JURY 2024
BEAST ANNOUNCES THE JURY OF ITS 7TH EDITION
EAST WAVE + EAST DOC
Heleen Gerritsen (Netherlands) studied Slavonic Languages and Economics in Amsterdam and St. Petersburg. She has lived in Germany since 2003. In 2009 she produced her first feature length documentary and founded her own film production company Serious Directions, together with producer/director Sahand Zamani. From 2014 to 2016 she was festival director of the European documentary film festival dokumentART in Neubrandenburg. Since October 2017, Heleen is at the head of goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film which is organized by the German Film Institute (DFF).
Juliana Julieta (she/they, Portugal) is a visual artist working in the fields of painting and experimental cinema. Working in film or oil painting (handmade media), JJ explores the sensitive/organic physicality of materials and processes, inquiring about a tactile, sensorial, cumulative and phenomenological relationship to creating images. They co-founded EARTHSEA (Porto), a cultural association formed in 2023, dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of interdisciplinary artistic research, focusing on the intersection between ecology and technology, with activities in the areas of visual arts, digital arts, film and experimental video. Member of Laboratório da Torre (Porto) and Cave (Lisbon) and co-founder of the collective No Room, spaces run by artists working with analog film and photography.
Tadeusz Strączek (Poland) is the Director of the WATCH DOCS International Film Festival organized since 2001 in Warsaw and across Poland by the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. Expert in cinematic social impact documentaries. A graduate of the American Studies Center and the Institute of English Philology at the University of Warsaw, he also studied at the Humboldt University Berlin and the School of the Association of Polish Art Photographers. In 2014, he curated a Rob Hornstra & Arnold Van Bruggen exhibition “The Sochi Project: An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus” at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle.
ANIMA EAST + EXPERIMENTAL EAST
Eugen Jebeleanu (Romania) is a film and theater director and actor. His works have been programmed at festivals in Romania, Denmark, Germany, Moldova or France, and he has directed plays at the prestigious National Theater in Stuttgart and Opera in Lyon. “Poppy Field” is his first feature film.
After graduating his acting studies at UNATC – Bucharest and the Master of Directing and Dramaturgy in Paris, he dedicated his activity to directing theater, opera and, more recently, film. In 2010, together with the playwright Yann Verburgh, he founded “Company 28”, and later “Cie des Ogres” in 2017, collaborating in recent years with the most important theaters in the country, including those in Sibiu. He also directed many shows performed on stages in France and Germany. In 2017, he directed the play “Ogres”, a project that was awarded by the Fédération d’Associations de Théâtre Populaire (FATP). For the show “Itinerary. One day, the world will change” directed in 2019, he received the award for best director at the UNITER Awards Gala. He collaborated with the Lyon Opera for the play “I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky”, by John Adams. In 2020, he made his debut as a film director with the feature film “Poppy Field”, awarded at the TIFF 2021 Festival for Best Director.
Jakub Spevák (Slovakia) is a writer, screenwriter, and programme director at the International Animation Festival Fest Anča in Slovakia, where he has also been a curator since 2021. He has curated programs of short animated films for festivals such as Animest or Annecy, the largest and most prestigious animation festival in the world. As a writer, he wrote his debut novel “Po funuse”, which was nominated for the Slovak literary award Anasoft Litera. He has collaborated as a screenwriter and dramaturge on several short films screened at various international festivals. Currently, he is working on screenplays for two feature films and an upcoming new book.
Marika Agu (Estonia) currently works as curator and archive manager at the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art. In addition, she is the curator of the upcoming 19th Tallinn Print Triennial in 2025. Her academic training comes from the fields of semiotics and art theory, as well as librarianship. Her context-driven projects are characterised by interdisciplinarity, while implying remix as a method to reframe overlooked materials and suggesting symbolic and material transfers from different areas of knowledge. In parallel to curating, she has been publishing texts in Estonian and international media as well as been teaching creative practices with memory institutions for the Estonian Academy of Arts. Since 2021, she is a member of the editorial board of contemporary art magazine A Shade Colder.
