Festival Jury
Festival Jury 2009
The memers of Emotion Pictures 2009 Jury are:
- Theo Angelopoulos
- Soheir Abdel Kader
- Katerina Koskina
- Nicolas Peyre
- Aris Tastanis
Festival's Artistic Director:
- Maria Hadjimichali - Papaliou
Theo Angelopoulos
He was born in Athens in 1936 to a family of merchants and studied law at the University of Athens. After completing his military service, he went to Paris to attend the Sorbonne and then enrolled to study film in the prestigious French film school IDHEC. He worked for a time at the Musée de l'Homme under the tutelage of Jean Rouch, the ethnographer and pioneer of cinéma vérité film. He returned to Athens in 1964 and, until 1967, was a film critic for the leftist paper "Democratic Change".
His first attempt at making a film was in 1965. The film was entitled The Forminx Story but it was never completed due to a disagreement with the producers. His first short film was Broadcast and in 1970 he made his first full-length feature film Reconstruction.
Since then his films have participated in countless international festivals and have won numerous awards that have established his reputation as one of the most influential directors in contemporary cinema.
Indicative Filmography: The Traveling Players (1975, FIPRESCI Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival), Megalexandros (1980, Gold Lion, Venice Film Festival), Voyage to Cythera (1984, Best Screenplay, Cannes), Landscape in the Mist (1988, Silver Lion, Best Director, Venice), Ulyssee's Gaze (1995, Grand Prix, Cannes), Eternity and a Day (1998, Golden Palm, Cannes), The Dust of Time (2008).
Soheir Abdel Kader
She earned a bachelor's in Arts from Ain Shams University, Cairo. She has been a member of the Union of Arab Artists since 1997. She has served as Cultural Mass & Public Relation Secretary General at the Egyptian Ministry of Culture and as director (1995-1998) and vice-president (1998-present) of Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF). She has put a lot of work in marketing CIFF and has been a key to its promotion to a category "A" festival (1997).
Soheir Abdel Kader has taken part in important film festivals: Cannes (since 1987), Karlovy Vary, Shanghai, Lucarno, Asfahan etc. She was a jury member of San Francisco Film Festival, Isfahan Film Festival (Iran) and Sousse Film Festival (Tunisia).
Moreover, Soheir Abdel Kader is very active in promoting children's cinema. She was President of Jury in Moscow International Film Festival for Children and jury member for Lucas International Film Festival for Children (Germany). She has worked for the Centre International du Film pour l'Enfance et la Jeunesse and is the founder and director of Cairo International Film Festival for Children (CIFFC). She was the one who first established the idea of Children Jury members within the CIFFC. She served as consultant for the Egyptian National Day for Children, held in 1994 under the auspices of the First Lady of Egypt, and she also established Charity Market for Handicapped and Orphans in conjunction with CIFFC (1998-present).
Katerina Koskina
Art Historian-Museologist, President of the Board of Trustees of the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece, and Artistic Director of the J. F. Costopoulos Foundation, Athens.
Katerina Koskina was born in Corfu. She studied French Literature at the University of Athens, as well as History of Art, Archaeology, Modern Greek Literature, and Philosophy of Art at Paris I, Sorbonne University. In addition, she studied History of Art, Archaeology, and Museology at the Ecole du Louvre. She has a PhD in Art History.
She worked at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi as a Special Advisor for visual arts for four years. She has organized, directed and/or curated group and one-man shows and she was the Greek Commissioner at the 23rd Biennale of Sao Paulo in 1996 and the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. She has also contributed essays to several books and exhibition catalogues. She is a member of ICOM and of AICA Hellas. From 2000 to 2004 she was Artistic Consultant to the Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games/Athens 2004 SA.
Since 1998 she has also been a member of the Artistic Committee of the Athens METRO. Since 1992 she has been Curator of the Alpha Bank Art Collection.
Nicolas Peyre
Nicolas Peyre serves as Audiovisual Attaché at the French Embassy in Greece and the French Institute of Athens since September 2007. He is also the director of the Francophone Film Festival of Greece which is organised by the French Embassy and the French Institute of Athens. He has a long experience in the audiovisual sector in France (as producer and agent) and has served as director of Alliance Française (organisation for the promotion of French language and culture) in Buenos Aires and the alliances françaises network in Argentina.
Aris Tastanis
He was born in Parakoila on the island of Lesbos in 1953. Early on he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy affecting his upper arms and legs. This fact, his father's activities in the Resistance and the persecutions of the Civil War forced his family to move to Athens. He has been using a wheelchair since the age of twenty, forced to maneuver in a dysfunctional hospital system and in conditions of social exclusion. Egged on by the need to escape from all this he began to study literary texts and to write poetry. His first poem entitled You can (1976) was included in the calendar of the International Union of Disabled Artists and circulated in thirteen languages.
The fundamental elements of his work are the struggles, the dreams and the agonies of ordinary people and the yearning for Aiolida. He writes articles in Athens and country papers and magazines. As a radio producer he supervises and presents a series of programs on the subject of disability (1983). He is a founding member of the Hellenic Paraplegic Society, a member of the Society of Greek Writers, of Amnesty International, of the Support Committee for Political Refugees and of Disabled Citizens Intervention. He publishes the magazine Parakoila Stories (1983) and the cultural magazine Glyphada-Upper Lower (2002). He has also published twelve books. The Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation's ERT 2 channel has produced a documentary on his work.
Maria Hadjimichali - Papaliou
Born in Athens she is a film producer and director. Her directorial credits include many documentaries and television series, which have won awards in Greece and abroad (Award of the Athens Academy, FIPRESCI Award, Henry Ford Award, etc.) They have also been screened at international film festivals (Cannes, Mannheim, Locarno, Vienna, Festival dei Popoli etc.) and have been aired by 49 television channels worldwide. Retrospectives of her work have been held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the French Academy of Arts and Letters in Paris, the Louvre Museum, the British Museum, the Copenhagen Museum, etc. Her films are also in over 500 university libraries in America and Europe. Maria Hadjimichali - Papaliou is a member of the Greek National Committee for UNESCO and artistic director of "Emotion Pictures: Documentary and Disability" International Festival.
