Jury for the IDFA Award for Best First Feature at IDFA 2021
Mahdi Fleifel
Mahdi Fleifel is a director and producer of critically acclaimed documentaries. In 2010 he cofounded the London based production company Nakba FilmWorks. He is a graduate of the National Film & Television School (UK) where he studied Fiction Directing under Stephen Frears and Pawel Pawlikowski.
His debut, A World Not Ours (2012), received over 30 awards, including the Berlinale Peace Prize, the Edinburgh, Yamagata and DOC:NYC Grand Jury Prizes. In 2016 Fleifel won a Silver Bear for A Man Returned. His follow-up, A Drowning Man (2017), was in the Official Competition at Cannes and nominated for a BAFTA. I Signed the Petition won Best Documentary Short at IDFA and was nominated for the 2018 European Film Awards.
Daniella Shreir
Daniella Shreir is the founding editor of Another Gaze, a print and online journal exploring films and feminism. She is also the founder and programmer of Another Screen, an irregular streaming platform, free and available worldwide with subtitles in multiple languages, that launched this year and has so far showcased work by filmmakers including Cecilia Mangini, Carole Roussopoulos, Marguerite Duras, and a large program dedicated to the work of Palestinian women filmmakers.
She works as a literary and non-fiction translator from the French, with her translation of Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs receiving a PEN award in 2019.
Jacqueline Zünd
Jacqueline Zünd is a director whose three feature documentary films Goodnight Nobody (2010), Almost There (2016) and Where We Belong (2019) have been screened at international film festivals including Berlinale, Cannes, Visions du Réel, Locarno, IDFA Amsterdam, Dok Leipzig, Mostra Sao Paulo, and received numerous awards.
After studying journalism in Zürich, Switzerland, Zünd moved to London to study at the London Film School. This was followed by a two-year stay in Rome at the Istituto Svizzero di Roma, where she wrote her first screenplay and made short films in the field of video art. Zünd has been teaching since 2011 at the Zurich University of the Arts and since 2020 she also teaches at the Master’s program of ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne and HEAD, Haute école d’art et de design, Genève. She is currently working on the pre-production of Don’t Let the Sun (Catch You Crying), her fiction debut.
