Los Cabos International Film Festival announces Jury members

Los Cabos International Film Festival is proud to count on acknowledged and important film and television industry talents as the 18 members of the Jury who will chose the winners competing for awards consisting in more than $5,250,000 MXN. Outstanding national and international film industry leaders will assess the two categories that make up our Official Selection: Competencia Los Cabos and México Primero, and, also, the three categories of Gabriel Figueroa Film Fund: Work in Progress, Films in Development and TV in Development.

JURY

OFFICIAL SELECTION

Competencia Los Cabos

Miranda Bailey

USA

In a 15-year  lmmaking career, producer, actor and director, Miranda Bailey has produced over 20  lms; among them the Oscar-nominated The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005), The Diary of a Teen- age Girl (Marielle Heller, 2015) winner of the Spirit Award and part of Los Cabos 2015 program, as well as James Gunn’s Super (2010) and the Sundance hit Swiss Army Man (Dan Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, 2016). She has directed two documentaries: Greenlit (2010), which premiered at SXSW and is available on iTunes, Amazon & Hulu, and now The Pathological Optimist (2017), that opens on September 29th and can be seen on VOD on November 14th.

Eugenio Caballero

MEXICO

Eugenio Caballero is the Academy Award winning production designer of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). His work on the  lm also earned him an Ariel, an Art Directors’ Guild, and a Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association awards. His work on A Monster Calls (J.A. Bayona, 2016) earned him a Goya award early this year. His credits include near 30  films with directors such as Jim Jarmusch, Baz Luhrmann, Alfonso Cuarón, and Fernando Eimbcke, among oth- ers. In 2014 Caballero designed the Paralympic Opening Ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics, for director Daniele Finzi, with whom he also collaborated in the Cirque du Soleil’s show Luzia in 2016.

Antonia Zegers

CHILE

Antonia Zegers is a distinguished actress in Chilean cinema, television and theatre. Her  film debut was En tu casa a las 8 (1995), directed by Christine Lucas. She has taken part in  films such as Matías Bize’s Sábado (2003), La vida de los peces (2010) and La memoria del agua (2015); Tony Manero (2008), Post mortem (2010), No (2012) and El club (2015), directed by Pablo Larraín. Her leading role in Marcela Said’s Los perros earned her critical praise in the 2017 Cannes Festival. This year she will also appear in two more  lms: No estoy loca, directed by Nicolás López, and Dominga Sotomayor’s Tarde para morir joven.

México Primero

Dolores Heredia

MEXICO

Actress, producer and activist Dolores Heredia was born in La Paz, Baja California Sur. Her eminent  film career of over 40 feature  films includes titles like Dos crímenes (Roberto Schneider, 1994), Santitos (Alejandro Springall, 1999), and Cobrador (Paul Leduc, 2006). She played a leading role in the  first three seasons of the HBO Latino series Capadocia (2008- 2012). Among her many other accomplishments, she was elected president of the Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMACC) in 2015 and the Iberoamerican Federation of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Academies (FIACINE), in 2017.

Simone Urdl

CANADA

Simone Urdl is an award-winning Producer and the co-founder of Toronto-based production company The Film Farm with partner Jennifer Weiss. They have twice been invited to screen in the Oficial Competition in Cannes with Adoration (2008) and The Captive (2014), both by Atom Egoyan. Their  film Redacted (Brian De Palma, 2007) won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Away From Her (Sarah Pol- ley, 2006) was nominated for two Oscars and won a Golden Globe for Julie Christie. They currently continue their collaboration both with Atom Egoyan and Brian De Palma. They have just completed production of Sook-Yin Lee’s Octavio is Dead!

Xavier Velasco

MEXICO

Xavier Velasco abandoned his Political Science studies in favor of the literary cause. He considers himself a bastard child of the Latin American boom, Bowie, Polanski, Nico, Wilde, Ibargüengoitia, Rotten and, before them all, his grandmother, Celia Alcalde.

