International Jury

Ah, Mexico! Between its legendary macabre folklore and its drug cartels that hang corpses by their feet from the top of highway bridges… Which is unsurprisingly a fertile ground for some genius creators of genre films. Isaac Ezban is one of them. A genius scriptwriter who wrote the stories of more than half of his films himself. He’s been bathing in sci-fi and horror movies ever since he grew a stache (which, according to legend, appeared when he was around the age of 7 years and a half). He is such a fanatic that he owns his own drive-in movie theater in Mexico City, something even Tarantino can’t claim. His films THE INCIDENT and PARALLEL, which Christopher Nolan would certainly not disapprove of, moved the crowds at BIFFF in 2015 and 2018. So it’s safe to say Señor Isaac Ezban is a household director at the BIFFF!
Filmography: The Incident (2014), The Similars (2015), Parallel (2018), Evil Eye (2022).

Roxane Mesquida started acting at the age of 13 and has since then led a thousand lives. She was Karl Lagerfeld’s muse and Quentin Dupieux’s favorite actress. She was a DJ in Hollywood and lived in Charlie Chaplin’s old house. She stood on the cover of Vogue … and Playboy! She played in GOSSIP GIRL (well okay, no really a hit at the BIFFF) and she made the silver screen tremble with her bewitching look in SHEITAN opposite Vincent Cassel (and that’s a nr 1 hit at the BIFFF). And she also played Severine in Gregg Araki’s outstanding series NOW APOCALYPSE.

His feature debut, PARABOLA, was filmed in the streets of Liège in 2005, without permits, with a budget of 750 Euros and a crew of only three people. Not really an impressive production, you might say. But thanks to this Mac Gyver of cinema, it became a triumph. PARABOLA was praised in Venice for its avant-garde feminist discourse and went on to win a series of prestigious awards around the world. It was the first part of a triptych of committed films about women facing violence in our modern society. Part two, LE REPAS DU SINGE, was released in 2013, followed two years later by the closing piece, UNE REALITE PAR SECONDE. Since then, there’s been no stopping Karim Ouelhaj, who has won so many awards that we cannot list them all. Let’s just note that his latest film MEGALOMANIAC (2022), inspired by the case of the Butcher of Mons, blew us away at BIFFF last year, soon followed by the rest of the world.