The Jury of the Official Competition will award the Transilvania Trophy to a first or second feature film director. Twelve films are competing for this award.
The Transilvania IFF.22 jury includes Mexican director Michel Franco, awarded in Cannes for the dramas After Lucia (2012), Chronic (2015) and April's Daughter (2017), and Serbian actor Darko Peric, internationally acclaimed for his role as Helsinki in the phenomenal series La Casa del Papel.
They are joined by actress and dancer Judith State, who has been cast in some of the most prominent Romanian productions of the last decade and received the Gopo Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance in Monsters (dir. Marius Olteanu).
The jury also includes British director Harry MacQueen, whose film Supernova (2020), starring Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci, was voted by critics as one of the “best British films of the 21st century”, and Nicoletta Romeo, artistic director of the Trieste Film Festival, film producer and programmer.
The documentaries in the What's Up, Doc? section are to be judged in 2023 by three experts of the cinema world: Christian Popp, who has produced over 40 documentaries, some of them screened at Cannes, IDFA, Sundance, or Berlinale; director and producer Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan, member of the American Film Academy and the European Film Academy; and Martichka Bozhilova, director of the Balkan Documentary Center and the Sofia DocuMental Film Festival.
The members of the Romanian Film Days jury are influential personalities in global cinema. Charles Tesson was artistic director of the Cannes Critics' Week, film critic and editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma magazine, currently vice-president of the French Film Critics' Union. Joining him on the ZFR jury will be Pedro Andrade, D'A Film Lab Barcelona coordinator for D'A - Barcelona Film Festival, and Katarina Tomkova, feature film tutor for MIDPOINT Institute.
Short films in the same section will be examined by Nicholas Pinnock, a theatre, film and television actor of over 30 years, and Rina Mikkonen, Executive Director and Programmer at Tampere Film Festival, Finland.
The FIPRESCI Jury, responsible for awarding the International Federation of Film Critics' award of the same name, is made up of Israeli Ariel Schweitzer, critic and editor of Cahiers du cinéma, Polish writer Bartosz Żurawiecki, co-founder of Campaign Against Homophobia and contributor to the monthly magazine “Kino” and the bi-monthly LGBTQ magazine “Replika”, and Armenian film critic and video essayist Alexander Melyan, co-founder of the multimedia platform Cine[scope].
The jury for the Local Competition will include Irina Malcea - founder of the Bucharest-based production company Luna Film, director Mihai Mincan - whose fiction debut premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and Istvan Teglas - winner of the Gopo Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.