International jury

Alpinist, naturalist, photographer, he was born in 1952 in the province of Mantua. After his first mountaineering experiences in Africa, the Americas and Asia, in 1983 he climbed K2, the first of the fourteen mountains over 8,000 metres that he has climbed without oxygen. An active ecologist, he is among the founders of Mountain Wilderness and president of the Italian chapter. He is tireless in his divulgation of knowledge about naturalist themes. In recent years he has devoted his energy to humanitarian projects in Nepal, promoting cultural development.

He began his career in Morocco as a photo reporter. In 2009 he produced and directed his first documentary, Waiting for the Snow, in which he explored the behind the scenes reality of the image that the media communicates about Morocco, emphasising the harshness and difficulty of life in a mountain town. His subsequent work as a photographer and independent documentary filmmaker continues his investigation into and exposure of social and political problems. At present he is a student at the Dutch National Film Academy in Amsterdam.

Born in 1951, Martin Kaufmann’s interest in film began early on when, in 1957, his father opened a cinema near the family hotel in Nova Levante, a village of the Eggen Valley amid the peaks of the Rosengarten and Latemar, in South Tyrol. In 1978 the Filmclub Bolzano was born, of which Kaufmann is a founder. His idea inspired the birth of the Festival Bolzano Cinema (Bozner Filmtage) in 1987; he has been its artistic director from the start, and has given the event a highly personal stamp.

After earning a diploma from the Film, Theatre and TV Academy in Belgrade, Adela Peeva worked as a director from 1973 to 1990 at the Documentary Film Studio in Sofia, making films and documentaries on controversial themes that were censured more than once by the Communist regime. She has devoted particular attention to the Balkan region as a producer and director of documentaries, among these, Whose is this Song? which was shown at fifty festivals and won sixteen prizes. She is a member of the European Film Academy and of the board of the European Documentary Network.

Her passion for telling about the people of the Western Alps, through images, began with her marriage to Sandro Gastinelli, in 1991. She lives with her husband in the chestnut-filled woods of Rosbella di Boves and with him has made some fifteen documentaries and shorts about their mountains. In 2000 she founded, with Gastinelli, the Film Festenal di Rosbella and from 2007 to 2010 they were co-directors of the video-film section of the Festival della Montagna in Cuneo.