Florida Film Festival 2004 Jury

Features Jury

Joel Hopkins

Joel grew up in London. After a BA in Fine Art at Christ Church College, Canterbury, he entered the MFA Graduate Film Program at New York University, graduating in 1998. His thesis film, Jorge, won First Prize at the Graduate NYU Wasserman Awards, the BBC Prize at the British Short Film Festival 1999, and has been broadcast on FilmFour, Canal Plus, and Channel Four. Joel's first feature screenplay, Jump Tomorrow, was awarded $100,000 from the Richard Vague Production Fund and was made through FilmFour's Film Lab. It screened at Sundance 2001, opened theatrically in America in July of that year, premiered in the UK at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and was released in the UK in November 2001 and in France, Summer 2002. It won the Audience Award at Deauville, was nominated for five British Independent Film Awards, and won the BAFTA Carl Foreman Award for most promising newcomer to British Film. He is currently in pre-production on Lolapalooza for Working Title.

Wendy Mitchell

Wendy Mitchell is the Managing Editor of independent film publication indieWIRE and also the print magazine IFC Rant, indieWIRE's joint venture with the Independent Film Channel. Wendy has also written about various entertainment topics for Glamour, Playboy, the New York Daily News, Paper, Billboard, Silicon Alley Reporter, Time Inc., Salon, CMJ, Rolling Stone Online, Spin Online, and other online and print publications. She earned a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has lived in New York since 1996. Before joining indieWIRE, she was a staff writer and editor at Dow Jones, CMJ, Rolling Stone Press, Time Inc., and Silicon Alley Reporter. When she's not at movie screenings, Wendy's busy "researching" the revised edition of her book, New York City's Best Dive Bars (Ig Publishing, 2003).

TC Rice

TC Rice is currently Senior Executive Vice President of Manhattan Pictures International, a distribution company dedicated to releasing quality American independent and international films including such pictures as Michael Apted's Enigma, Alan Rudolph's The Secret Lives of Dentists, and Jean Luc Godard's In Praise Of Love. Over the course of his career he has been involved in the marketing and distribution of films for a number of companies and has worked on everything from The Care Bears Movie to Bad Lieutenant. He has (as his personal business card once said) "done everything and will travel."

Documentary Jury

Jami Bernard

Jami Bernard is an award-winning film critic and columnist for the New York Daily News, and author of the film books Chick Flicks, Total Exposure, First Films, and Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies. Her most recent book is Breast Cancer: There and Back, a humorous memoir as well as a guide for women going through treatment. Her film essays appear in the National Society of Film Critics compilation books The A-List and Flesh & Blood. Jami is also a member and former chair of the New York Film Critics Circle. She named her parrot Sensei after the kung-fu movies of her youth. She also has two cats, Tsuko and Buzz. The cats chirp and the bird barks.

Ian Bricke

Ian Bricke is Manager, Film Programming for Sundance Channel, responsible for English-language features, world cinema, and short films. Before joining the Channel, he worked at Killer Films on projects including Storytelling and Hedwig and the Angry Inch and at the Independent Feature Project on three consecutive Independent Feature Film Markets. He also worked in development for Open City Films and Pipedream Productions. He has appeared on panels at South by Southwest, the Sundance Film Festival, the IFP Market, and the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival. He has also served on juries at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the New York Exposition of Short Film and Video, the Anchorage Film Festival, and the Austin Film Festival. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he is a native of Kansas.

Jeff Krulik

Washington DC-based director/producer Jeff Krulik has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the American Film Institute and on PBS. In 2002, he was honored as a guest filmmaker at the 48th Annual Robert Flaherty seminar. His resume includes work for Errol Morris Globe Department Store, Discovery Networks, and National Geographic Channel. In 2002, he was commissioned to produce a one-hour documentary on carnival sideshow history for The Travel Channel. Krulik is co-producer of cult documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot which was recently turned into a reality TV series on TRIO called Parking Lot. Other titles in his body of work include Hitler's Hat, Ernest Borgnine on the Bus, and the award winning I Created Lancelot Link (Best Documentary 1999 at the New York Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival and Microcinefest in Baltimore).

