Jury of the Competition Programme – Documentary Film of the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival

 

 

Palestinian filmmaker and artist Kamal Aljafari is known for his distinctive approach to cinema. He studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and has held teaching positions at The New School in New York and the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin. He was awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University and a fellowship at The Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris (2024–2025). As of September 2025, he is a resident at the Académie des beaux-arts x Cité internationale des arts in Paris. His installation The Camera of the Dispossessed was shown at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo in 2023. Retrospectives of his work have been presented at the IndieLisboa festival at the Portuguese Cinematheque (2024), the Madrid Spanish Cinematheque (2025), the Mexican National Cinematheque, and the Torino Film Museum (2026). His most recent work, With Hasan in Gaza, premiered in 2025 in the International Competition at the Locarno Film Festival, where it was awarded the Europa Cinemas Label, as well as at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival. The film has received main awards at DMZ Docs, the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, CINEMED, and Festival dei Popoli, and was nominated for a European Film Academy award. 

 

 

Born in Wels, Upper Austria, festival director Sabine Gebetsroither studied German philology, media, and film studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, and Aarhus University, Denmark. She has worked for renowned film festivals, including the Film Festival Cottbus – Festival of East European Cinema (Germany) and the Reykjavík International Film Festival (Iceland). Since 2004, she has held various positions at the CROSSING EUROPE Film Festival Linz (Austria) and has served as its co-director since November 2021. From 2015 to 2021, she was also a member of the Film Commission of the Province of Upper Austria. 

 

 

Ollie Huddleston is an award-winning film editor with nearly 40 years of experience working on documentaries. He has worked with many of the documentary world's leading lights, including Kim Longinotto, Adam Curtis, Sean McAllister, Marc Isaacs, Angus Macqueen, and Aliona Van der Horst. He has won two Royal Television Society editing awards and has been twice nominated for a BAFTA. His films have won many prizes at festivals all over the world, including Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go at IDFA, The Liberace of Baghdad, Rough Aunties, and Dreamcatcher at Sundance, and Sisters in Law at Cannes. He has worked as an edit consultant on many award-winning documentaries, sat on festival juries, and taken part in edit workshops and masterclasses all around the world. He is a member of the Rough Cut Service, a select group of internationally acclaimed editors who consult on and support international documentaries. He is currently working on a personal project, An Unusual Childhood.