JUDGES
We would like to thank and acknowledge the MPIFF 2021 Judges.
Damián Alcázar (born January 8, 1953 in Jiquilpan, Michoacán, Mexico) is a Mexican actor and politician, who is best known outside of Mexico for portraying Colombian drug lord Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela in the Netflix series Narcos. He was a deputy in the Constituent Assembly of Mexico City.
Laura is an Audiovisual Producer based in México City, she has produced a significant number of feature films and documentary films since 2010. Some of her work as a producer has been screened at the Cannes Film Festival, Biarritz Film Festival, Huelva Film Festival, NYC Film Festival, Berlinale. In 2014 she created Ruta 66 Cine in partnership with Hugo Espinosa, a production label with which they have produced independent films in Mexico and Spain. Along with her work as a producer in Ruta 66, she works as a production manager and line producer in documentary films and television projects.
Pedro Aguilera was born in San Sebastian, Spain. He studied fine arts at the University of Madrid. He initially worked for advertising agencies as a screenwriter. So he gradually got as an assistant in shooting Spanish films. He won a scholarship to the Cuban Film School in San Antonio, where he studied screenwriting and documentary filmmaking. He gained experience as a director of a number of short films and as an assistant director on the Mexican films Clash with the Sky by Carlos Reygadas and The Blood of Amat Escalante. Influence is his feature film debut.
José Pablo Estrada Torrescano is a Mexican film director and producer based in Stuttgart, Germany. He has a MFA in Cinema and Digital Media from FAMU (Prague) and a BA in Actuarial Sciences from ITAM (Mexico City). He debuted in 2018 with the documentary film “Mamacita”, which was screened at venues like San Francisco MOMA, Museum of Modern Art Boston and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and in festivals like Hot Docs, Zurich Film Festival, Dok Fest Munich, Hiroshima Film Festival, among others.
Diego Fandos is a filmmaker from Spain. Originally a journalist (University of Navarra), he studied filmmaking in FAMU International. He has written and directed TV commercials, documentaries and the feature Cosmos, presented in competition in the San Sebastian Film Festival and released in 2008. From that year, he´s been teaching Screenwriting in Prague Film School. His last two shorts - Under Pressure (2014) and Aurora (2017) - have been selected and awarded in more than 60 festivals around the world. Diego has published two collections of short stories -"Lemon Loves" (2015) and “Prague on February” (2020)- and the handbook "Writing for Short Film / El guion del cortometraje" (2019).
Antonio started his career as a stills photographer and had his own B&W lab at home, he got his first job as a field photographer working closely with First Nations in Mexico and then in Canada. His career was jumping back and forth from the Czech Republic to the US where he has shot "Last Knights" starring Morgan Freeman and Clive Owen, "The Bachelors" with JK Simmons and Julie Delpy, "Face of Love" with Annette Bening and Ed Harris.
Almudena is a long-experienced Director of Photography based in Madrid. She graduated in Cinematography at the prestigious EICTV, (Cuba) and Communication Studies at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. For 15 years she has been globetrotting filming fiction and documentary projects. Her films have been selected in important film festivals as Berlinale, Festival de Málaga Cine Español, Seminci and Rio de Janeiro and nominated for the Goya awards. Her collaborations in video art have been exhibited, among other museums, in Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. She is known for her work on The Debut (2016), Sacromonte, los sabios de la tribu (2014) and La cicatriz (2005).
Born in Cava De 'Tirreni (1981) Antonello lives in Madrid, is producer and director of independent films and shorts, is also involved in television directing, shooting and editing video for international television broadcasts and commercials and institutional videos. His short films and movies were screened in hundreds of festivals in different countries (such as the USA, Chile, Peru, Australia, India, China). His works as producer and director have received about three hundred awards and acknowledgments, some of them received by celebrities such as Francis Ford Coppola, Rutger Hauer, Asia Argento, Enrico Lo Verso, Alejandro Jodorowsky.