Jury for the IDFA Competition for Short Documentary at IDFA 2021
Eliane Esther Bots
Eliane Esther Bots is a Dutch filmmaker, whose latest film In Flow of Words won several awards, including the Pardi di Domani Best Director – BONALUMI Engineering Award at the Locarno Film Festival, and has been nominated for the European Film Awards. Bots graduated from the University of the Arts Utrecht, Netherlands and the Master of Film at The Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam. Her films have been screened at festivals such as IDFA, Locarno, Berlin, Cinema du Réel (France), New York Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Germany), Go Short (Netherlands), Glasgow Short Film Festival (UK), Kassel Dokfest (Germany).
Eliane Bots currently works as a lecturer at the University of the Arts in Utrecht, Netherlands and has been lecturing at other art universities such as the Master of Film at The Netherlands Film Academy and ArtEZ Zwolle. She has also been a programmer for the Go Short Film Festival in Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Pamela Cohn
Pamela Cohn is a freelance film curator, writer, nonfiction story consultant and dramaturge for film and video makers and moving image artists as an independent contractor, as well as for programs such as Open City’s Assembly and The British Council and Scottish Documentary Institute’s Connecting Stories.
She is the author of Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers (2020) and produces, writes and hosts The Lucid Dreaming Podcast. She writes for MIT’s Open Doc Lab blog site IMMERSE; Filmmaker Magazine; BOMB Magazine; The Calvert Journal; Senses of Cinema, among other print and web publications, catalogues and artist materials. She also works as host and moderator for filmmaker talks and panels at an array of international festivals including True/False Film Fest, Camden International Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, DokuFest (Kosovo), Open City London, and IDFA.
Sara Ishaq
Sara Ishaq is an award-winning Yemeni-Scottish filmmaker who began her journey in filmmaking at the BBC in 2007. In 2012, her debut independent documentary film Karama Has No Walls was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short and a BAFTA Scotland New Talents Award. Following her graduation from an MFA in film directing at the Edinburgh College of Art, Sara’s second award-winning documentary The Mulberry House premiered at IDFA in 2013.
Since 2015, Sara has been leading film production and training in Yemen and finally co-founded Comra Films & Comra Academy, dedicated to the support, mentorship and production of creative independent films in Yemen. Sara has sat on film jury committees such as BFI London Film Awards, BBC Aan Korb Film Festival, IDFA Bertha Fund, MOOOV film festival and others, and is currently working on her first Fiction Feature, The Station which was selected for L'Atelier Cinéfondation Festival de Cannes (2020).
