JURY SHORT FILMS 2022

We are excited to welcome Nisha Platzer, Virginia Rico and Andrés Suárez, as Jury members for the short film competition of the 20th edition of VLAFF.

The short ‘s program is the 1st competition section we created at VLAFF -in the year of 2005- and we are happy to continue showing the work of the up and coming as well as established Latinx filmmakers.

15 short films make up the total of the films selected and can be watched online all across Canada until September 4th.

Nisha Platzer (she/her) is a queer artist and filmmaker from Vancouver, Canada. Her films meld sounds and imagery that you can dream and drown in. Her last short film, Vaivén (2020) won the best film award at aluCine Latin Film & Media Arts Festival and competed at festivals worldwide including Raindance, Festival Nouveau Cinéma, FIDBA, and Ji.hlava. Nisha studied at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) in Cuba and her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council and the National Film Board of Canada. She teaches handmade film workshops and is a member of Iris Film Collective. An alumnus of IDFAcademy, the VIFF mentorship program, and the Hot Docs Doc Accelerator Lab, her work can be found in music videos, narrative, and experimental films. back home is her first feature documentary supported by Telefilm Talent to Watch (2019) and recently presented at the Cannes Docs 2022 – Docs-in-Progress Canadian Showcase.

Andrés Suárez (Colombia) is a graduated from the Film School and the Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from the National University of Colombia. He has taken part in Talents Buenos Aires (2015), the Locarno Industry Academy of the FIC Morelia (2017), the 30 industry meeting of the Locarno Festival (2019) and the Critic Workshop and Young Jury of the Mar del Mar Festival (2020). He has been part of the programming teams of the International Film Festival of Cartagena de Indias-FICCI (2015-2018), the Cinematheque of Bogotá (2019), the Cine Crea Colombia Season (2020-2022), the Colombian Film Festival in Buenos Aires-FICCBA (2022) and was in charge of the Talents Guadalajara of the 37th Guadalajara International Film Festival-FICG (2022). He worked in the International Promotion area of ​​Proimágenes Colombia, where he managed the catalog of Colombian short films REFRESH (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2). He has written reviews and critical texts for the catalogs of the UNAM-FICUNAM International Film Festival, the Bogotá-MIDBo International Documentary Exhibition and the now-defunct ARCADIA cultural magazine. Currently, he is the coordinator in Colombia of the distribution label Interior XIII and a scriptwriter and researcher for the podcast in Spanish MUBI Encuentros, a production of MUBI and La Corriente del Golfo Podcast. He is head of programming for the 20th Bogotá Short Film Festival-BOGOSHORTS.

Virginia Rico (Mexico) Virginia is a historian and cultural manager. She is currently studying a PHD in Art History at Mexico’s National University UNAM, related to film studies. She has a degree and a master’s degree in History from the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. In the academic field, her personal interests and the lines of research from which she works are the history of Mexican cinema, experimental cinema and the uses of pre-existing images in contemporary cinematographic practices. Since 2013, Virginia directs Ojo Libre, a project dedicated to cinematographic exhibition, non-school learning about cinema, cultural management, cinema programming with a historical focus, research of/on cinema, and the dissemination of Mexican cinema.