2017

Jury / Sunbird Award Competition for Short Narrative Films

Jury / Sunbird Award Competition for Feature-Length Documentary Films 

Linda works as producer for IGC Film GmbH in Berlin, Germany. The focus of IGC Films is on international co-productions, aiming to entertain on a smart level. Their last film Bye Bye Germany had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival 2017. Since 2013, she also works as funding advisor for the World Cinema Fund of the Berlin International Film Festival. She holds a university degree in Latin American Studies.

Currently based in Paris, Samia Labidi, a French-born Tunisian, is a Political Science graduate from The Sorbonne. She is one of the coordinators of Festival Ciné-Palestine (FCP) devoted since 2015 to showcasing the diversity and quality of the Palestinian cinematic landscape. She is also Head of Distribution of Momento ! Films, a production and distribution company focused on independent filmmakers.

Meriem Mesraoua was born in Qatar, raised in France and earned a B.Sc. with Honours in Media Industries and Technologies from Northwestern University. She explored various facets of the film industry and gained professional experience at Miramax, NYWIFT, film sets and festivals amongst others. Mesraoua now works in the Grants division at the Doha Film Institute.

Rawan Odeh is a cultural events producer and programmer specialized in communication strategy and new media outreach. She is also a co-founder and a committee member at Festival Ciné-Palestine (FCP). The event, running into its fourth edition in 2018, is dedicated to screening Palestinian cinema, providing a mingling platform for Palestinian filmmakers, producers and industry professionals, and raising the profile of Palestinian fiction and documentary.

Ania is an award-winning sound editor. She won Best Sound Designer at Underwire Film Festival 2014, was nominated for the prestigious Verna Fields Golden Reel awarded by Motion Picture Sound Editors association in Los Angeles. In 2014, she was selected for Berlinale Talents. Her recent feature I Am Not a Witch was in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival. The feature documentary Almost Heaven premiered in the Official Selection at Berlinale 2017.

Jury / Sunbird Award Competition for Feature-Length Documentary Films 

Rachel Robey is a film producer with twenty years’ experience, and is both Senior Producer at Wellington Films and Film Programme Manager at the British Council. Her debut feature film production was the BAFTA nominated London to Brighton by Paul Andrew Williams that screened at numerous leading film festivals and was recently numbered amongst the Top 100 British Films in Timeout Magazine.  Her most recent production was Hope Dickson Leach’s debut feature The Levelling that was released in the UK during May 2017, to widespread critic