Jury of the best series from the Central and Eastern Europe (2023)

Piodor Gustafsson (SWE)

Piodor has more than thirty years of experience in film and TV. Since September 2020 Piodor has been responsible for Scripted Content in the Nordic territory (excluding Iceland) at TV4 Media. He has previously worked as CEO for Black Spark Film & TV, as Head of Programming and Commissioning Editor at SVT and as a Commissioning Feature Film Consultant at the Swedish Film Institute. Piodor has recently produced LAMB (by Valdimar Johannsson), TIGERS (by Ronnie Sandahl), BORDER (by Ali Abbasi), THE WIFE (by Björn Runge), STHLM Requiem (by Karin Fahlén), MOSCOW NOIR (by Mikael Håfström) and EVERYTHING I DON’T REMEMBER (by Beata Gårdeler).

Clare Thompson (GB)

Clare is Non-Executive Director of the UK’s leading TV consultancy K7 Media, regularly writing and presenting on global content trends for their broadcast and production clients around the world, from Sony to Fremantle, Fox to SBS Korea. She spent her early career producing and developing entertainment and factual entertainment TV shows, much of it at ITV, where she ran the company’s in-house development team for several years.

Since then Clare has helped TV companies big and small to hone their ideas and creative strategy, leading development and pitching workshops, and channel commissioning projects for clients including the BBC, Channel 4, ITV Studios, Endemol Shine, All3Media, MTV, TV Prima and numerous Chinese broadcasters. She also supports the growth of numerous independent production companies in the UK through Channel 4’s Emerging Indie Fund and the Indielab TV Accelerator programme, running bespoke masterclasses and seminars on areas from business strategy to the international TV export market.

Clare still makes shows too… ITV’s Girls With Autism documentary is the one she’s most proud of.

Maral Mohsenin (SUI)

Holding a PhD in film history and aesthetics (University of Lausanne, University of Amsterdam), Maral has been working since 2015 in the programming team of the Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF), first as the retrospective curator, then the series programmer, and finally the head of programs since 2022. GIFF is one of the oldest festivals in the world to integrate television in its program. At the same time, she was a film restorer and conserver at the Cinémathèque Suisse from 2016 to 2022, has collaborated with several festivals in Switzerland (Visions du Réel, VIFFF) and occasionally intervenes in conferences and courses at the University of Lausanne.

Jury of the best webseries

Joël Bassaget (FRA)

Partner researcher at University of Wollongong („Valuing web series“) and freelance consultant in shortform production and distribution strategies. Lives in Berlin. Writes scripts for animated TV shows since 1989 and is a bigtime shortform aficionado. Founded in 2001 the very first (and shortlived) European portal for Flash animated indie cartoons. In 2014, he founded the blog “Web Series Mag” for the online version of French newspaper Liberation. The following year, he founded of the Web Series World Cup. Author of “Le guide des Webséries – la nouvelle vague” and co-author with Meredith Burkholder of “Short Narrative & Serialized, a complete guide of the web series phenomenon”.