Decisions are made by an international jury. This year’s jury includes Winnie Wang, Jesse Cumming, and Ana David.
Winnie is a writer and cultural worker. Their writing can be found in Cinema Scope, Los Angeles Review of Books, Documentary Magazine, Toronto Star, Little White Lies, and POV. Currently, Winnie works in the industry department at TIFF, where they contribute to talent development programming for artists. In the past, they served as an associate producer at CBC, and as an industry programmer at Hot Docs, where they managed grants and filmmaker labs, programmed the festival conference, and led delegation trips to AIDC and Berlinale. Winnie also works with MDFF, a Toronto-based production and distribution company with a monthly screening series at the TIFF Lightbox. They were the recipient of the International Documentary Association's 2022 Getting Real Fellowship and the Toronto Film Critics' Association’s 2024 Emerging Critic Award. In 2025, Winnie participated in Open City Documentary Festival’s Critics Workshop led by Another Gaze.
Ana David
Ana is a festival programmer and curator working between Portugal and Berlin. She’s an advisor to the official programme of the Berlinale since 2024, a member of the advisory board of Berlinale Panorama since 2017, and currently programmes at Márgenes (Madrid) and Queer Lisboa, which she has co-directed in the past. From 2021 to 2024, she served as curator at Batalha Centro de Cinema (Porto), a new public film institution whose opening she accompanied and where she co-curated the thematic series ‘Politics of Sci-Fi’, ‘Domesticities’ and ‘After Hours: Clubbing on Film’. Previous programming positions include IndieLisboa, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Oslo/Fusion, BFI London Film Festival, and Queer Lisboa. She has organised retrospectives dedicated to Angelo Madsen Minax, Claire Denis, Joanna Hogg, Luísa Homem, Annemarie Jacir, and Jane Campion.
Jesse is a curator, writer, and researcher. He’s Associate Curator for the Wavelengths section at Toronto International Film Festival, having previously served as the section’s Programming Associate. He has served as a programmer with Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, and as a consultant with the Berlinale Forum and Open City Documentary Festival. Independently, he has curated, co-curated, and presented programmes with the Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Tallinn Photomonth Biennial, Anthology Film Archives, the ICA London, and more. His writing has appeared in Cinema Scope, The Brooklyn Rail, MUBI Notebook, Filmmaker Magazine, Hyperallergic, Canadian Art, Another Gaze, C Magazine, Berlin Art Link, and more. He was a founding collective member of MICE Magazine, a publication dedicated to Moving Image Culture, Etc., and formerly served on the steering committee of the Toronto Film & Media Seminar. He holds an MA in Communication & Culture from York University, and was formerly a Media Lecturer with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Cairo Campus.