Main Competition Jury

Rudi Dolezal, born in Vienna, Austria, founded his European-based company DoRo more than 25 years ago with his partner Hannes Rossacher. He has directed and produced more than 1,000 music videos, 500 documentaries, 500 concert films, commercials, image films, short films, and television shows. He has directed and worked with well-known and exceptionally talented artists such as The Rolling Stones, U2, Queen, Miles Davis, David Bowie, and Liza Minnelli among countless other international stars. Dolezal was nominated in 2002 for a Grammy® for best long-form music video for Freddie Mercury: Lover of Life, Singer of Song – the Untold Story, which he directed and produced.

Mike Goodridge is US editor of UK-based Screen International and its sister website Screendaily.com. Based in Los Angeles, he supervises all US coverage for the magazine and is an active film critic as well as in charge of the daily publications at various international film festivals. English-born, he still also writes on film for The Evening Standard and Sight And Sound in the UK, as well as national daily El Mundo in Spain. His first book Directing was published in 2000. It consisted of in-depth interviews with 15 of the world's greatest film-makers including Pedro Almodovar, Roman Polanski, Bernardo Bertolucci and Lars Von Trier. Goodridge is a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and The Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Udo Kier is well-known internationally for his striking onscreen presence. In films ranging from art to horror, Kier has played many memorably villainous characters. This German-born leading man has worked with a number of important directors including his lifelong friend Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Before long, his acting career, which has now spanned three decades, was underway. Kier has appeared in numberous Lars von Trier films including Epidemic (1987) and Zentropa/Europa (1991). More recently, he has appeared in American films such as Breaking the Waves (1996) and Grindhouse (2007) and is next slated to appear in Far Cry (2008) and Lulu and Jimi (2008).

Jiri Menzel (b. 1938, Prague, Czech Republic) is a director, screenwriter, and actor from the Czech Republic. Considered an influential part of the Czech New Wave, his first feature, Closely Watched Trains, won an Oscar® for best foreign-language film in 1967. His controversial film Larks on a String, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1990, was originally made in 1969 but banned by the Czech government, and his dark comedy, My Sweet Little Village, was nominated for an Oscar® in 1986.

Claude Nouchi is a successful French producer, distributor, and international sales agent. He began his career in film in 1964 as an assistant editor and assistant artistic director, and in 1976, he created World Marketing Firm, a distributor that represented over 300 films worldwide in its 20-year run. He is working as an international consultant for the French sales agent and theatrical distributor Colifilms Diffusion, France's leading distributor of Spanish-language films as well as of films in other Latin languages. Many award-winning Colifilms films have participated in notable international festivals, and Nouchi produced Jacques Nolot’s new film, Before I Forget, which is screening in this year’s Festival.

Maryse Sistach graduated from the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica and emerged onto the Mexican filmmaking scene with a generation of women filmmakers in the ’80s. Her final student work, Y si platicamos de agosto? (1980), won the Ariel Award for best short feature film. In 1988, Sistach received international attention for her first feature film, Los Pasos de Ana. In 1996, Sistach, alongside partner José Buil, earned the Silver Ariel Award for best feature-length documentary for La Línea paterna. The two went on to create the “Trilogy of Cruelty” that includes the award-winning Violet Perfume: Nobody Hears You, which Sistach is wrote and directed.

New Directors Jury

Phillip Bergson, a film critic and screenwriter, founded the Oxford Film Festival at Balliol College, where he was a student. After graduating, he was selected as a “New Critic” by the Sunday Times and soon began working on various BBC radio programs and writing internationally for magazines. A member of FIPRESCI and the British Critics’ Circle, Bergson is a seasoned international film festival juror who served at Berlin and Cannes. Bergson is a lecturer and, in his native Yorkshire, a consultant for the National Media Museum.

Elizabeth Donius is a University of Chicago graduate and the executive director of IFP/Chicago (Independent Feature Project). Previously she worked in the publicity department of the PBS independent documentary showcase P.O.V. and as a segment producer for the Independent Film Channel program Split Screen. In collaboration with childhood friend Amy Elliott, Donius has worked on film and video projects for the last 10 years. The two created the black-and-white feature Headless in 1997, and recently World’s Largest, their documentary featuring hundreds of small towns that boast the "world's largest" somethings as their claims to fame, is in post-production.

Ron Falzone is an award-winning screenwriter and tenured member of the full-time faculty of the Film and Video Department of Columbia College Chicago. In addition, Ron is the host of two screening series: Talk Cinema in Chicago and Evanston and Cinema Slapdown at Columbia College. Ron is the author of 14 feature-length screenplays and one opera and has developed and written stage plays for such Chicago-area theaters as Goodman Theatre, City Lit Theater Company, and Organic Theater Company. As a freelance writer, Ron has contributed essays to the Home Vision DVD releases of Vittorio De Sica’s A Brief Vacation and the Oscar®-winning foreign-language films Dangerous Moves and Black and White in Color and spent six years as a film critic for Staticmultimedia, a popular industry-related Ezine. Ron is a year 2000 recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship in Screenwriting, a 2006 winner of the IAC Finalist Award, and a 10-time Artist in Residence at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois.

Bill Stamets is a freelance film reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times and a part-time instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. Stamets was the video director for Chicago in the Year 2000 (CITY 2000), a year-long project to create a photographic archive of Chicago. Previously he contributed to Impact Visuals, a cooperative agency of photojournalists. His Super 8 films have screened at Chicago Filmmakers, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His Super 8 documentary of Chicago Politics: A Theatre of Power was released by MPI Home Video in 1987.

Docufest Competition Jury

Clayton Brown is a narrative and documentary filmmaker and co-founder of 137 Films, a non-profit documentary production company. His latest film, The Atom Smashers, is in post-production and in distribution negotiations. Brown’s films have been screened across the country, including at the Los Angeles International Film Festival and the Independent Feature Project Market in New York. Brown teaches documentary and narrative film production at Northwestern University.

Peter Gilbert has had a distinguished career in producing, directing, and photographing documentaries, feature films, commercials, and music videos. He is currently finishing At The Death House Door, with Steve James and Kartemquin Films for The Independent Film Channel. He is a partner in Foreground Films, in New York; a director with Nonfiction Spots, in Los Angeles; and an associate of Kartemquin Films, in Chicago.

Lisa Nesselson was raised in Chicago and has been Variety's film critic in Paris, France since 1991. A well-rounded individual whose interests include movies, cinema, and film, she suspects her youthful exposure to the eclectic offerings of the Chicago International Film Festival contributed to her subsequent life of drudgery as a film critic. If she ran the world, Marshall Field's would have retained its name and the Granada, Nortown, and Adelphi theaters would still be
standing.