Document 2017: Meet the Jury
There are five films in the international jury competition this year at Document. They are Gulîstan, Land of Roses, Normal Autistic Film, Rat Film, Erase and Forget and 69 Minutes of 86 Days. For Document 2017, we are delighted, not to mention honoured to welcome Laura Ager, Frances Higson, Hannah McHaffie, Mona Rai and Dr Kiki Tianqi Yu to sit on our international jury. The jurors will deliberate together before announcing the winner at our closing gala at CCA, Glasgow on Sunday 22nd October. Here’s a little more about each of them…
Laura Ager
Laura is an independent researcher and culture worker. As a freelance event organiser and film programmer she organises pop-up screenings in Leeds under the name Film Fringe, she is regional co-ordinator for the Scalarama film festival and programmes documentaries for the Leeds International Film Festival and the Hyde Park Picture House. She recently completed her PhD in festivals presented by UK universities and now teaches cultural theory at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include film, history, cultural studies, knowledge exchange, the politics of the cultural economy and non-hierarchical models of organising.
Frances Higson
Frances is currently Project Manager for the FANS Youth Film Festival and Programme Co-ordinator for the Radical Film Network 68 Festival. In previous years Frances has worked extensively as a film maker; she produced the multi-award winning feature films The Magdalene Sisters and Orphans, she has also made several award winning short films and documentaries. A founding member of Camcorder Guerrillas, a film & video collective that produces short documentary toolkits for campaign groups and organisations working with human rights. She also works in film education mentoring young film making talent and teaches Social Screen, a module she designed and developed at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Hannah McHaffie
Before Hannah joined the Doc/Fest team full time in 2015, she was programming a community film club in Lancashire for a local arts organisation and attended a variety of film film festival. She is a freelance writer for EventBrite UK and runs her own film site, ReelInsights. After two years as Administrative & Executive Assistant with Sheffield Doc/Fest, she has recently been promoted to Programme Coordinator, working across both the Film and Alternate Realities programmes.
Mona Rai
Mona Rai co-founded Document, Scotland’s first human rights film festival, with Paula Larkin in 2003, and coordinated the festival until 2012. Beginning with the intent to counter the aggressive anti-immigrant and Roma narratives in the national press at the time, in the ensuing years Mona oversaw ten successive iterations of the festival and countless screenings, events, panels and collaborations, establishing and growing Document’s international reputation before transitioning to sit on Document’s board as a key guiding force.
Dr Kiki Tianqi YU
Dr Kiki Tianqi YU is a filmmaker, scholar, and film curator. Originally from China, Kiki studied Film and Sociology at the University of Westminster and the University of Cambridge. Having worked in China, she is currently Lecturer in Filmmaking at the University of the West of Scotland. She is the author of ‘My’ Self On Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an individualising China (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and the co-editor of China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the 21st Century (2014). Her films include Photographing Shenzhen (2007), Memory of Home (2009), feature documentary China’s van Goghs (IDFA, 2016) – won four international awards, screened at over 15 film festivals. She’s currently producing a 15 years long term production documentary on transgender in China. She curated ‘Memory Talks – series of personal nonfiction films’ in Shanghai 2017.
The international jury prize will be announced at Document 2017’s closing gala, ahead of the screening of 69 Minutes of 86 Days, Sunday 22nd October at 8pm. More details here.