Movies That Matter Jury

Rati Oneli was born in 1977 in Tbilisi, Georgia. From 1994 to 2000, he earned a Master’s degree in Middle East Studies at the Free University Tbilisi. From 1999 until 2014, he lived in New York where he studied International Relations and International Media at Columbia University. He made his first short film Theo in 2011. Since 2013, he has been pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland. In 2014, he moved to Georgia in order to establish a film production company Office of Film Architecture / OFA, together with lmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili. Oneli’s debut feature documentary City of the Sun premiered at the 2017 Berlinale and garnered numerous awards internationally, including a Special Mention at last year’s ZagrebDox.

Igor Prassel was born in 1971 in Koper-Capodistria, Slovenia. He is a freelance journalist, animation film programmer and board member for many different film and contemporary arts festivals in Slovenia and abroad. In 2004, he founded the Animateka International Animation Film Festival where he is the artistic director. He was a long time co-editor of the Slovenian comics magazine Stripburger. From 1998, he runs a monthly animation film program at the Slovenian Cinematheque, where he was appointed as film curator and head of the program department. From 2008 until 2014 he collaborated with the World Festival of Animated Films Animafest Zagreb as programme adviser. He is a founding member of the Slovenian Animated Film Association. Since 2010, he lectures on the history and theory of animation film at the University in Nova Gorica. In 2012, the Slovenian Cinematheque published his book The Filmography of Slovene Animated Film 1952 – 2012. From 2013 until 2016, he was the director of the Festival of Slovenian Film.

Sara Kekuš was born in Zagreb in 1990. She graduated in political science from the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb, attended European Studies at the Centre Européen Universitaire in Nancy and completed the Peace Studies program. She became involved in activism in the area of human rights, refugees and migration as a Center for Peace Studies volunteer. During the 2015 humanitarian crisis, she was one of the coordinators of the Welcome initiative. Since 2017, she works at the Center for Peace Studies. She is the head of the Asylum, integration and human safety program, and focuses primarily on issues of integration and right to asylum through advocacy, re-search and direct involvement.