He has published the novels Diablo Guardián (2003), Éste que ves (2007), Puedo explicarlo todo (2010) and La edad de la punzada (2012). He writes the columns Pronóstico del clímax for the newspaper Milenio, Exceso de equipaje for Aire magazine and Las funciones vitales for Empire magazine. He writes on the website Zenda (zendalibros.com) and in his personal blog, La leonina faena (xaviervelasco.com).

FIPRESCI

Klaus Eder

GERMANY

He studied German Literature at Stuttgart University. He is a  film critic since the mid 1960’s. At present he works for German National Radio (Bayerischer Rundfunk) and for several German language  film magazines. He has written books on Andrzej Wajda, Luis Buñuel, Nikita Mikhalkov, Andrei Konchalovsky, Arturo Ripstein, Im Kwon-taek, and Nagisa Oshima, among others. From 1986 until 2007 he was programmer for the Munich International Film Festival. Since 1987 he is the General Secretary of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI). He lives and works in Munich.

Leonardo García Tsao

MEXICO

Film critic. He currently writes a weekly column for La Jornada. He was a founding member of the now defunct magazine Dicine. He has published books on Welles, Truffaut, Tarkovsky, Peckinpah and Cazals, among others. From 2006 to 2010 he was the Director of the National Film Archive, where he previously held the post of Head of Programming (1977-1989). He has been a programmer for the Cancún, Guadalajara, Palm Springs and Bangkok festivals. He wrote the screenplays for Intimidad (Dana Rotberg, 1989) and the short  film Ponchada (Alejandro Moya, 1994). He has taught at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica and the Iberoamericana and Anáhuac universities.

Andrea Martini

ITALY

Andrea Martini joined the Quotidiano Nazionale as a film critic in 1988. His books and essays on  lm criticism and theory focus mainly on the Marx Brothers, Buñuel, Pialat, Ripstein, and Italian and Mexican cinema. His work for television includes the documentaries Bergman by Bergman (1995) and Cinéastes et citoyens (1998). He has been Advisor to the Venice Film Festival (1988-96) and directed the International Critic’s Week in Venice from 1997 to 2006. Martini has been Associate Professor at the University of Siena since 1983 teaching History and Theory of Cinema. Since 2012 he contributes to the Sunday literary supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore.

 GABRIEL FIGUEROA FILM FUND

Cine en Desarrollo

Julie Bergeron

CANADA

She practiced Commercial Litigation and International Financing before moving to France. There, she became Deputy Manager at Telefilm Canada. She founded Vision-in-Motion, a company dedicated to producing events such as the industry programs at the Cannes Festival’s Marché du Film and international projects for Ventana Sur.

In 2016, she joined the Marché du Film as Head of Industry Programs, and contributed to the creation of the Frontières Platform in 2017. She has co-produced Beckett’s Prisoners (Michka Saäl, 2005) and was associate producer on the  lm Regular or Super—Views on Mies van der Rohe (Joseph Hillel and Patrick Demers, 2004).

Kilian Kerwin

USA

Having started his career in feature-film production, as assistant to Tony Scott, Kerwin moved into the development arena,  first as an executive and then as a screenwriter. Over a ten-year span he developed projects for Universal Pictures, Miramax, Paramount Pictures, Fox 2000, Dreamworks Animation, and 20th Century Fox. He also wrote and directed a feature  film, Learning Curves (2003), starring Sophia Bush. Kerwin is currently President of Production at Ivanhoe Pictures, where he oversees projects from territories including India, Korea, China, and Latin America, as well as selected English-language motion pictures and international television series.

Martha Sosa

MEXICO

She began her career as a journalist. She has been a reporter and anchor for Canal Once’s cultural news- cast—for which she and her team received the National Journalism Prize in 1988. In radio she has been a presenter of  film programs. She has worked in  film production since 1999. Her  films have received 85 awards in the international  film circuit. Her produc- tions Amores perros (Alejandro González Iñárrritu, 2000) and the documentary Presunto culpable (Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith, 2010), won numerous awards and were box of ce successes in the year of their release.

