Jury for the IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film at IDFA 2021

​Susanne  Guggenberger 

Susanne  Guggenberger has been producing documentaries for Mira Film since 2012. Recent titles are Taming the Garden (Salomé Jashi, 2021) and Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes (Sophie Huber, 2018). She is passionate about aesthetic diversity and film as a medium for exploring realities. As an analogue counterpart she has been creating mail art for decades that has been gifted to her pen friends. Since October 2021 she is the artistic director of Bildrausch Film Festival Basel which presents an exquisite selection of outstanding narrative films, documentaries and experimental films.

Born in the Austrian Alps, Guggenberger studied communication science and history at the University of Salzburg. Since 1998 she has been working with a focus on documentary film with various production companies in Vienna. She gained experience in distribution at Autlook Filmsales as well as through her roles at DOK Leipzig and Visions du Réel.

​Sacha Polak

Sacha Polak is an award-winning director and scriptwriter. Hemel, her first feature-length film, got selected in the Berlinale Forum in 2012, where it won the FIPRESCI Award. Her second feature film Zurich premiered at Berlinale 2015 and won the Jury Award for Best Film in the Forum Competition.

Polak’s first English language feature Dirty God (2019), which she directed and co-wrote, premiered at Sundance in the main competition. Last year she worked on two episodes of the Amazon TV show Hanna that will premiere in November. She is currently shooting the feature film Silver Haze in London.

​Farahnaz Sharifi

Farahnaz Sharifi is a documentary filmmaker and film editor living and working in Iran. Her films include The Revolutionary Memories of Bahman Who Loved Leila (winner of the Grand Prize at Uppsala International Film Festival 2013), Destiny (Best Mid-Length Documentary at Al Jazeera Film Festival 2007), Missing (2016), and the ensemble film Profession: Documentarist, which received the Tim Harrington Prize at Sheffield Documentary Film Festival in addition to Best Documentary Feature Prize at Women’s Voices Now.

Sharifi has also edited several award-winning Iranian films. One of the latest, Radiograph of a Family (Firouzeh Khosrovani, 2020), won the prize for Best Editing at the Iranian Independent Documentary Film Association, as well as the IDFA Awards for Best Feature-Length Documentary and Best Creative Use of Archive. Other works include a collection of short stories titled Sleeping in Open Air. Currently Sharifi works as co-director on her latest film titled Letters from Ms. Iran.