Movies That Matter Jury

Janko Baljak is a Serbian film and television director. He graduated in Film and Television Directing at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. His first short feature film Due to Reasonable Doubt was shown in 1986 in the official selection of the Festival of Yugoslav Documentary and Short Feature Film. During the studies, he directed Perfect Pitch, a part of the feature omnibus film What Are You Doing Tonight. Perfect Pitch represented the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at the World Festival of Film Schools in Munich in 1988 and in the selection for the 18th Oscars for the best student film of the non-English speaking world. His graduation work, TV drama The Long Life of the Kos Couple came across an excellent reception from audience and critics. Janko Baljak is the author of a dozen shows for the cultural and artistic program of TV Belgrade. He is one of the founders of the film and TV production department of the independent Belgrade radio station B92, for which he produced a series of documentary films that were successfully presented in Serbia and abroad and won multiple awards. He is a full-time professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, teaching Documentary Film. From 2009 to 2014, he was artistic director of the Belgrade Festival of Documentary and Short Film, one of the oldest film festivals in Europe.

Carmen Gray is a freelance arts journalist, film critic and programmer who was born in New Zealand and lives in Berlin. She has written on the arts, politics and resistance movements in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus for The New York Times, and has also contributed to Criterion, The Guardian, The Observer, Sight & Sound, Screen International, The Village Voice and ArtReview, among others. She is Chief Critic for Modern Times Review: The European Documentary Magazine, and was previously the Film Editor of Dazed & Confused magazine in London. She is on the selection committees of the Generation section of the Berlin International Film Festival and the Winterthur International Short Film Festival, and is a programme adviser for Open City Docs. She also works as an industry adviser for First Cut Lab.

Srdan Kovačević is a director and cinematographer, born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1982. He obtained his MA in cinematography at the University of Zagreb’s Academy of Dramatic Arts in 2009. Since 2000 he has been working as a cameraman for various independent regional film and TV production companies ('Fade-in', 'Pro.ba', 'Drugi plan', 'Factum', ‘Restart’, etc.), shooting documentary films and reportages. He made his directorial debut with the feature documentary film Factory to the workers. Currently he lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.

Honorary Member

Iryna Tsilyk, born in 1982 in Kyiv, is a Ukrainian filmmaker and writer. She graduated from Kyiv National University of Theatre, Cinematography and Television in TV directing in 2005. Her previous short fiction and documentary films were presented and awarded at various international film festivals. She is the author and director of several short fiction and documentary films. The Earth Is Blue as an Orange (ZagrebDox 2021, Movies That Matter Award) is her debut feature-length documentary. Tsilyk is the author of eight books published in Ukraine which include poetry, prose, and children’s books.