JURY

Penny Panayotopoulou is a Greek filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer. She holds a LLB in law from University of Athens and a degree in film and photo arts from the Polytechnic of Central London. Her debut short film Eldorado won the Best Film Award in the Thessaloniki Film Festival, the State Quality Award by the Ministry of Culture, and an honourable mention from the CNC. It was part of the competition at the international section of the Clermont Ferrand film festival.

Her debut feature film Hard Goodbyes: My Father (2002) premiered in the 55th Locarno Film Festival where it was awarded the Bronze Leopard for Best Actor, and the ecumenical jury prize. In the Thessaloniki International Film Festival the film won the FIPRESCI prize and the award for Best Actor. Among numerous international festivals, the film participated in the Toronto International Film Festival in the Discovery Section, and set out for an acclaimed international career followed by many awards at many festivals worldwide.

September (2013), premiered in the official competition of the 48th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival to critical acclaim, was nominated for six Hellenic Film Academy Awards and won the award for best leading actress.

Wishbone (2024) is her third feature film.

Dimitris Koutsiabasakos is a director. He studied film and television directing at the Russian State University of Cinematography in Moscow (V.G.I.K.) and is a professor at the Film Department of the School of Fine Arts at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He has directed, among others, the documentaries The Weavers, Silent Witness, Becoming An Actor, The Grocer, as well as his latest feature Daniel ’16.

Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Oxford, Dimitris Papanikolaou is the author of Singing Poets: Literature and popular music in France and Greece (Legenda/Routledge: 2007), “Those People Made Like Me”: Queer Cavafy and the poetics of sexuality (in Greek; Patakis: 2014), There is Something About the Family: Nation, desire and kinship at a time of crisis (in Greek; Patakis: 2018) and Greek Weird Wave: A cinema of biopolitics (Edinburgh University Press: 2021). Founding member of the collective Greek Studies Now and the Journal of Greek Media and Culture, for which he has co-edited special issues on Cavafy Pop (2014), New Queer Greece (2018) and Greece and the South (2022). He has also co-edited volumes on queer memory and politics and on the history of Greek cinema. See www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/papanikolaou

Effie Pappa is an award winning director (animation and live action) based in Athens and London. Her work explores characters and discusses universal themes depicting human concerns through allegory, absurdism and humour. Her films have been screened and awarded internationally; with her stand out film My Stuffed Granny, winning twenty awards for Best short film (Edinburgh Film Festival, Tokyo Anime Awards, Palm Springs, Hamptons) and screening in hundreds, including Annecy’s official selection.

Effie also directs selective commercials and music videos – Wild World by Yusuf/Cat Stevens, and The Little Elephant by George Hadjipieris, are amongst the most popular ones, gaining more than 80 Million Youtube views.

In 2022 her latest short IN BETWEEN is being released, and a year later she directs Mailchimp’s All in a Day’s Work season 2, a six stop motion episodes series.

In 2023, she launches Dr.Happy Productions, and develops a 2D Animated Kids TV Show called My Name is Lulo!.

Her work is featured in Rolling Stone, BFI Showcase, Short of the Week, ABC and The Fader amongst others.

Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian-Danish visual artist who works mainly with film, and also produces installations, photos and sculptures. Central to her work is the dialectics between myth and historical narrative. Her work often uses science fiction to address social and political issues, dealing with memory, inherited traumas, power structures and nation states.  

In 2020, Sansour was the recipient of the Jarman award. Her work is shown in film festivals and museums worldwide amongst which, the Tate Modern, MoMA, Centre Pompidou and the Istanbul Biennial. In 2019, Sansour represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale. Her current solo shows in 2024 are ‘Indigo is the Colour of Grief’ at Göteborgs Konsthall in Sweden and a retrospective of her work at Amos Rex Museum in Helsinki, Finland.

She lives and works in London in the UK.

Nasos Gatzoulis is a music video and commercial director based in Los Angeles and Athens. His short film called Tim of the Jungle has screened at festivals all over the world, including Camerimage, LA SHORTS International Film Festival, and was an official pick in Short of the Week. His Documentary Toxic Magnus won multiple awards, including the Best Documentary Award at the Drama International Short Film Festival in 2022. Currently, he is in the preproduction of his first feature film, Stop Doing That.

Nikoleta Leousi is a director and editor from Athens. Her work focuses on stories with a strong central character with a backdrop of social and political turmoil.

Nikoleta’s short films have been screened in multiple international festivals. Generator (2013) won the Award of the Greek Film Critics Association, while 37 Days (2018) premiered in the 2019 Rotterdam International Film Festival and won the Best Script award at the 24th Athens International Film Festival. Her latest film Non-essential Movement (2024) was part of national selection of the Drama International Short Film Festival. She is a Berlinale and Sarajevo Talents alumna.

Anna Poupou is an assistant professor of Film History and Theory at the department of Digital Arts and Cinema at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her research interests include urban space in cinema, the history of European post-war cinema, contemporary Greek cinema, and cinematic narrative in relation to other forms of expression – theatre, literature and digital games. Poupou A., Fessas N., Chalkou M. (eds.) Greek Film Noir, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2022, and Nikolaidou A., Poupou A. (eds.) The lost avenue of Greek cinema, 1960-1990. Nefeli, Athens, 2019.