The festival jury is an international board made up of film and media professionals with and without Romani origin. The members change every year. Their task is to decide on the official selection of the film festival as well as on the awards given to the best films. In 2019, the jury members are the following experts:
László Farkas aka Gypsyrobot is a Hungarian media producer, DJ and Roma LGBTQI activist. He is the main organizer of the Roma LGBTQI float for Budapest Pride, which has inspired many other important Roma LGBTQI Pride movements in Europe. He is the founder and editor of the Queer Roma media project called “QRTV Europa”. He gained his experiences in communication, film and media production at one of Hungary’s largest television channels and as the social media team leader of a media agency. Based on his initiative, hashtags and QR codes were tested and used on screen in Hungarian television for the first time. In 2014, he was awarded the Certificate of Appreciation by the Dr. Varga Jozsef Hungarian Rural Talent Encouragement Program as an “exemplary career starter”. Between 2015 and 2017, he was a member of the online jury in digital media awards for the leading Hungarian creative communications magazine, Kreativ.hu. László Farkas was nominated for the Hungarian Roma Press Center Prize called “Aranypánt-díj” which is awarded to successful Hungarian Roma youth. In 2018, he was one of the artists of the Roma Biennale in Berlin.
Gilda-Nancy Horvath is a journalist, digital-media producer and artist, writer, entrepreneur and consulter. The Lovara-Romni was born in Vienna, were she started working on grassroots projects for the Romani community. Between 2005 and 2015, she worked as a journalist, presenter and TV-producer for the National Public Broadcaster ORF in Austria. During this time she studied Journalism & New Media. Between 2015 and 2017, she worked as an independent consulter for a diverse range of NGOs and institutions in Berlin. It was at this point that she invented her Alter-Ego “Nancy Black” and started writing poems and songs in Romanes. In 2018 she released her first complete album with Romani Rap “Love Revolution” together with the collective “Romano Groovement”. As Nancy Black she showed her video-installations at Shedhalle Zürich, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade and Wien Museum.
In 2016 Gilda-Nancy Horvath founded the Romani news platform romblog.at in Vienna, including an educational program for Roma and Sinti in Vienna. In 2017, she curated the exhibition “Romane Thana” which counted over 25.000 visitors at the Wien Museum. She is also Co-Founder of two radio stations for Romani music in Vienna which are on air as of August 2019: high-live.com and hood-music.com. In 2019 she became a Board Member of ERIAC – European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture.
Zharko Ivanov is a languages and literature graduate at the Philology Faculty in Skopje, Macedonia. In 2006 he attended the Film Art College in Sofia, Bulgaria after which he completed a Masters in Cultural Studies at the University of Skopje and a Masters in Animation Film Directing at The University of Audiovisual Arts. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in Film and Literature theory focusing on adaptation of literary works into film. He is the president of the Macedonian branch of the International Animated Film Society (ASIFA) and is founder of the production company “Flip Book” with which he has produced more than 20 short animated, documentary and live action films. As a director, his films have been shown at more than 100 festivals around the world and have won more than 15 awards.
Lea Wohl von Haselberg studied theatre, film, and media studies at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main. She wrote her PhD thesis in Hamburg and Haifa on the depiction of Jewish film characters in (West) German cinema and television; it was published in 2016 and received the Joseph Carlebach Preis of Hamburg University. She is a media studies scholar at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf and an associate member of the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies. Presently, she is working on a research project on German-Jewish film history. She works in, and has published pieces on themes such as: Jewish filmmakers, anti-Semitism and film, memory culture and multidirectionality in (audiovisual) memory cultures. She is a member of the editorial board of the magazine Jalta Positionen zur jüdischen Gegenwart, which is published bi-annually. In 2017/18 she joined the theater company Futur II Konjunktiv for a project on Jewish refugees (displaced persons) after World War II, which was shown in Munich, Frankfurt and Mülheim an der Ruhr.
She is interested in interdisciplinary approaches and the exchange between scholarly, artistic and political activist spheres.