NEW DIRECTORS JURY

VLAFF is pleased to host a live streamed deliberation in Spanish with three Latin American film critics to choose the winner of the New Directors prize.

Public deliberation, Sunday, Sept 6th at 4pm. VLAFF Facebook Live

For a long time the method of how prizes are awarded in the arts has been a much debated topic. We hope that this exercise will contribute to a greater transparency in how prizes are awarded, as well as for the public to learn more about the work of film critics and to view the films in discussion from new perspectives.

Diego Batlle has written film criticism for over two decades. He is the founder and director of the site OtrosCines.com and has written about cinema for the newspaper La Nación since 1998. He has been a jury member for festivales such as BAFICI, SANFIC, Locarno among many others, and has participated in the last 19 editions of the Cannes Film Festival. 

Luciana Gallegos was part of the team of the Costa Rica International Film Festival, 2019-2020 (CRFIC), in the positions of programmer, film critic and assistant to the artistic director. She is part of Krinégrafo, a group of film criticism and promotion, where she has contributed both with reviews and with the programming of film series. In 2019, she worked as a general production assistant in the documentary television series Animal Político (winner of the Fund for Audiovisual Development FAUNO 2018). In 2018, she collaborated with deleFOCO – an organization with cultural purposes that seeks to support the audiovisual industry in Costa Rica – in press, criticism and organization. She is known to almost only watch movies with lesbian leads or contemplative documentaries of cows grazing, but that’s not entirely true.

Ernesto Diezmartinez has been writing about films without interruption since the late 1980s in various newspapers and magazines. He was a film critic for the newspaper Reforma for more than 23 years and since 1993 he has been writing for the Sinaloan newspaper Noroeste. He is currently a contributor to the Letras Libres magazine. He is a member of FIPRESCI and has been a jury member at several international film festivals such as Valladolid, Montreal, Palm Springs, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, Cartagena and others. His book Vertigo: Twenty Years of Film Criticism (published in December 2009), contains an anthology of his critical texts. In 2018, he published, in collective authorship, the film research project Memoria Fílmica Mexicana 1983-1984. Since 1992, Ernesto has been a professor at the Monterrey School of Education and Humanities at the Sinaloa Campus. His texts can be read on his website: www.ernestodiezmartinez.com