Jury of the best series from the Central and Eastern Europe (2020)

Piodor Gustafsson

Peter “Piodor” Gustafsson has more than thirty years of experience within the film, TV and advertising industry. Since September 2020, he has been working at TV4 Media as Director of Scripted Content for the Nordic territory. Piodor has also been running Black Spark Film & TV since March 2016, a film and television company mainly focusing on development and production of local originals. He has recently produced “The Wife” featuring Glenn Close and Jonathan Price, directed by Björn Runge, previously e.g. “The Snowman” with Working Title Ltd. Before this, he used to work for the Swedish national broadcaster SVT as Head of Programming and Commissioning Editor for Drama Series, Culture, Feature Films and Documentaries and was also member of the SVT’s board.

Gerhard Maier

After working with the film and TV industry for over a decade where he escorted movies and series through their life-cycles by scouting markets, consulting marketing campaigns, conceiving websites, writing press books and reviews as well as editing two of Germany’s biggest point-of-sale entertainment publications, Gerhard Maier put his life-long obsession with TV series to use by founding Seriencamp. It is Germany’s first festival dedicated exclusively to serial storytelling, which is having its sixth edition in 2020. In 2017, Gerhard also founded an interdisciplinary storytelling conference PLOT that brings together experts from film, marketing, art, technology, and journalism to exchange perspectives, inspire, be inspired and network. As an expert in all things “series“ he is giving lectures and talks at film schools, training programs and conferences.

Elly Vervloet (VRT, Belgium)

Elly Vervloet is the international drama executive of VRT, the Flemish public broadcaster in Belgium. As part of VRT’s drama strategy, the ambition is to make high quality drama with international appeal and potential. Therefore, Elly takes up the responsibility to find international financing partners and to set up international co-productions. It is her role to build an international network, to introduce VRT as a strong drama-partner. She commissioned, amongst others, Salamander, Team Chocolate and Beau Sejour; series that travel the world. Elly combines her work for VRT with being coordinator of the European Broadcasting Union’s Drama Initiative.

Vinca Wiedemann (Denmark)

Vinca Wiedemann graduated as a film editor from National Film School of Denmark but she soon moved into script development. As film commissioner at the Danish Film Institute, she was responsible for granting development and production support to numerous feature films and was instrumental in the rise of Danish cinema. Vinca is an internationally esteemed script consultant and story supervisor for directors, e.g. Lars von Trier collaborated closely with her on his scripts for Melancholia and Nymphomaniac. She was Director of The National Film School of Denmark for five years, serves internationally as member of think tanks, film juries, keynote speaker and as a lecturer on artistic collaboration and issues linked to innovation, film education and film policy.

Cia Edström (TV Drama Vision, Göteborg Film Festival, Sweden)

Cia Edström is Head of Industry and the program manager for the Nordic Film Market and TV Drama Vision at Göteborg Film Festival. She took up this post in 2005. Cia has a background as a producer of film and cultural events, industry seminars at the Culture Capital of Stockholm and Swedish Film Institute.

Peter Ansorge (NFTS London, The United Kingdom)

Peter Ansorge currently teaches screenwriting at the National Film and Television School London. He started working in the field as script editor and producer at the BBC where he worked e.g. on David Hare’s television play ‘Licking Hitler’ that won BAFTA for the best drama in 1978. After leaving the BBC, he followed his colleague to the new UK’s broadcaster Channel 4 where he became commissioning editor for fiction. Subsequently, he became Head of Channel 4 Drama for TV series. Peter has also written two books on stage and screenwriting, ‘Disrupting The Spectacle’ and ‘From Liverpool To Los Angeles.

Ben Harris

Ben Harris is a writer and Producer for television. He has just finished writing and executive producing Young Wallander, the show he created for Yellowbird and Netflix about the formative experiences of the iconic detective Kurt Wallander. Ben was a showrunner on Big Light series Ransom for CBS and TF1 based on a real life crisis negotiator. He also worked on ITV series Marcella and Dark Heart, and BBC shows The Musketeers, Hunted and The Paradise. He is a core tutor at Serial Eyes, the Berlin-based postgraduate course for European professionals, that teaches how to be a showrunner in the American writers room system.

Katharina Böndel

Katharina Böndel studied latin american studies, politics and cultural management.She has been working with the Berlin International Film Festival since 2015, first for the special series NATIVe and later for the European Film Market. As Coordinator of the Berlinale Series Market and Conference she organizes the three-days event in february and selects the drama series line-up for the market.

Jury of the best webseries

Joël Bassaget 

Joël Bassaget has been a TV writer since 1990. In 2014, he created the blog Web Séries Mag for the French paper Liberation online edition where he reviews web series from all over the world. He is also the founder of the Web Series World Cup – circuit of festivals dedicated to both narrative and documentary short-form episodic content. Last year, he published (along with Meredith Burkholder) an e-book Short, Narrative & Serialized: A complete guide to the web series phenomenon.