Jury

Marta Bałaga is a film journalist, she has published in Variety, Cineuropa and regularly contributes to Finnish monthly magazine Episodi. She has collaborated with various festivals, including Helsinki International Film Festival – Love & Anarchy and its industry sidebar Finnish Film Affair or Les Arcs Film Festival. Member of the International Federation of Film Critics FIPRESCI and the European Film Academy, where she has joined the committee deciding the nominations for the European Discovery 2019, 2020 and 2021 – Prix FIPRESCI. She has served on many juries, including Venice International Film Critics’ Week at the Venice Film Festival.

Michelangelo Frammartino was born in Milan in 1968 to Calabrian parents. In 1991 he enrolled at the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, where he developed a special interest in the relationship between the physical and constructed space of housing and the image. He continued to study the figurative realm at the Civica Scuola del Cinema in Milan, discovering a particularly rich vein of research in this period: the field of video installations. He alternates between works traditionally oriented towards cinema (a series of self-produced short films) and others specifically aimed at the visual arts (set designs for films, video clips and independent films, installations) and teaching. He made his feature film debut with Il dono (2003), presented at the Locarno Film Festival, followed in 2010 by Le quattro volte, which debuted at the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes, winning the Label Europa Cinemas. After the short documentary Alberi (2013) he returns to feature film with Il buco, Special Jury Prize of the Venice Film Festival 2021 competition.

Illum Jacobi comes from a background in mountaineering and long expeditions into the Arctic and Amazon. He worked as a high-altitude cameraman before launching his own expeditions to remote mountain ranges concluding in a 2.500 km long traverse of the North Coast of Greenland. Later he studied Cinematography at the Danish Film School and began to make films with scientists and artists studying our relationship to nature. Moving into fiction Jacobi is continuing his work with a series of feature projects translating his own experiences in the wilderness to narratives. His first film THE TROUBLE WITH NATURE follows philosopher Edmund Burke on a grand tour of the Alps in search of the sublime. The project was filmed with just two actors in remote parts of the Alps and premiered at Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2020. Jacobi is now developing his second feature FALL OF MAN, a tragic comedy following a group of scientists and Inuit hunters on an arctic expedition to Greenland in 1918.

Christian Quendler is Professor of American Studies, Film, and Media at the University of Innsbruck, where he is currently chairing the Department of American Studies and co-directing the Center of Inter-American Studies. He is the author of three monographs: From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist Metafiction, Interfaces of Fiction, and The Camera-Eye Metaphor in Cinema. His articles have appeared in The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and Amerikastudien/American Studies. He received grants and fellowships from the Austrian Academy of Science and the National Humanities Center and was a visiting lecturer and scholar at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Notre Dame University, and the University of Alberta, and a Botstiber-Fulbright Visiting Professor of Austrian-American Studies at Appalachian State University. His current research project “Delocating Mountains: Cinematic Landscapes and the Alpine Model” examines the history of mountain cinema from transnational and ecocritical perspectives.

Stefi was born in the small mountain paradise of Andorra and grew up surrounded by nature. The daughter of a ski instructor, she was a competitive skier, becoming a skiing and Telemark skiing instructor and a mid-mountain guide. She later turned her attention to climbing and mountaineering. From her first ascents of 4000-metre mountains, in a few years she climbed the highest 6,000-metre peaks and lastly Nanga Parbat and Manaslu in 2019. In the long-term, she plans to climb all the 14 eight-thousanders in the world without the use of oxygen.  She became famous on the web for the snapshots of herself at the summit wearing red lipstick. As she herself recounts, using lipstick has solved her problematic habit of biting her lips due to the tension, sun and cold. Furthermore, it has become her way of overcoming prejudice and demonstrating that a woman climber can also accomplish the most demanding feats.