Juries
Critics Jury
Caterina Bogno
Film journalist and critic. Born in Varese in 1992, she holds a master’s degree in Modern Literature with a thesis on Dino Buzzati’s crime reporting. Since 2017 she has been an editor at the weekly Film Tv, where she writes about cinema, television and books, and contributes to outlets including Gli Spietati and Blow Up.
Emanuela Martini
Film critic and essayist. Born in Forlì, her eclectic taste began to take shape in childhood, ranging from melodrama and musicals to horror, neorealism and the avant-garde. Since the 1970s she has been part of the editorial staff of Cineforum, the journal of which she has become editor-in-chief since 2020. In more than forty years of career she directed the Torino Film Festival from 2014 to 2019, served as editor-in-chief of Film Tv and co-director of the Bergamo Film Meeting, and has collaborated on several occasions with the Venice Film Festival as a selector. A specialist in Anglo-American cinema, she has written numerous essays and monographs on some of the most emblematic filmmakers and genres of the twentieth century.
Frédéric Boyer
Artistic director and programmer. Born in Cannes in 1961, he attended the Cinémathèque française and pursued further studies at the Sorbonne and at Censier, where he followed seminars led by critics of the French New Wave. Since 2012 he has been responsible for the artistic direction of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and, since 2009, of the Les Arcs European Film Festival in the French Alps. He previously served as Artistic Director and Head of Programming of the Directors’ Fortnight, an independent sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival, and as Director of Programming of the Reykjavik International Film Festival (RIFF). He also has served as a juror at numerous international film festivals.
Neil Young
Film critic and journalist, curator and programmer, filmmaker and actor. Born in Sunderland (United Kingdom) in 1971, he has been based in Vienna since 2019. His articles and reviews have appeared in publications such as The Hollywood Reporter, Screen Daily, Sight & Sound, Tribune and MUBI Notebook. He was director of the Bradford International Film Festival (2011–2015) and collaborates with several European festivals as a curator and presenter; since 2019 he has been Head of Selection for the National Competition at the Vienna Shorts Film Festival. As an actor he has appeared in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir (2019) and Radu Jude’s Dracula (2025); his films as director include Rihaction (2019) and Point d’Impact (2022).
Tech-nical Jury
Heidi Honeycutt
Film historian, journalist and author specializing in horror films directed by women. Born in Los Angeles in 1971, she has spent more than two decades researching, writing and lecturing on the genre, and is the author of I Spit On Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies (2024), nominated for the Bram Stoker Awards. She is co-founder of the Etheria Film Festival, a showcase of horror, sci-fi and fantasy films directed by women that is now also distributed through platforms such as Amazon Prime and Shudder. Her writing has appeared in magazines and websites including Fangoria, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Ms. Magazine and Bloody Disgusting. She currently works in acquisitions for the distributor Studio Dome and programs the horror streaming platform BloodStreamTV.
Valeria Weerasinghe
Animation filmmaker, illustrator and curator of Italian-Sri Lankan origin. After studying Media Arts, she specialized in Character Animation at Central Saint Martins in London. In 2021 she received the Premio Mutti from the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and directed her first animated short film, In una Goccia, produced and distributed by Sayonara Film. Her work explores identity and memory through everyday experiences, and alongside her filmmaking she is active as a programmer and curator for international festivals and film programmes.
Seggen Mikael
Curator, programmer and cultural consultant. After completing her studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology as well as Art, Music and Theatre in Germany and the United States, she now designs film programmes, moderates talks and develops projects focused on communities and marginalized groups. She is a feature-film programmer for the Generation section of the Berlinale and for DOK Leipzig, and previously led the Toolbox Programme of the European Film Market (Berlinale). She is also co-founder of the consulting collective DisChecks, a member of the Programmers of Colour Collective, and a lecturer in Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.