Every year at Polish Film Festival, Los Angeles, Cinema Without Borders offers an award for the Best Polish Short Film. For 2014 Polish Film Festival, Cinema Without Borders jury members are Drew Denny, Ziggy Kozlowski, Rachel O’Meara and Bijan Tehrani.
Nominees for Cinema Without Borders’ Best Polish Short Film Award are: The Bartender, Mother Earth, The Kiss, The Purple Story, Strong Coffee and Such a Landscape. Winner will be announced at the opening ceremony of the Polish Film Festival, Los Angeles on October 7.
Cinema Without Borders’ Jury members:
DREW DENNY
Drew Denny is a multi-media artist, filmmaker and musician. She has worked with the Movement of Landless Workers in Brazil, a cooperative of displaced miners in Bolivia, feminist activists who organize sex workers and sweatshop laborers in Southeast Asia and Central America, and is now collaborating with Greenlandic Inuit and Maldivian activists to tell the stories of people who have to leave their homes because of climate change. Drew is based on the Russian River. She holds a BFA in Cinema Production from the University of Southern California and an MA in Aesthetics and Politics from the California Institute of the Arts.
ZBIGNIEW (ZIGGY) KOZLOWSKI
Ziggy Kozlowski is a partner at the eminent public relations firm Block-Korenbrot Public Relations where he has worked for the past sixteen years. In his role as publicist he has worked on the release and award campaigns of the most significant independent and foreign films of the past decade, among them CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, the BLUE WHITE RED trilogy, HOOP DREAMS, LEAVING LAS VEGAS, AMOUR, and the Oscar winning CRASH. His client roster includes Sony Pictures Classics, HBO, Fox TV, Lionsgate Releasing, and New Line Cinema, among others. Personal clients include Paul Haggis, director, writer, and producer of CRASH.
RACHEL O’MEARA
An alumni of London’s Academy of Live and Recorded Arts (ALRA), Rachel O’Meara has been a working actor and producer across film, television, commercials and theatre for fifteen years. Prior to that, she worked in media with the Saatchi Group in London, S Africa and Dubai, during which time she contributed lifestyle and entertainment articles to international magazines and newspapers. Rachel also spent years working in Germany, France, Brunei, Nepal and Hong Kong, giving her a first-hand insight to international cinema, and she attends as many different film festivals as she can.
BIJAN TEHRANI
Bijan Tehrani, a film director, film critic/historian and writer, works as editor in chief of Cinema Without Borders while giving lectures on international cinema and international filmmakers at colleges, universities and film clubs. Bijan has won several awards in international film festivals and book fairs for his short films and children’s books.
Bijan Tehrani is in process of writing a children book and pre-production stage for making two documentaries.