2025 Festival Jury

Best Feature Film

Tessa Blake
An award-winning filmmaker and prolific television director, Tessa Blake is an alumna of AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women. Her films have premiered at Cannes, SXSW and Woodstock, won awards at Nantucket Film Festival and Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and been honored by the Academy.

As a writer, Tessa has written for ABC, NBC, FOX and Warner Brothers. Currently, she’s developing an international series slated to start production this year in Germany.

She has directed plays for Naked Angels Theater Company and The Atlantic Theater Company, is a proud alumna of the 24 Hour Plays, and a founding advisor for The Moth.

Robert Bailey
Rob Bailey is a British Director and Producer who has been based in Los Angeles for 20 years. His extensive body of work includes The Wire, Treme, CSI and Gotham. Most recently he returned to the UK to be Producer and Lead Director on the HBO-MAX series Pennyworth.

He attended the National Film and Television School in the UK, where he learned from notable film and TV directors such as Stephen Frears, Derek Jarman and Wojciech Marzewski. His NFTS Graduation film was bought by Channel 4 and was shown nationally. He landed his first TV directing job 2 years after graduating which led to non-stop work in the UK, culminating in the launch of the BAFTA-winning BBC series MI5.

Attracting attention from this, he was asked to work for HBO on the emerging TV show The Wire and shortly afterwards he began a long association with Jerry Bruckheimer on show’s such as Without A Trace, CSI – Crime Scene Investigation and “CSI:NY”. Which he produced and directed.

He has worked on many US shows for both Network and Streaming services.

A full list of his credits can be found on his IMDB page:
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0047458/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

Marlis Pujol
Marlis Pujol is a Cuban American producer with a distinguished career in television. A Golden Globe winner for her work on “The Kominsky Method” in 2019, and a two-time Emmy nominee, Pujol’s credits include acclaimed series such as HBO’s “The Wire,” “True Blood,” & “Ballers.” She currently serves as a Co-Executive Producer on Apple TV+’s comedy “Mythic Quest,” and is also a dedicated advocate for the hiring and mentoring of Latino talent within the industry, solidifying her impact both on and off-screen.

Best Documentary Film

Sarah Anthony

Sarah Anthony was most recently the Producer of Kiss the Future alongside Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. The documentary highlights the underground art and music scene during the siege of Sarajevo, and U2’s relationship with the city. The film premiered at Berlin, Tribeca, Rome and many other festivals, winning the Audience Award at the Sarajevo and Ljubljana Film Festivals. It was released by AMC, Odeon and Paramount Plus in 2024.

Her previous project was the six part series Light and Magic for Disney, as the Story Producer for director Lawrence Kasdan with Imagine and Lucas films. She was the Story Producer on the top ten Netflix series Heist for Dirty Robber, and Producer on the Netflix documentary Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator. She was the line producer and lead Producer on the Grammy-winning HBO documentary series, The Defiant Ones, and on the Emmy-nominated The Price of Free (formerly titled Kailash), a documentary about child slavery which won the 2018 Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize. She was the Consulting Producer for Making a Murderer Season 2 for Netflix.

Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Sarah spent the majority of her childhood in West Virginia. She began her documentary career in London, with films on subjects ranging from the Iraq war to the Ming Voyages of the 1400’s. She was Associate Producer for PBS FRONTLINE on The Age of AIDS, a four hour series covering the history of the HIV/AIDS pandemic with won an Emmy and the Dupont Peabody Award. In 2007 she moved to Los Angeles and joined Exclusive Media as the Co-head of Documentary Features. At Exclusive she supervised development, production and distribution on multiple documentaries including Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Billy Joel’s Last Play at Shea, and the Academy Award-winning Undefeated. She then returned to FRONTLINE as co-producer on Endgame: AIDS In Black America, and from there went on to line-produce The World According to Dick Cheney for Showtime.

Sarah worked extensively with director Davis Guggenheim and the Emerson Collective on a variety of social justice issues, from immigration reform to redesigning the American high school system. She is passionate about using media to inspire positive social change.