Jury for the International Competition

Grace Lee is a Korean American filmmaker whose work combines personal storytelling, humor, and compelling characters to reframe how we see history, power and community. She was a director/producer on the Peabody-winning Asian Americans documentary series (2020) and And She Could Be Next (2020) about women of color transforming US politics. Other credits include The Grace Lee Project (2005), Off the Menu: Asian America (2015) and K-Town ’92 (2017), an interactive online project about the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest. Her work has screened at festivals such as Sundance, Toronto, Tribeca, Busan, was broadcast on PBS and Sundance Channel, and won two Peabody Awards, Emmy and NAACP Image Award nominations as well as multiple festival audience awards. Lee has been supported by the United States Artist Fellowship, MacArthur Foundation, Sundance Institute, IDA Enterprise Fund and others. She is a co-founder of the Asian American Documentary Network (A-Doc), serves on the board of the International Documentary Association and is a member of the AMPAS Documentary branch. 

Kazuhiro Soda is a filmmaker practicing an observational method of documentary filmmaking based on his own “Ten Commandments,” which prohibit him from doing pre-shoot research or writing a synopsis before filming. His films have received numerous awards including the Peabody Award for Campaign in 2008, the Best Documentary Awards at Busan International Film Festival 2008 and Dubai International Film Festival 2009 for Mental, the Best Documentary Award at Hong Kong International Film Festival 2011 for Peace, the Best Film Award at Festival des 3 Continents 2020 and the Ecumenical Prize at the Berlinale 2020 for Zero. He received the Marek Nowicki lifetime achievement prize awarded by the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. Soda is the author of nine books published in Japanese. His book Why I Make Documentaries (2023) has been translated into English, Korean, and Chinese. His latest film The Cats of Gokogu Shrine will be screened in the Signed section of IDFA 2024. 

Sophie Fiennes is a filmmaker and independent producer. Her formally inventive approach often combines observational documentary with performance film. Fiennes’ films include Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami (2017), Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010), her collaborations with philosopher Slavoj Žižek: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2013), and her most recent film Acting (2024). Fiennes’ films have been selected internationally for festivals including Cannes, Toronto, Rotterdam, IDFA and Sundance and are distributed theatrically and on broadcast television. Museums including MOMA (New York), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebaek, Denmark), Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art (Sapporo, Japan), Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid) have shown her work. Fiennes was awarded a NESTA fellowship in 2001 to support her innovative approach to filmmaking. In 2023 Tate acquired the installation current/SEE, which comprises a 13-minute extract from her film The Late Michael Clark (1999). 

Juliana Fanjul is a director and producer of non-fiction films. After studying Communication in Mexico City, she specialized in documentary filmmaking at the Cuban film academy EICTV. She continued her studies in Switzerland, where she obtained a Master’s degree in filmmaking at the Haute École d’Art et Design in Geneva and École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne. Her first feature film Muchachas (Visions du Réel, 2015) focuses on domestic workers and won the Grand Prix at the Paris Human Rights Film Festival. Radio Silence (IDFA 2019), a portrait of Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui, opened the Ambulante Festival 2020 and won a dozen awards. In 2022, she co-directed Becoming a Black Woman, the first film to address the issue of racism suffered by black Swiss women, which won a Swiss Film Award. Fanjul has been a jury member in several festivals. Since 2019 she’s in charge of the Documentary Chair of EICTV. 

Asmae El Moudir is a Moroccan film director, screenwriter and producer. After gaining degrees in film from several Moroccan academic institutions, she went on to study at La Fémis in Paris. Asmae has directed several award-winning short films. Her first theatrical documentary feature The Mother of All Lies premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Directing Prize in the Un Certain Regard section as well as the Golden Eye for Best Documentary. The Mother of All Lies was also shortlisted in the International features section of the Oscars and nominated for the Film Independent Spirit Awards. The film screened at Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance, and Busan, among many other international film festivals. Asmae was nominated for the PGA Award for Outstanding Documentary Producer. Most recently, she won the IDA Award for Best Director. In 2023, she was named a member of the Un Certain Regard jury at Cannes, headed by Xavier Dolan.