Jury & Awards
The award ceremony of the 22nd Verzió Film Festival will take place on 19th November at 19:30 at the lobby of Toldi cinema. The ceremony is open to the public and requires no registration.
The Closing film, LOVE-22-LOVE screening starts at 20:30 at Toldi cinema. A limited number of tickets are available at the cinema box office and online.
Hungarian Competition Jury
MARIA KRAUSS (1981), documentary film producer, manager of cultural projects; social activist. Co-founder of a boutique production company Plesnar & Krauss FILMS. Produced and co-produced strong character driven documentaries screened and awarded at national and international festivals. She has wide experience in international co-productions and in industry events. Participated in several editions of Doc Lab Poland, Baltic Sea Docs, EDP and Match Me! during Locarno FF or Visions du Reel-Pitching. Last titles she is involved is “In The Rearview (won dozens of prizes all over the world, shortlisted for Oscars), Faces of Agata (nominated for Polish Film Awards Eagles) or The Guest (best Cinematography Award at IDFA). Member of Polish Producers Alliance KIPA, Polish Film Academy and European Film Academy.
Lie has a background as newspaper and magazine editor – for 30 years. He is the editor of the 'cinepolitical' documentary magazine Modern Times Review (since 2017). As a filmmaker he also creates essayistic documentaries. He is now working on the feature "Palestine – Three Essays on Freedom".
Igor Stanojević is a Serbian filmmaker and film curator. He is the author of numerous short films which have been screened and awarded at international film festivals. He is currently in postproduction on his next film Vidasil (TBD). He has been the Director of Programming of Beldocs IDFF since 2018.
International Competition Jury
Eroll Bilibani is a film producer based in Kosovo. His work includes award-winning short films like ON THE WAY, DISPLACED, IN BETWEEN, and HOME. He leads DokuLab, the educational program of DokuFest, where he supports young filmmakers and develops programs that use film and storytelling to explore social issues and complex topics.
Eroll also coordinates DokuFest’s Short Film Forum, the first platform of its kind in the Western Balkans. He currently serves as Chair of the Kosovo Cinematography Center Council and is a member of the European Film Academy.
Júlia Hack is a film editor based in Budapest, Hungary. She graduated in Film Editing from the University of Theatre and Film Arts in 2011, and previously completed the university’s Television Production program under the guidance of documentary filmmaker Ibolya Fekete. With over 15 years of experience, she has worked across both fiction and documentary, editing numerous television series and feature projects. Her credits include HBO original productions such as In Treatment (Terápia), Golden Life (Aranyélet), and The Informant (A besúgó), as well as the large-scale historical series Hunyadi. She has collaborated with acclaimed directors including Ildikó Enyedi, Orsi Nagypál, Attila Gigor, Zsombor Dyga, and Áron Mátyássy.
Passionate about documentary storytelling, she edited Anna Rubi’s ‘Your Life Without Me’, a project she followed over five years. The film received multiple awards, including Best Hungarian Documentary and the Audience Award at the 21st Verzió Film Festival, and the Human Rights Award at the 30th Sarajevo Film Festival. Member of the Hungarian Society of Film and Video Editors (HSE) and the Hungarian Documentary Association ( HDA).
Doc Future Competition Jury
OLIVER SERTIĆ is a documentary producer and festival programmer from Croatia, currently living in Bucharest, Romania. Until now, he has produced and co-produced around 40 feature and short documentary and experimental films. For 18 years, worked as a journalist and editor-in-chief in different media and as an organizer of cultural events. The founder of the organization RESTART (2007), where he established Restart Laboratory, Dokukino, and the distribution department Restart Label. The last 15 years has been tutoring at the School of Documentary Film in Zagreb. Has cooperated with numerous film festivals as a PR, programmer, producer, and advisor (Zagreb FF, ZagrebDox, DokuFest, Vukovar FF, Makedox, DORF, RAF, Supetar Super FF, Moldox…). Since 2007, he has worked as a selector and programming director at the Liburnia Film Festival, a Croatian documentary film festival in Opatija, where he served as director for nine years.
Young Jury
Irem Aysin Deprem is originally from Turkey and have been living in Budapest since 2018. She studied Film and Media for my BA and currently pursuing her MA in Art and Design Management. Alongside her studies, she works on film productions. She is currently exploring ways to connect her curatorial studies with her filmmaking background.
Amina Ghazouani came from Tunisia and she is a PhD researcher in Budapest at ELTE. Her passion for cinema started very young, when her father would bring them DVDs every saturday and they had been look forward to every end of the week to watch it. Once her mom would reward their hard work in school by taking them to the movie theaters, her passion grew stronger. She enjoys watching movies and writing small commentaries on Letterboxd.
Éva Nádasdi is a 25-year-old aspiring poet and journalist. She recently finished her master’s degree in Media and Communication. In 2024 she covered the Verzió Film Festival as a journalist, and it was an inspiring experience.
Her favorite documentary is The Salt of the Earth by Wim Wenders, which is very close to the kind of films she truly admires. She is especially drawn to slow, atmospheric movies that she can completely immerse herself in. For her films are like poetry — and sometimes she imagines poems as documentary films.
Botond Polecsák was born in Budapest and is currently studying photography and filmmaking in high school. After graduation, he plans to continue his studies, focusing on photography and cinematography. His connection with cinema goes back to his childhood, but it was only about a year ago that he began taking it seriously, especially the side of it behind the camera. This year, his first short film was selected for the Országos Diákfilmszemle Festival, and it won first place in its category at the Lift-Off Global Network Festival in the UK.
Solongo Soninbayar is a filmmaker based in Budapest. She holds a Master's degree in Filmmaking from Eötvös Loránd University. Formerly a TV producer, she is currently developing her documentary short film and writing research on the representation of identity in diasporic cinema. She is interested in personal documentary films that show simple yet complex human emotions. Her favorite documentaries include I’m Not Everything I Want to Be, Fragments of a Life Loved and Fire of Love.
