International Competition of Biografilm 2020 is composed by Luca Ragazzi (director and film critic), Shelly Silver (artist working in still and moving image) and Martijn te Pas (festival programmer and documentary consultant).
Luca Ragazzi worked as a film critic for 20 years, when in 2008 he started directing documentary films together with his partner Gustav Hofer. Since their very first feature Suddenly, Last Winter (Improvvisamente l’inverno scorso) (which received a Special Mention from the jury in Berlinale and the Italian Nastro Argento award for Best Documentary) the couple has made a mark with their unique style straddling investigative and creative documentary. They went on to make Italy Love it or Leave it (2011), What is Left? (2014) and DicKtatorship (which premiered at Biografilm 2019), all feature-length documentaries that have circulated over 300 festivals worldwide. In 2018 he was also casting director and second unit director for the US short documentary The Red Tree by Paul Rowley.
Shelly Silver is a New York based artist working with the still and moving image. Her work has been exhibited worldwide. She is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts. Silver has taught video art at the German Film and Television Academy, the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She has received numerous awards and fellowships including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Japan Foundation and Anonymous was a Woman.
Martijn te Pas for nearly twenty years (2000-2019) was part of the program department of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). As senior programmer he was responsible for doing research activities for regular and focus programs, maintaining an extensive network of film professionals and attending major film festivals - often as a juror. Martijn is an advisor for the IDFA Bertha Fund and reads projects for the IDFA Forum. He runs e u R O P E doconsultancy and is a Guest Documentary Programmer at Nordisk Panorama 2020.
The jury of the Biografilm Italia Competition is composed by Roberta Mattei, cinema and theatre actor, Cristina Rajola, documentary producer and expert in international co-productions and Ester Sparatore, artist and documentary filmmaker.
Roberta Mattei began theatre acting at the age of 12 and went on to gain a degree from the National School of Cinema in Italy. She worked on several TV series and in 2014 was cast as Annarella in Italian Race (Veloce come il vento) by Matteo Rovere, which was later nominated for a David di Donatello Award. She then worked with renowned filmmaker Claudio Caligari in Don’t Be Bad (Non essere cattivo). She went on to collaborate with Roberto Faenza, Giorgio Tirabassi, Marco Danieli, Maccio Capatonda, Stefano Mordini, Ficarra and Picone and this year is filming a series with and by Niccolò Ammanniti, Anna. Roberta and her family run a theatre and a cultural centre.
Cristina Rajola is an Italian documentary producer and executive producer, expert in film financing and international co-productions. She has a degree in Semiotics of Cinema from the University of Bologna (2004) and undertook professional training as a producer with EURODOC. She was selected as "producer in focus" by EDN during CPH:DOX 2014. She has worked with various Italian and European talents, her production credits include Power to the People? by Lise Birk Pedersen, Loro di Napoli by Li Donni, Happy Winter by Totaro and The Butterfly by Cassigoli and Kauffman. She worked as audiovisual archives researcher for Erik Gandini's Videocracy and Kim Longinotto's Shooting the Mafia among others. She is currently Development Manager of Propaganda Italia. She is a member of the EWA Network and participates in major international festivals and markets.
Ester Sparatore graduated in 2001 from the Abadir Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo. She collaborated with the production company C.L.C.T. Broadcasting, directing, editing and editing documentaries and short films. Her video installations and moving image artworks have been exhibited across Italy. Since 2007 she has collaborated on the directing and cinematography of documentaries with the director Stefano Savona and the screenwriter Alessia Porto. Among these Palazzo delle Aquile (2011), about the occupation of Palermo’s town hall by group of families that had been left homeless. In 2014 together with Letizia Gullo she wrote and directed Mare magnum, which follows the mayoral elections for in the small town of Lampedusa. Her latest documentary Those Who Remain (Celles qui restent) was selected for the Feature-Length International Competition of Visions du Réel and won Best Film in the Biografilm Italia competition at Biografilm Festival 2019.
