We are pleased to announce the experts who will select the winners of the two competition programmes.
The jury members for the national feature films and the international short documentary competition are Anna Łazar, Polish director of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, curator, writer, and translator, Rohan Berry Crickmar, development producer, documentary producer, festival and industry events producer, and S&D specialist, Olha Zhurba, film director, screenwriter, and editor, a member of the European Film Academy.
Anna Łazar is a Polish director of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, curator, writer, and translator. She has co-curated the following exhibitions: the group show "R.E.P." ("Revolutionary Experimental Space") at NAMU | National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv; “Look How This Moment Trembles” at Galeria Arsenał in Białystok; “Distant Bearable Murders” (curatorial text | Culture.pl) in Berlin; “In What a Beautiful Place We Find Ourselves” at the Museum of Art in Łódź; and “Table of Women,” a delegated performance by Anna Baumgart at the Museum of Zofia and Wacław Nałkowski in Wołomin.
From 2022 to 2024, she has curated the international artistic cooperation program “Free Word” within the framework of Gdańsk – City of Literature. Łazar has formerly worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as Deputy Director and Acting Director of the Polish Institutes in Kyiv and Saint Petersburg and served as curator at the Museum of Art in Łódź. She is a member of the Women’s Archive team at IBL PAN and of the Polish section of AICA.
Rohan Berry Crickmar is a development producer, documentary producer, festival and industry events producer, and S&D specialist based in Ireland. He has produced and co-produced the documentary features Lost For Words (dir: Hannah Papacek Harper, Premiered at CPH: DOX 2025) and Reality Is Not Enough (dir: Paul Sng, Premiered at EdinburghIFF 2025), and the EdinburghIFF 2025 premiering documentary CommunityTheatre (dir: Lewis Baillie), and the EdinburghIFF 2022 premiering documentary The Tomorrow That’ll Come (dir: Carla Shah). He has also worked on television projects with Canal+ and Warner Bros. and commercial documentaries with Christian Dior, among others. Currently, he is consulting on the debut documentary feature Our Imagined Islands of Croatian filmmaker Ana Grgić. He works as Festival Manager with Dublin IFF.
Olha Zhurba is a film director, screenwriter, and editor, a member of the European Film Academy. Her work has been presented at major international film festivals, including the Venice Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, IDFA, Docudays UA, Molodist, Hot Docs, and Trieste Film Festival. She is the director of the documentary Songs of Slow Burning Earth, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The film has received awards at festivals in Latvia, Italy, Hungary, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the United States and was nominated for the 38th European Film Awards in two categories — Best European Documentary and Best European Film — as well as for the IDA Documentary Awards in the categories Best Director and Best Feature Documentary.
The 23rd Docudays UA is held with the financial support of the European Union and the Embassy of Sweden in Ukraine. The opinions, conclusions, or recommendations do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union or the governments of these countries. Responsibility for the content of the publication lies exclusively with the authors and editors of the publication.
