Jurys

Ann Marie Fleming is an award-winning Canadian independent filmmaker, writer, and artist. Born in Japan to Chinese and Australian parents, Fleming creates work that addresses themes of family, identity, history, and memory. She adapted her 2003 animated documentary “The Magical Life of Long Tack Sa” into an Eisner Award-nominated graphic novel in 2007, and has followed with a number of acclaimed short films, including “ I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors “(2010), “Big Trees” (2013), and the animated web-series “My Place” (2009) for Discovery USA’s Planetgreen.com. Her latest project is “Window Horses”, a feature-length animated film about a young Canadian poet discovering her family history.

Katrin Magnitz is born on the 16^th of February 1943 in Potsdam-Babelsberg. She attended the eight-level elementary school in Babelsberg and then for two years the Wirtschaftsschule in Potsdam. From 1960, she began her art studies at the Meisterschule in Berlin-Tiergarten. In 1964, she graduated in the specialisation “Trickfilm”. Various time contracts followed, including Durniock Film Berlin, ARD Frankfurt and AGF Glauert. From 1972 she was in Hamburg at cinegrafik Helmut Herbst. After that, in 1974 she founded the cinegrafikstudio together with Robert Darroll and worked by order of NDR, ZDF and WDR (Sesame Street, The Show with the Mouse, own free movies). Since 1999 she is part of the studio community Goldbekhof in Hamburg. Besides various animation films based on children’s books by Jutta Bauer, Ole Könnecke and Ingrid Mylo she created experimental films and private projects.

Joanna Priestley has directed, animated and produced 27 award winning films and recently completed an abstract animated feature, “North of Blue”. Her work maintains a high level of porosity between serious exploration of boundaries and intuitive whimsy and she is dedicated to experimentation in technique, theme and content. Joanna Priestley has had retrospectives all over the world including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw, Poland) and Hiroshima Animation Festival (Japan) and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, the MacDowell Colony, Fundación Valparaíso and Creative Capital. Joanna Priestley was founding president of ASIFA Northwest and has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1992, where she annually juries the Student Academy Awards and the Nicholl Screenplay Fellowships.

Daniel Šuljić is an animator, musician, DJ and the artistic director of the World Festival of Animated Film Animafest Zagreb. Born in Zagreb, he graduated in painting/animation at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in 1997. Since 2003 he is a lecturer for animation at different art universities such as University of Arts Linz and Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb. In 2006 he was given the title “Honorary Professor at Jilin College of the Arts Animation School”, in Changchun, China. 2010 – 2012 Daniel Šuljić worked as an artistic consultant for animated film at Croatian Audiovisual Centre – HAVC. Since 2011 he is the artistic director of Animafest Zagreb and since 2013 a member of the artistic council for film at the city of Zagreb. His films were shown at numerous international and Croatian animation film festivals and by several TV stations in Europe, earning him 21 awards so far. He has been a member of various international festival competition juries. Daniel Šuljić lives and works in Zagreb and Vienna.

Theodore Ushev was born in Kyustendil, Bulgaria, in 1968 and graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia. He first made a name for himself as a poster artist in his native country before settling in Montreal in 1999. Theodore Ushev found fertile ground for developing his own original artistic style at the National Film Board of Canada. With more than 15 films to date, that has been shown at all over the world and more than 150 prizes, he continues to work in the field of cinema, multimultimedia, installation art.  In “Blood Manifesto” (2014), a poetic and ferocious short which Theodore Ushev animated with his own blood, he ponders whether ideals are worth spilling blood for. His latest project, in 2017 his film “Blind Vaysha” (2015), a philosophical tale about the importance of living in the moment, has been nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Short. The film won more than 31 prizes and awards to date.

After studying Law, then Ethnology, and ultimately getting a Master Degree in Publishing, Délphine Maury worked for a number of academic and technical editors. After a few years, she began to write articles for and to edit children’s magazines (J’aime Lire,  D Lire),  where she learned how to create games, review new books and help authors take stories from idea to text. In 2008, Délphine Maury crossed over into television, where she worked as a script editor for a number of series such as “Ariol”, “Angelo Rules” or “Maya the Bee”. She also wrote the series “The Long Long Holidays”. Finally, Délphine Maury founded her own production company, Tant Mieux Prod, to produce the collection “Fresh out of School” (En Sortant de l’École) in which young directors, fresh from French animation schools, create a collection of short movies illustrating poems. Together with her co-workers, she is currently developing an adaptation of the great novel “Toby Alone” into a series.

