Grand Jury

Anders Østergaard, Denmark

Anders Østergaard was born in Copenhagen in 1965. He completed studies in journalism in 1991 and spent the next few years working in advertising and public relations. Eight years after making his debut documentary Johannesburg Revisited (1996), he won international acclaim for his film Tintin and Me (2004) about the European comics genius Georges Rémi. This film was given a Bodil Award by Danish film critics, as was the director’s next work Gasolin’ (2006) – the biggest selling documentary in Danish history about the celebrated rock band of the same name. By far the most important piece in Østergaard’s oeuvre, however, is his unique film Burma VJ (2008). This documentary about the Saffron Revolution in one of the world’s most repressive regimes in Burma, south Asia, won a number of prizes at international festivals, including the Vaclav Havel Special Award at last year’s One World.

Dariusz Kowalski, Poland

The Polish documentary-maker Dariusz Kowalski graduated in psychology from Warsaw University, and worked for several years as a TV producer. As a scriptwriter and director, he made educational series for Polish TV (TVP), the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights and the Polish Humanitarian Organization (PAH). Kowalski is the founder and also the first managing director of Warsaw’s Watch Docs international human rights festival. He established the Social Film Institute (SIF) in 2005, and began collaborating with the documentary distributor Ragusa Film two years later. He currently works for the programme department of the DocBoat film showcase, Poland’s first online festival. At the end of last year, Kowalski launched a foundation that promotes the genre documentary in Poland.

Linda Jablonská, Czech Republic

Linda Jablonská was born thirty years ago in Prague. After finishing high school, she studied at the Documentary Film Department of the FAMU film school. She graduated in 2006 with the feature-length film Left, Right, Forward. This picture about young people with political ambitions was distributed in cinemas and won awards at the Jihlava IDFF, Famufest and Febiofest festivals. In her work, the director often focuses on human rights themes and controversial contemporary issues. In 2008, she made Czech Heat, a film which recorded the attitudes of Czechs to climate change. A year later, she shot the short film Breaking the Circle, documenting the work of a Doctors without Borders mission in Guatemala, which helps victims of sexual violence. Linda Jablonská’s most recent film is Welcome to North Korea (2009) about a tourist visit to the Asian dictatorship. This was screened in Czech cinemas in February 2009 and will be shown at this year’s One World festival as part of the One World On-line section.

Masha Novikova, Russia

Moscow-native Masha Novikova originally made her living as a Russian language and literature teacher. She later worked in a German-language theatre in Kazakhstan. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, she moved to the Netherlands, where she studied cinematography, script-writing and film direction. In 2005, she directed her first film Fallen Angel, a documentary about the East European skin trade. Novikova has never hidden the shame she feels about her own country’s attitude to Chechens. She developed this theme in her feature-length documentary Three Comrades (2006), which will be presented at this year’s festival as part of the One World On-line section. She continued her unconcealed criticism of Russia in documentary portraits of two murdered opponents of the current Russian political establishment: In Memoriam: Aleksander Litvinenko (2007), which she made with the director Jos de Putter, and Anna, Seven Years on the Frontline (2008), about the dissident journalist Anna Politkovskaya.