Shorts Jury

Signe Baumane

Signe Baumane was born and lived her first 18 years in Latvia, leaving to obtain a philosophy degree in Moscow. She returned to Riga and began working as a cell painter and animator at Riga's Animated Film Studio. There she also gained insight to arts funding, using government funds to finance he first three films. Eventually she packed up and headed for New York, where she met "the best possible teacher of Animated Independence--Bill Plympton," and worked on three of his features. In 1998 she made her first animated film on American soil and since then has produced films regularly. Among her films are The Witch and the Cow, Tiny Shoes, The Gold of the Tigers, Woman, Love Story, The Threatened One, Natasha, and Five Fucking Fables. Her films have received awards at Boston Underground Film Festival, Woodstock Film Festival, Caroline's Comedy Club Funny Shorts Festival, Cin(e) Poetry Festival 2000, Minsk International Women's Film Festival, Montevideo International Film Festival, Long Island Film Festival, and Worldfest-Houston International Film Festival. Currently she is working on her new animated short Dentist.

Hank Blumenthal

Hank Blumenthal is currently Director, Post Production at IFC Films. He has produced over 14 feature films, directed short films, and also created interactive narratives. His most recent film is The Last Letter. Other recent films include producing The Mouse and Ratchet. He is currently developing a feature to direct with Bigel Mailer Productions called Roleplay. He has worked extensively in digital media winning a Webby Award for Best Music Site for Sputnik7.com in 2001. He was previously Director of Design and Production for NBC/Bravo/IFC Digital Media. He also developed interactive narratives with Microsoft’s R&D Virtual Worlds division. Best known as the producer of Alexander Rockwell's In the Soup, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival his other films include Risk, The Next Step, Condition Red, Sons, Misplaced, Return of Superfly and A Fool and His Money starring Sandy Bullock. In addition, he spent three seasons directing music videos for the Peabody Award-winning series The Great Space Coaster.

Scott Foundas

A card-carrying member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Scott Foundas is one of the film critics for the international trade magazine Variety and the Los Angeles-based alternative weekly, LA Weekly. In addition, his writing appears regularly in the Canadian film quarterly Cinema Scope. He has also contributed to The Village Voice and Cahiers du Cinema, and in 2003 served on juries at the Sundance and Vancouver film festivals.

Student Works Jury

Charles Martin

Charles Martin is an online and print film critic, writing for OrlandoCitybeat.com (part of the OrlandoSentinel.com web site) and FilmThreat.com as well as BoxOffice, MovieMaker, and other magazines in the US and England. He is currently writing the DK Eyewitness Guide to Orlando, which should be out towards the end of the year. Charles's passion for movies is unbridled--he averages more than 65 films, long and short, each year during the Florida Film Festival, with particular interest in cult movies, silents, restorations, sci-fi, classics, and comedies. Some may remember his six-year stint as host of "Chas' Crusty Old Wave" on WPRK-FM, soon to be reborn as an internet radio stream. Charles lives in Maitland with his wife Heather, and enjoys theatre, live music and Macintoshes in addition to the movies--meaning he spends entirely too much of his life in dimly-lit rooms.

Lindy T. Shepherd

Lindy T. Shepherd's been on the staff of Orlando Weekly for the past 13 years, and lived in Winter Park for the past 20 years with her husband and family, having been raised in New Orleans. Currently the managing editor at Orlando Weekly, she's served there as free-lancer, calendar editor, arts editor, online editor, and arts/online editor. Before that, she worked with Orlando Magazine when the late Ed Prizer was still at the helm. Experiencing the growth and maturity of Orlando and of her two daughters is an ongoing source of curiosity and satisfaction. Meeting the many creative people in town and sharing their work--including actors and filmmakers in the Enzian Theater community--is an ongoing honor. It's been a pleasure for her, both personally and professionally, to witness the progressive profile of the Florida Film Festival. As always, she finds the most fun at the Festival to be on-screen, thanks to new-sprung artists and their inventions.

David Thierer

As Studio Facilities Representative for Universal Studios Florida Production Group, David is responsible for productions in sound stages & backlot locations at Universal Studios. David previously operated his own production company, Athena Visual Communications, Inc. During his nine years with the company, he served as Producer/Director/Writer on a wide range of projects including national television segments, commercials, series development, corporate videos, multimedia, and eCommerce websites. Credits include projects for CBS, CNN, BET, PBS, The Montel Williams Show, Darden Restaurants, BellSouth, and numerous regional corporations. David has a BA in Journalism/Mass Media from Rutgers University and has worked in the NY, LA, and Washington D.C. markets.