［Documentary Category］Jury President

　　HARA Kazuo （Japanese documentary director)

　　Born in 1945, Hara Kazuo is a director and cinematographer and was influenced as a young man by the protest movements that took place throughout Japan and the world in the late 1960s and 70s. He founded Shisso Productions in 1971 with his wife, producer, and primary collaborator Sachiko Kobayashi. He has directed and released five documentary films thus far, including the award-winning The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987), widely and internationally recognized as most important and influential documentary ever made in Japan, Goodbye CP (1972), Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974), and A Dedicated Life (1994). He started a documentary film school “CINEMA-Juku” in 1995 in Japan, and this year he will complete a new documentary film Nippon-koku Izumi minami Asbestos mura for the release in 2017. He has also published a book “Documentary is Combative sport” featuring a conversation with Japanese film director Shouhei Imamura, Nagisa Oshima, Kinji Fukasaku and Kaneto Shindoh.

　　［Animation Category］

　　Jury President

　　Georges SCHWIZGEBEL （Swiss animation director)

　　The animation film director Georges SCHWIZGEBEL is the author of a remarkable work, one of the most original in contemporary creation. His masterly work is characterized by a playful narrative approach and a striking formalism which integrates pictorial and musical considerations.

　　Further to an education in Fine Arts, in 1971 Georges SCHWIZGEBEL, together with film directors Claude LUYET and Daniel SUTER, founded Studio GDS in Carouge. His short film The Flight of Icarus (1974) was the start of a career rich in films (17) that would be the subject of numerous retrospectives and earn him many prizes in international festivals (notably Cannes, Annecy, Zagreb, Hiroshima, Stuttgart, Ottawa and Espinho). The Ride to the Abyss (1992) is regularly cited by specialists as one of the best animated films of all time.