TEDDY Jury Reception: Moderated introduction of the TEDDY AWARD Jury 2024

Cerise Howard
^{(pronouns: she/her)}
Melbourne Queer Film Festival
Programm Director

Cerise Howard was appointed as Program Director of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival in May 2023. She hails from Aotearoa New Zealand and has for several years been a co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque. She co-founded the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia and was its Artistic Director from 2013-2018; she was also a co-founding member of tilde: Melbourne Trans and Gender Diverse Film Festival. She has been a Studio Leader at RMIT University since 2019, specialising in courses interrogating the shortcomings of the canon and incubating film festivals. She is a long-time commentator and widely published writer on film; a regular broadcaster on Melbourne radio station 3RRR, and was a member of the International Jury Board of the East-West: Golden Arch Awards, celebrating Eurasian cinema, between 2018 and 2021.
 

Diego Armando Aparicio
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Queer Wave: the Cyprus LGBTQIA+ Film Festival
Festival Director

Diego Armando Elia Aparicio (b. 1993) is the founder and artistic director of Queer Wave: the Cyprus LGBTQIA+ Film Festival. For his work on Queer Wave, he was one of 20 finalists worldwide shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Youth Awards, amongst one thousand nominees from 43 countries. He is an alumnus of the Festival Atelier, the Future of Film Festivals Forum, the Global Cultural Relations Programme and Developing Your Film Festival. In 2018 he served as an official jury member for Giornate degli Autori at the Venice International Film Festival. He has assisted the Giornate programming team as pre-selector every year since 2019. In 2022 he was part of the selection panel for the European Parliament’s LUX Audience Award. He has worked in the production and direction departments for several international co-productions, including feature films and limited series which have premiered in Venice, the Cannes Critics’ Week and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. He graduated with a physics degree from Imperial College London in 2016. He is a member of the European Film Academy. 
 

Kami Sid
(pronouns: she/her)
Aks International Minorities Festival
Artist and Curator

Kami Sid is a prominent transgender activist and artist from Karachi. She happens to be the first transgender fashion model from the region and has worked as an artist and speaker in several fictions and documentaries in the past. Kami runs a community based queer youth organisation “Sub Rang” that mainly focuses on creating safe spaces and ensuring the well being of LGBTQ+ and non-binary people from urban Pakistan. She is also Coordinator at Humraz Male Health Society, working for HIV/AIDS and Mental Health . Kami has been working with Aks International festival as a head of Karachi chapter since 2016, she has been successfully opening queer and trans dialogues with universities and public spaces in Karachi through Aks festival. In the past month, Kami made history by organizing the first Hijra Festival, a trans led street festival with political agendas demanding equal rights for transgender/Hijra community of Pakistan. The Hijra festival was attended by thousands of transgender and queer community member from all over Pakistan. Kami has been awarded for her work on national and international platforms. As the producer of Aks festival in Pakistan, she has recently started Aks Out Reach project that is used as tool for sensitization and educational awareness across Pakistan. Kami organized Aks festival’s events in more than 12 different cities in 2022 and is eager to reach out to many more this year. Kami is also a trained mobile filmmaker for the empowerment of minorities and is currently working on her debut documentary on trans youth in Pakistan as a director.
 

Luís Fernando Moura
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fuga
FENDA – Experimental Festival of Film Arts
Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife
Coordinator, Curator, Advisor

Curator, film researcher and audience designer born and based in Recife, Brasil, with a programming background at the festivals Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife (programming coordinator, 2015-2023), Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival (2017-2019) and forumdoc.bh – Documentary and Ethnographic Film Festival (2018), currently part of the programming team at FENDA – Experimental Festival of Film Arts (2022-2023). Developer of the platform fuga, aimed at the intercontinental exchange of dissident film. Curator of retrospective film collections including Brasil Distópico (2017), L.A. Rebellion (2017-2019) and CUIR – FILM Y EXPERIMENTO – LATINOAMÉRICA (2021).
 

Vic Carmen Sonne 
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Actress and Writer

Vic Carmen Sonne is an actor and writer based in Copenhagen, Denmark.  In 2016 Vic graduated from the Danish National School of Performing Arts, without prior formal education, and as the youngest applicant ever accepted. Throughout her career, Vic has been dedicated to forging emotional connections in cinema by challenging norms and illuminating the often-unseen complexities of human life. This dedication has manifested through nonconformist narratives, challenging stereotypes, and societal norms and is a defining feature of her filmography.  In 2016, Vic starred in Rasmus Heisterberg´s feature film IN THE BLOOD  for which she won a Bodil Award for Best Actress (the Danish Critic’s Association). Shortly after, she started her continuing collaboration with director Hlynur Palmason’s  when she boarded his WINTER BROTHERS, for which she received the Robert Award (the Danish Film Academy) for Best Supporting Actress.  In 2018 she starred in Isabella Eklöf´s Sundance premiere, the grand jury prize nominee  HOLIDAY . The film was recognized widely, awarding Vic with a Bodil for Best Actress.   In 2019, Vic was invited to sit on the feature narrative and documentary jury for Film Festival Oslo Fusion, a festival focusing on LHBTQIA2S+ and QTIBIPOC alongside Bartholomew Sammut.  Vic’s contributions to cinema were internationally acknowledged in 2020 with the Shooting Star award at the Berlinale. In 2022, Vic in “Godland,” Palmason, premiered at Cannes and was shortlisted for the Academy Awards’ Best International Feature. Vic’s coming projects include E.L. Katz’s “Azrael,” Milad Alami’s “Bullshit,” the Netflix series “The Helicopter Heist” created by Ronnie Sandahl and directed by Daniel Espinosa, and Magnus von Horn’s “The Girl with the Needle.” 
 

Bartholomew Sammut
Bartholomew Sammut is a Maltese-Australian, Non-Binary film curator living in Berlin. They began writing and producing short films and then went on to work for a number of Television programs at SBS Television Australia, namely ‘Eatcarpet’ the late night program dedicated to screening smart, experimental and queer short films. In 2006 they founded the XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin, which they directed for 15 years until 2021. In 2009 Bartholomew began working for the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival and works as part of the selection committee. As of 2019 they became the Program Manager and the TEDDY Award Coordinator for Panorama as well as becoming a member of the Berlinale Series selection committee. Bartholomew established the Queer Short Film Fund in 2015, an initiative from the XPOSED Queer Film Festival to help foster and support queer film production and development in Germany.