2017 International Jury

Jill Bilcock is one of Australia’s pre-eminent film practitioners, working as an editor for 33 years alongside some of the most acclaimed filmmakers at home and abroad. Her first film was Richard Lowenstein’s coal-mining drama Strikebound (1984) and she would continue to work with Lowenstein on a number of films including iconic rock musical Dogs in Space (1986), concert documentary Australian Made: The Movie (1987) and children’s drama Say a Little Prayer (1993).

After breaking out on the local scene, Bilcock quickly found international attention with Evil Angels (1988), Fred Schepisi’s Academy Award®-nominated retelling of the Lindy Chamberlain court trial that starred Meryl Streep and competed for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. She soon forged another long-lasting collaborative relationship, this time with Baz Luhrmann. Her work on Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom (1992), Romeo + Juliet(1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001) were hailed for the way they introduced fast-paced, modern editing techniques to classic genres of musical and Shakespearean romance, which proved to be highly influential and considered key to the films’ success. She received an Academy Award® nomination for Moulin Rouge! and won awards from the Australian Film Institute (AFI), American Film Institute and the American Cinema Editors Guild.

Jill Bilcock has remarkably edited six of the 20 highest-grossing Australian films of all time. Alongside Luhrmann’s flamboyant musicals, she edited PJ Hogan’s Muriel’s Wedding(1994), Kriv Stenders’ Red Dog (2011, APSA nominee for Best Children’s Feature Film), the Working Dog production of The Dish (2000), and Jocelyn Moorhouse’s The Dressmaker(2015).

Bilcock has also worked on many international productions including Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) both starring Cate Blanchett, Sam Mendes’ Road to Perdition (2002) with Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, and Jean-Marc Vallée’s The Young Victoria.  Significantly, Bilcock has also worked extensively alongside female filmmakers within the Australian film industry including Jocelyn Moorhouse and Ana Kokkinos, Sue Brooks, Clara Law and Robyn Nevin.

She is currently working once more with Richard Lowenstein on Mystify: Michael Hutchence, a documentary about the late INXS singer and star of Dogs in Space, while a documentary about her life and career, Jill Bilcock: Dancing the Invisible, recently premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival. Over her career she has won five AFI Awards, received four additional AFI nominations, two AACTA nominations, and four BAFTA nominations. In 1995 she was awarded the AFI’s prestigious Byron Kennedy Award for her outstanding creative enterprise within the industry. She is a member of the ASE (Australian Screen Editors) and ACE (American Cinema Editors).

Adolfo Alix Jr is one of the world’s most prolific filmmakers, having directed 30 feature films in only 11 years. With an additional 29 writing credits, plus short films, and over 200 episodes of television, Mr. Alix Jr is not just an acclaimed regular on the world film festival circuit, but also an in demand director of some of the Philippines’ most popular programs. In 2006, Mr. Alix Jr’s debut feature, Donsol, was the official Philippines selection for the Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film, and in 2010, Adolfo Alix Jr was named by The Hollywood Reporter in their ‘Next Generation Asia’ list that featured 20 filmmakers deemed “the best and brightest among their peers”.

In 2013, Mr. Alix Jr broke through to even bigger international recognition when Death March, a black and white drama about Filipino and American prisoners of war during World War II, competed in the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Un Certain Regard competition. His 2009 film Manila also played at Cannes as an out-of-competition special screening. In his homeland of the Philippines, Mr. Alix Jr’s films have competed at the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival, Cinema One Originals festival, the Metro Manila Film Festival New Wave section, and the Cinemanila International Film Festival. He has won Best Director in the Urian (Critics’ Prize), plus six prizes from the nation’s Young Critics Circle Awards, and been nominated for eight Golden Screen Awards. His latest film Dark is the Night premiered in the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.

Ms. He Saifei is a Chinese film and television actress who was born in the Daishan County, Zhejiang Province. One of three daughters, Ms. He is best known for internationally acclaimed and award-winning films from globally recognised filmmakers. Titles include Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern (1992), an Academy Award® nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, and Chen Kaige’s Temptress Moon (1996), which competed for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Ms. He starred alongside superstar actress Gong Li in both of those films. She also featured in Academy Award®-winning Taiwan director Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), which was nominated for a Golden Globe® and two BAFTAs.

In 1995, Ms. He won the China Film Society of Performing Arts Award for her role as ‘Xiao E’ in Blush (Hong fen), while the film won the Silver Berlin Bear from the Berlin International Film Festival for its Outstanding Single Achievement. In 1996, she was awarded the Best Supporting Actress prize from the Hundred Flowers Awards for her performance in Di hou wu gong dui. Recently, she featured in the 2015 epic television series Lord of Shanghai as Sister Jin, which aired for a total of 32 episodes on TVB Jade as one of the network’s four grand anniversary broadcasts. In 2016, she featured in the action-comedy film Sugar Express.

Now in his 11^th year as Programming Director for the International Competition section of TIFF, Yatabe spent five years overseeing that Programming Division and serving as Programming Director for the Japanese Independent Film section. Yatabe is an experienced producer and distributor and in 2015 he produced the documentary Dryads in a Snow Valley directed by Shigeru Kobayashi. Among the film juries he has served on the jury are Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s “East of the West” section, the Art Encouragement Prize given by the Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs, the Nomination Committee of the Asian Film Awards, and for the Mainichi Film Awards.

Adilkhan Yerzhanov is one of Kazakhstan’s foremost filmmakers. In 1999, he received accolades for the first ever Kazakh animation series Kozy-Korpesh and Bayan-Sulu. He was the recipient of the APSA NETPAC Prize for emerging talent in 2013 for Constructors (Stroiteli). He has made several shorts and features, among which The Owners (2014), which premiered at Cannes, was nominated for the APSA for Best Feature Film, and was subsequently screened and awarded at many film festivals all over the world. His new film, The Plague at the Karatas Village (2016), had its world premiere at IFF Rotterdam where it won the NETPAC Award.