Jury 2020

Aistė Žegulytė (born in 1986), studied photography at Vilnius College of Technologies and Design from 2006 to 2009. In 2009 she started Television and Film Directing studies at the Lithuanian Music and Theater Academy, she completed her degree with her short-length documentary Identities (Lith. Tapatumai). She completed her Master of Film degree in 2015. During her study years she created a few fictional and documentary short films, they were screened in national and international film festivals. Film Animus Animalis (2018) is her first feature length documentary. It premiered at the prestigious Dok Leipzig festival, in the Next Masters competition. The film has been screened at numerous film festivals in Europe and America and is successfully continuing its journey around the world.

After crossing paths in 1999, CITIA took in Sébastien Sperer to become part of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival “network server”. The adventure has nourished his limitless dreams by enabling him to try his hand at selecting and planning programmes, moderating panels and conferences, being a jury member and much more besides: like presenting a “Best of Annecy” programme at other festivals since 2011, and organizing short film screenings in prisons, health care homes, bistrots and churches since 2013. Whether at home or abroad, Sébastien strives to make Animation accessible to all and the medium where everything is possible… a sort of common ground where a human experience can exist without filters or rules. With this in mind, he created the Midnight Special “WTF” programmes in 2017, followed by “WTF2018” and “WTF2019”. He is fascinated by the mobilizing force inherent to the magic of film and is driven to “Promote intercultural understanding through animated film, dialogue and transmission”.

Dora Nedeczky is an award-winning Hungarian producer, owner of the Budapest / Tallinn based art film production company, Mindwax. Her recent works include the arthouse horror anthology The Field Guide to Evil (2018) – segment The Cobblers’ Lot which premiered at SXSW, and The Rabbit Hunt (2017) by Patrick Bresnan, a short documentary, which – after premiering at Sundance Film Festival, playing in the Berlinale Shorts Competition – won “Best Documentary Short award” at Sheffield Doc/Fest, among seven other Academy qualifying awards. Dora’s latest short film GUO4 (2019) by Peter Strickland premiered at the 76th Venice Film Festival and nominated for the Short Film Award at the 63rd BFI London Film Festival. Her latest feature length film Empty Horses (2019) by experimental film director Péter Lichter premiered at the 23rd Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival and is selected to the 49th International Film Festival Rotterdam. Dora is in development with King of Fashion / Király Tamás by Noémi Varga supported by Creative Europe’s MEDIA Programme.