival after-screenings.