TV en Desarrollo

Gail Gendler

USA

She is a digital and television acquisitions executive with more than 15 years negotiating content for companies like Fandor, AMC Networks International, Sundance Channel LLC and NBC Olympics. She joined Fandor as the Head of Programming at the end of 2017 to elevate the streaming service’s presence in market. Prior to Fandor, she was on the executive team charged with launching Sundance Channel as a global powerhouse and helped launch ten linear global feeds with that team. Gendler worked on Sundance’s domestic channel on content deals before joining Sundance’s global team.

Gerardo López Gallo

MEXICO

His career at Univisión began in 2001 as a Promotion Manager, in charge of the image of TeleFutura. Shortly afterwards, as Director of Promotion, he developed promotion strategies for TeleFutura and Univisión. In 2010, he was named Vice President of Sales and Marketing and, a year later, also Vice Pres- ident of Integration. In 2013, he was appointed Vice President of Programming and Production at Gala- visión. In 2014, he became Vice President of Content for Discovery México. Earlier this year López-Gallo was appointed Vice President of Programming, Marketing and Research for Televisa Group.

Leonardo Zimbrón

MEXICO

He was Production Manager for Warner Bros. Mexico until 2010. He is a founding partner in Traziende Films. He has produced several films including Efectos secundarios (Issa López, 2005), Bajo la sal (Mario Muñoz, 2008), Amor a primera visa (Pitipol Ibarra, 2013), and the blockbuster Nosotros los Nobles (Gary Alazraki, 2013).

He is currently producing Club de Cuervos (2015-present), the  first Netflix original series in Spanish. 2017 will see the release of Dogma, a suspense drama he has produced for Blim, as well as the  films Cómplices (Luis E. Reyes, 2015) and Cómo cortar a tu patán (Gabriela Tagliavini, 2016).

Work in Progress

Sylvain Auzou

FRANCE

Born in France, he studied International Trade, Public Law and Political Science. In 2004, while working as Advertising Director for the professional review Le Film Français (1999-2007), he co-founded Venice Days, an indepently run section of the Venice Film Festival, where he still works as Vice Director. From 2006 until 2012, he created and directed Business Street, the Rome Film Festival market.

Auzou also worked as match-maker at Cinemart, Rotterdam Film Festival, from 2005 until 2010. He was Artistic Director of the Moscow Film Festival in 2013 and works in that same position at the Bucarest Film Festival since 2016.

Eva Morsch

FRANCE

Since 2016 Eva Morsch coordinates the Artistic Committee for Cinélatino, Rencontres de Toulouse, where she also was in charge of the industry platform. She is a consultant for Venice’s European Gap Financing Market, for Ventana Sur, and the audiovisual workshop BrLab. She has collaborated with Cannes’ Fabrique des Cinémas du Monde. She teaches masters level courses at the Jean Jaurès University and the École Nationale Supérieure de l’Audiovisuel. She was appointed Secretary-General for the Confédération Internationale des Cinémas d’Art et d’Essai (CICAE), and since 2014 is President of the Institut Pluridisciplinaire pour les Études sur les Amériques à Toulouse (IPEAT).

Scott Veltri

USA

He is a Partner and the Head of Production and Development at Assemble Media, a production/finance company who’s credits include S. Craig Zahler’s Brawl in Cellblock 99 (2017), and the director’s followup Dragged Across Concrete, starring Mel Gib- son and Vince Vaughn. Previously Veltri was Head of Worldwide Sales at Magnolia Pictures where he handled the international launch on over 30 independent  films including Sean Baker’s Tangerine (2015), Sundance winner The Wolfpack (Crystal Moselle, 2015), Steve James’ Life Itself (2014) and 2017’s Lucky, directed by John Carrol Lynch and starring Harry Dean Stanton.

A multi-disciplinary jury conformed by this group of outstanding and recognized personalities of the audiovisual field reaffirms Los Cabos International Film Festival’s compromise towards the development and boosting of filmic and TV culture within our region, gathering together this specialists who, lavishly, share with us their knowledge and experience..

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