Dear audience, We present to you the members of the jury, which will announce the winners of the film program, in most competition categories of this year's 15th edition of Eho Mountain Film Festival:
Maja Muhic is a professor of cultural studies and cultural anthropology at the University of Southeast Europe. She received her doctorate in philosophy in Skopje, and her master's degree in cultural anthropology at the University of Cambridge, England, as well as gender studies and culture in Budapest. In her academic career, she also stayed at other renowned universities such as the University of Santa Barbara and Berkeley, California. She has published many papers in philosophical and anthropological journals in the fields of post-colonial theory, identity politics, multicultural theories and intercultural competences. She participated as a visiting professor and lecturer at many conferences and renowned universities in Europe, Asia and the USA.
Trifun Sitnikovski is an established director, writer and producer in the Balkans, based in Skopje. Known for his work on numerous film and TV projects, he gained wider attention for his work in public interest filmmaking, which involves collaborating with investigative journalists to tell complex issues like environmental crime, corruption, and information wars. His latest short film "A Joke" was selected in official competition at the prestigious Oscar qualifying Odense Film Festival. However, his most acclaimed work comes as director of the award winning documentary series "Newsroom", with which he has positioned himself among the leading regional voices in this genre of documentary filmmaking that later served as a model for such projects in the Baltic region and Lebanon. "Newsroom" was produced by the Investigative Reporting Lab, and with them Sitnikovski co-founded Story Lab - a film production company focused on making films in the public interest.
Zlatko Gеeleski is a writer, film, music and literary critic, born on February 9, 1986 in Bitola. He graduated General and Comparative Literature, at the faculty "Blaze Koneski" in Skopje in 2010. He has been actively involved in film criticism since 2008. He published the digital film reviews on the website "Movies.mk", and the printed ones in: "Koshmar", "Gragjanski", "Kinopis", "Film Plus", "Film Press". He is the host of the film radio shows "Danse Macabre" and "TV 103" on the radio "Kanal 103". He won the Cinedays Film Festival Award for Best Film Critic in 2013. He is the director of the short films "From the Other Side", "Memoirs" and “Freedom”, and the organizer of the horror film selection "Mrak Fest". He was a member of the juries of the film festivals: "Cinedays", „Makedox“, "Filmay", "Mobile Festival", "Philosophical Film Festival" and "Flipbook Film Festival". He is the host of the YouTube shows: "Videology". He has published three collections of short stories: "Morbidism", "The Collector of Fear" and "Ponor". In 2021, his first collection of film essays and reviews "Videology (2019-2020)" was published, and a year later the collection of interviews with domestic directors: "Masterclass", and in 2023 it published Videoology 2 (2021-2022). From 2023, he became a member of the National Section of the International Federation of Film Critics FIPRESCI.
