President of the Jury of the Official Feature Fiction and Short Fiction Competition, Deborah Young is International Film Editor for the Hollywood Reporter and a well-known film critic. She has been a consultant for several film festivals including Venice, Tribeca and New Italian Cinema Events. From 2007-2011 she was artistic director of the Taormina Film Festival.

Licínio Azevedo is a Brazilian film-maker and scriptwriter; he moved around Africa during the wars of liberation. Now based in Mozambique, he took part in training workshops organized by Ruy Guerra and Jean-Luc Godard at the National Film Institute of Mozambique. His films include Le train de sel et de sucre, which won the 2017 JCC Golden Tanit.

A Lebanese actress and director, she has a DEA from the Beirut Institute of Fine Arts, where she now teaches acting and directing. She co-wrote Void, which has received several prizes (Golden Murex, Alexandria, Malmo). Her short film Semicolon won the Jury’s Special Prize at the Beirut European Film Festival. She has acted in films such as Stable Unstable (2013), A Syrian Family (2017) and The Insult (2017). A jury member in Namur Film Festival.

Ridha Behi is a Tunisian film director and producer. His first two feature films, Sun of the Hyenas (1977) and Angels (1984), were selected for La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes. Swallows Do Not Die in Jerusalem won the 1994 JCC International Critics Prize. The Magic Box (2002) was selected at the Venice Mostra and won the Special Jury Prize at the JCC. Always Brando was selected at the Toronto Festival. His film Fleur d’Alep was Opening Film at the 50th Carthage Film Festival in 2016.

Maïmouna N’Diaye is a theatre and cinema actress as well as a director of the documentary films Warbassanga (1998), Balan (2004), Recréatrales (2003), Amando (2003) and Tranches de vies (2009).
As an actress, she has worked in Senegal, in Guinea and in Burkina Faso. She was awarded the Best Actress Award for her role in L’oeil du cyclone (JCC 2015).

Mai Masri is a Palestinian film-maker. She has directed several films that received awards and were screened worldwide: War Generation-Beirut (1989), Children of Fire (1990), A Woman of Her Time (1995), Children of Shatila (1998), Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001), Beirut Diaries (2006) and 33 Days (2007), 3000 nights (2015). In 1995 she co-founded Nour Productions with Jean Chamoun and is today a director and producer.

Beti Ellerson is founder-director of the Centre for the Study and Research on African Women in Cinema. She has written and spoken widely on African women in cinema; she was producer/ host of Reels of Colour, a series showcasing films by people of colour in the US. She is author of Sisters of the Screen (Africa World Press, 2000), and producer of the documentary of the same name for Cinéma d’Afrique au féminin (2002).

Raed Andoni is a Palestinian director and producer born in 1967. A selftaught director and producer, he started his career in the film industry in 1997. He set up the Dar Films company in Ramallah and in 2008 cofounded Les Films de Zayna in Paris. He has made several documentaries, including Improvisation (2005), Fix Me (2009), and Ghost Hunting (2017). He has won several international prizes, for example at the 2017 Berlinale and the 2011 Buenos Aires Festivals.

Laza is a Malagasy director and producer. In 2006, he set up the Short Film Meetings Festival with the backing of the Institut Français de Madagascar and he is President of the Madagascar Short Film Meetings Association. He directs his own production structure, Rozifilms. He is a Knight of the National Order in Madagascar.

Giona A. Nazzaro is General Delegate of the Venice International Film Critics' Week, programmer and curator for Visions du Réel, and on the board of the SNCCI. He was a member of the selection committee for the Torino Film Festival and programmer for the Festival dei Popoli (Florence, Italy) and works for the Festival del Film di Locarno. He was on the selection committee of the Festival Internazionale del Film di Roma.

Kaouther Ben Hania has directed several short films which have been successful on the international festival circuit. Challat of Tunis was her first feature film (ACID, 2014 Cannes Film Festival); Beauty and the Dogs, her second feature film, was in the 2017 Cannes Official Selection (Un Certain Regard). She was a Member of the Jury at the 2018 Venice Film Festival.

Thierno Ibrahima DIA. Senegalese researcher in Arts and Film Critic. He is Lecturer in Comparative Film at Bordeaux Montaigne and Niamey Universities. He is the Editor at Africiné, dedicated to Africa & Diaspora Films (Dakar, www.africine.org) and he runs Images Francophones (La Francophonie, Paris). He authored several books, articles and media trainings (Milan, Dakar, Luxor...). Member of the National Committee on Secularity (Ligue de l'Enseignement, Paris).

Born in 1957 in Kinshasa, he studied sociology, history and philosophy in Belgium. He took courses in film-making in France, the United Kingdom and the United States. In 1991 he made his first documentary, Dix mille ans de cinéma, and in 1993 released a second documentary on Thomas Sankara. His first fiction film was Le Damier Papa National Oyé! made in 1996. He was a member of the board of short films at CNC in France from 1999 to 2001, and is a founding member of the Guild of African Film-makers and Producers.

Born in Algiers, she lived there until 1993, when she left for Paris. She was noticed in Merzak Allouache’s Bab el Oued City. In 1997 she acted in Nouri Bouzid’s film Tunisiennes, in 1999 in Nadir Mokneche’s The Harem de Madame Osmane, and then had the lead role in Nationale 7 by Jean-Pierre Sinapi. Onstage she has acted in plays like Le Patio du pays éperdu and Femmes en quête de terres, a play she wrote and acted in.

He is an Iraqi film director of Kurdish descent. Since 2005 he has won over 40 national and international awards. In 2007 he directed Winterland and in 2013 Before Snowfall, which won prizes at Gothenburg and Tribeca. His next feature film was Letter to the King (2014) and he was awarded the FIPRESCI award at the European Cinema Festival at Lecce.