Winning a prize at a major film festival involves two entirely separate decisions made by two entirely separate groups of people: the programmers who decide what screens, and the jurors who decide what wins. Festival juries are typically assembled by the festival's own programmers or leadership, who recruit industry professionals whose expertise they trust, then hand them a set of rules—sometimes codified in detail, sometimes informal—that governs how the prize is decided. The FIPRESCI prize, awarded by the International Federation of Film Critics, offers an unusually explicit example of what those rules look like when they are written down in full.
Who Serves on a Film Festival Jury?
Festivals seek jurors whose professional credentials lend their prizes credibility. The Chicago International Film Festival describes its jurors simply as "the industry professionals who select the winners" of its competition awards; its International Competition Jury at the 62nd edition included Carolina Cavalli, an Italian writer-director whose debut feature premiered at Venice and whose work as a co-writer earned a SFFILM Rainin Grant and a Film Independent Spirit Award. The implicit logic is straightforward: a director who has been through the festival circuit understands what the films are up against.
Other festivals widen the professional net. When Alison Foreman interviewed the team behind the Fantasia festival's jury for IndieWire, the programmer explained the balancing act: "I like people who are immersed, who love film as much as I do… But I also like to make sure that they're well-rounded. So, they don't just know horror, but they're aficionados who watch other things and cover other things as well." That year Fantasia's jury president was filmmaker Elza Kephart, and the programmer noted she chose people the same way she chose films, balancing the political realities of her country with the festival's inclusive values. Jury selection, in other words, mirrors curation itself.
