JURY MEMBERS

Jonathan Jackson is an American actor, musician, and author. He is best known for his role as Lucky Spencer in the television series General Hospital (1993–2015), which won him five Daytime Emmy Awards. He is also known for his roles in the films The Deep End of the Ocean (1999), Tuck Everlasting (2002), Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004), and Riding the Bullet (2004), as well as the television series Nashville (2012–2018), for which he received a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination. For his roles he's got 16 wins & 13 nominations at multiple world festivals. Jackson's other abiding passion has been his music. He has been the lead singer and guitarist in a number of bands, most recently for Enation. From 2022 Jonathan is the Associate Dean and Primary Instructor at Theoria College of Filmmaking​ in the US.

Stefania Bochicchio studied semiotics under the tutorage of Umberto Eco and cinematography with Bernardo Bertolucci at Bologna University.

Upon moving to London, she worked at a number of top Pan European publications as a music journalist having articles published in Melody Maker and the NME, and becoming the first woman editor-in-chief at Metal Hammer Magazine (Italy). Shifting to radio and television, she devised the format of ROCK CAFE’ before adding producing and directing to her range of activities.

In 2017 she founded a new theatre in inner London, the ground-breaking Theatre @DraperHall, specialising in new audiences, inclusion and London Premieres. Its pioneer scheme “TickForward” was featured in the Londonist and The Stage and had Sir Patrick Stewart.

Stefania has been collaborating with the London Film Festival for the past 15 editions, with Cinema Made in Italy UK since its inception 14 years ago and she is the co-curator of ITALIA DOC, the only dedicated series of contemporary Italian documentaries together with Dr.Cristina Massaccesi (UCL).

Henry Normal is a writer, poet, TV and film producer, founder of the Manchester Literature Festival and co-founder of the Nottingham Poetry Festival. He set up "Baby Cow Productions" with Steve Coogan in 1999, and was its managing director until his retirement in 2016. Productions include Philomena, Gavin and Stacey, Red Dwarf, The Mighty Boosh and Alan Partridge.

Henry’s writing collaborations include: Paul and Pauline Calf Video Diaries, Coogan's Run, Tony Ferrino, Doctor Terrible, all of Steve Coogan’s live tours, the film The Parole Officer, Mrs Merton Show and the first series of The Royal Family.

Henry has several poetry collections published, as well as writing and performing ten BBC Radio 4 shows combining comedy, poetry and stories about his life and family.

He has received a special BAFTA for services to television along with honorary degrees from both the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University.

Daragh Carville is a playwright and screenwriter, best known for co-creating and writing the ITV crime drama The Bay. First broadcast on ITV in 2019, The Bay has been sold to over 130 countries worldwide.

Daragh’s other TV credits include Being Human (BBC3, 2013), 6 Degrees (BBC NI, 2013/15) and The Smoke (Kudos/Sky One, 2014). His films are Middletown (dir. Brian Kirk, 2006) and Cherrybomb (dir. Lisa Barros d’Sa / Glen Leyburn, 2008.) Work for radio includes Regenerations (BBC Radio 3, 2001), which was nominated for the Richard Imison Award, and Dracula (Radio 4, 2003) starring Michael Fassbender.

Daragh Carville has won both the Stewart Parker and the Meyer Whitworth awards for playwriting and has twice been nominated as Best Writer in the Irish Film and TV Awards. He teaches Scriptwriting at Birkbeck, University of London.

Dr Maryam Ghorbankarimi is a filmmaker and film scholar, focusing on representation of women both in front of and behind the camera. Her current research is on transnational cinemas and cultures, specifically the representation of gender and sexuality in Iranian cinema. Her first book entitled A Colourful Presence; The Evolution of Women’s Representation in Iranian Cinema was published in 2015. Her second book is on seminal Iranian female filmmaker Rakhshan Banietemad, ReFocus: The Works of Rakhshan Banietemad was published in spring 2021. She started her production company Bina Film in 2020 and has been collaborating with other local filmmakers in the Northwest England.

Rob is a former filmmaker turned film analyst, currently known for his deep dive film analysis videos on YouTube with a special emphasis on Stanley Kubrick. His film studies have received coverage from dozens of news media outlets and his main YouTube channel, Collative Learning, has approx. 230k subscribers.

Previously he wrote, directed and edited multiple short films and a feature, all independently produced, worked on multiple shoots for other filmmakers and ran filmmaking workshops at the Basement Film Unit at the University of Liverpool. Alongside film work, Rob worked for seventeen years in mental health, youth work, probation and with the homeless, and studied psychology extensively in his spare time, using these experiences often as inspiration in his own creative projects. In the late 1990's he was an animator in the video games industry.

Currently, Rob is writing a film analysis book and developing a video game, both for publication in early 2024.