Waref Abu Quba is a Syrian filmmaker and professional motion graphic designer, who was born in the city of Al-Tall, only 14 km from Damascus. He has a bachelor degree in Graphic Art from the Faculty of Fine Arts – University of Damascus (2008). Since then he has been working as a freelancer filmmaker and motion graphic designer with major companies nationally and internationally. Early in 2014 he sought asylum in Germany and is settled there since. Waref Abu Quba has finished five short films which premiered in international film festivals. Currently he is working on his sixth film for which he won the Film Prize of the Robert Bosch Stiftung for international cooperation in the category animation in 2016.

Benjamin Swiczinsky, born in 1982 in Korneuburg, Austria, made his first animated film at age 12. Having graduated from secondary school in Vienna, he worked for several film and TV production companies. After he studied journalism in Vienna he began to study animation at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in 2006 and graduated with a diploma in 2011. In the same year, he founded the studio “Neuer Österreichischer Trickfilm” together with Johannes Schiehsl and Conrad Tambour.

His film “Heldenkanzler” has won awards at many international film festivals. He worked as a director for the series “Lilly the Witch” and on music videos for arte and ZDF as well as for the Italian band Sisyphos. In 2016 Benjamin Swiczinsky created the animations for Tom Tykwer’s film “A Hologram for the King” featuring Tom Hanks.

Éric Cazès, born in Toulouse, spent his childhood between California and France dreaming to be an astronaut. Unfortunately the space programme overlooked his application. So he went to art school at École européenne supérieure de l’image (E.E.S.I.) instead, joining fellow students as Sylvain Chaumet, Nicolas de Crécy and Alexis Lavillat.

After his diploma, he worked in 1988 as a traditional layout artist at Disney Studio in Paris, meeting his friend Bolhem Bouchiba and other talents as Zoltan Maros or Dominique Montféry. Éric Cazès continued lay-outing, storyboarding and developing animation pilots in major studios on programmes like “Tintin” or “Jim Button”.

Since 2000 he directed and developed animation series, e.g. “Kings & Queens”, “Trontro”, “Garage Club”, “Vic the Viking”, “K3”. Currently he is directing the feature animation film “Vic the Viking”.

Pedro Rivero is born in 1969 in Bilbao in Spain. He is the producer, director and screenwriter of “Psiconautas, Los Niños Olvidados” (Goya Award for the Best Spanish Animated Feature Film 2017 and nominated for the EFA Awards), “La Crisis Carnívora” (2007) (the first Spanish feature film in Flash animation for theatres) and “Birdboy” (Goya Award for the Best Spanish Short Film 2012, preselected for the Academy Awards and selected in more than 200 film festivals).

Furthermore he is screenwriter for several TV animated series and for the feature film “Goomer” (Goya Award for the Best Spanish Animated Feature Film 1999) and the artistic director of Animakom Fest – Bilbao International Animation Community Festival. And along the way he is also author of theatrical plays and comic books.

Maya Gräfin Rothkirch began her career as a film producer and director in the late 1980s with her first TV series “Lisa und Paul” for ZDF, which she also developed. Working together with Thilo Graf Rothkirch, her company Rothkirch Cartoon-Film became one of the most successful European animation studios over the following years and received several awards from CARTOON Brussels/MEDIA Europe as well as further national and international prizes. One of their best known series is “The Little Polar Bear”, co-produced with WDR and Warner Bros. and nominated for an International Emmy Award in 2003. In addition to mostly classic 2D animation such as in “Tobias Totz und sein Löwe” and “Kleiner Dodo” they have also been producing CGI animated films since 2008, such as “Keinohrhase  und Zweiohrküken” which was released in cinemas in 2013. The eight feature films they produced so far have set new standards for German animated film. Their film “Laura’s Star” had millions of viewers and was awarded with the German Film Award for Best Children’s Film. In addition to her work as a director and producer, Maya Gräfin Rothkirch has also been Managing Director of Rothkirch Cartoon-Film GmbH based in Berlin since 2011.