Short Film Jury

Rachel Pronger is a curator, writer and editor, originally from the UK and now based in Berlin. As co-founder of archive activist feminist film collective Invisible Women, she has presented programmes and events with organisations including Glasgow Film Theatre, Cinema Rediscovered, HOME Manchester, EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam, Balkan Can Kino Athens,  Edinburgh International Film Festival and BFI Southbank. She is a programme adviser for Sheffield DocFest, BFI London Film Festival and Aesthetica Short Film Festival, and a team member of SiNEMA TRANSTOPIA. Her writing has been published by outlets including Sight & Sound, The Guardian, MUBI Notebook, Art Monthly and BBC Culture. 

May Santiago is a cultural studies scholar and essay filmmaker. She is pursuing her Doctorate of Philosophy in the Cultural Studies program at George Mason University. Her work focuses on Puerto Rican cinema, as well as the intersection of horror, queer, and feminist studies. She has presented work at Final Girls Berlin Film Festival and Ax Wound Film Festival. She writes, edits, and hosts a horror studies podcast named Horrorspiria.

Toby Poser is an American filmmaker and actor. As founder of Wonder Wheel Productions, she’s made 8 feature films alongside her partner, John Adams, and their daughters, Lulu and Zelda - collectively known as the Adams Family, or in their musical form as the band H6LLB6ND6R.  Their award-winning independent feature films include The Deeper You Dig (2021, Dark Sky Films), Hellbender (2022, Shudder) and Where the Devil Roams (2023, TUBI). She lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York. www.WonderWheelProductions.com

Feature Film Jury

Sarah Kathryn Cleaver is a London-based researcher, writer and editor. She writes about film and culture for publications including Curzon, SHOWstudio, Dazed and The Final Girls, alongside the regular Zodiac Film Club Substack newsletter. Cleaver also runs Zodiac Film Club and co-hosts the Projections Podcast, a dialogue on film and psychoanalysis with Mary Wild.

Sabrina Mertens was born in 1985 in Hamburg. Mertens studied audiovisual media design in Berlin and Brandenburg, worked for Deutsche Welle TV (DW-TV) as a freelancer and began with independent filmmaking in 2011. Sabrina Mertens’ works deal with painful border areas of social norms and taboos, supposed self-evident facts in capitalistic society, their consequences and (utopian) deviations.In addition to screenwriting, directing and video artwork, Sabrina Mertens writes short stories and song texts.

Sabrina Mertens’ films have been shown at national and international film festivals, exhibitions and curated programs. Mertens’ feature debut FELLWECHSELZEIT (TIME OF MOULTING), an episodic social horror drama, premiered 2020 at the Film Festival Max Ophüls Preis, Saarbrücken and the Rotterdam International Film Festival, won the Restless Revolutions Best Film Award at the Seville European Film Festival, awarded by the FIPRESCI jury, and is released in North America since mid-2023 in arthouse cinemas and on streaming platforms.

Alison Peirse is a Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. She is the author / editor of a number of books on horror film, including Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre. She is also a writer-director-editor, and her short films have won awards at film festivals around the world. Her latest short, Crochet is Sick, is a BFI / Sight and Sound Video Essay of the Year for 2023. You can find out more about her work, and watch many of her films, at www.alisonpeirse.com.

Due to COVID we think it’s still important to take care of each other - and we want every one of you to feel safe.

That’s why we kindly ask you to test yourself at home before coming to the cinema if you’re able to, and to stay at home if you feel sick.

Thank you 💚