Decisions are made by an international jury. Our jury for 2027 is John Greyson, Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi, and Marcelo Pereira.
2027 JURY
John Greyson
John Greyson is an award-winning Toronto video/film artist. Since 1984, his many features, shorts and transmedia works use humour and song to explore such queer activist issues as police entrapment, prison, AIDS activism, global solidarity, homo-nationalism and apartheid (both South African and Israeli). The winner of 4 Teddies, 4 Canadian screen awards, and Best Film Prizes at over 50 international festivals, his works include: “Door Prize” (2025), “Death Mask” (2024), “Photo Booth” (2023), “International Dawn Chorus Day” (2020), “Mercurial” (2018), “Gazonto” (2016), “Murder in Passing” (2013), “Fig Trees” (2009), “Proteus” (2003), “Lilies” (1996), “Zero Patience” (1993), “The Making of Monsters” (1991) and “Urinal” (1989).
Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi
Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi is a South African filmmaker based in Berlin, working across fiction and documentary. Her work is conceptually driven and rooted in observation, often engaging with sociological and psychological behaviour through formal constraints, objects and environments. Moving between realism and abstraction, her films are influenced by dissonance, discomfort and contradiction, using these tensions to examine the instability beneath everyday social interactions. She began her career in casting and production, contributing to projects such as Drake’s “Please Forgive Me”, before working across roles including coordinator, production manager and line producer on internationally recognised productions. Since relocating to Berlin, she has also worked across sales, distribution and operations with The Match Factory and MUBI.
Her transition into directing developed through independently produced short films presented at major international festivals including Sundance, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen and BlackStar. Her hybrid feature documentary “Let Them Be Seen”, which she also produced, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, received Best Documentary at the Joburg Film Festival, and later travelled to Prismatic Ground for its North American premiere. Nolitha is an alumna of Berlinale Talents and the Locarno Residency, where she received the DopoDomani Award for her debut fiction feature currently in development.
Marcelo Pereira
Marcelo Pereira was born in Barcelos, Portugal. He graduated in Cinema from Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema, in Lisbon, and since 2016 he has worked in film editing, production, and screenwriting with production companies such as Rosa Filmes, Terratreme, Fado Filmes, Uma Pedra no Sapato, among others; and at film festivals such as IndieLisboa, DocLisboa, and LEFFEST. In 2020, he co-founded the production film collective Fátima Filmes with Patrícia Neves Gomes, and in 2025 he premiered his first film, “A Emancipação de Mimi”, in several international film festivals. He is now finishing post-production on his second film, “Banho Santo”.
PAST JURIES
Winnie is a writer and cultural worker. Their writing can be found in Cinema Scope, Los Angeles Review of Books, Documentary Magazine, Toronto Star, Little White Lies, and POV. Currently, Winnie works in the industry department at TIFF, where they contribute to talent development programming for artists. In the past, they served as an associate producer at CBC, and as an industry programmer at Hot Docs, where they managed grants and filmmaker labs, programmed the festival conference, and led delegation trips to AIDC and Berlinale. Winnie also works with MDFF, a Toronto-based production and distribution company with a monthly screening series at the TIFF Lightbox. They were the recipient of the International Documentary Association's 2022 Getting Real Fellowship and the Toronto Film Critics' Association’s 2024 Emerging Critic Award. In 2025, Winnie participated in Open City Documentary Festival’s Critics Workshop led by Another Gaze.
Ana David (2026)
Ana is a festival programmer and curator working between Portugal and Berlin. She’s an advisor to the official programme of the Berlinale since 2024, a member of the advisory board of Berlinale Panorama since 2017, and currently programmes at Márgenes (Madrid) and Queer Lisboa, which she has co-directed in the past. From 2021 to 2024, she served as curator at Batalha Centro de Cinema (Porto), a new public film institution whose opening she accompanied and where she co-curated the thematic series ‘Politics of Sci-Fi’, ‘Domesticities’ and ‘After Hours: Clubbing on Film’. Previous programming positions include IndieLisboa, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Oslo/Fusion, BFI London Film Festival, and Queer Lisboa. She has organised retrospectives dedicated to Angelo Madsen Minax, Claire Denis, Joanna Hogg, Luísa Homem, Annemarie Jacir, and Jane Campion.
Jesse Cumming (2026)
Jesse is a curator, writer, and researcher. He’s Associate Curator for the Wavelengths section at Toronto International Film Festival, having previously served as the section’s Programming Associate. He has served as a programmer with Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, and as a consultant with the Berlinale Forum and Open City Documentary Festival. Independently, he has curated, co-curated, and presented programmes with the Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Tallinn Photomonth Biennial, Anthology Film Archives, the ICA London, and more. His writing has appeared in Cinema Scope, The Brooklyn Rail, MUBI Notebook, Filmmaker Magazine, Hyperallergic, Canadian Art, Another Gaze, C Magazine, Berlin Art Link, and more. He was a founding collective member of MICE Magazine, a publication dedicated to Moving Image Culture, Etc., and formerly served on the steering committee of the Toronto Film & Media Seminar. He holds an MA in Communication & Culture from York University, and was formerly a Media Lecturer with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Cairo Campus.