VIFF 2023 Juries

Elad is an award-winning director (DGC) and editor. He co-founded Scopitone Films and is an alumni of the TIFF Filmmaker Lab and WFF Doc Lab. Recent work includes editing: Corrective Measures, Portraits from a Fire which won him a Leo, The Shipment and She Who Must Burn, as well as Hayashi Studio, which he also produced. Elad’s directorial work includes the documentary Unarchived which premiered at VIFF 2022, as well as the narrative short Run.

John Bolton is an award-winning filmmaker from Vancouver, Canada. He is best known for his documentary Aim for the Roses, about Canadian musician Mark Haney and Canadian daredevil Ken Carter. John’s latest documentary is King Arthur’s Night, inspired by a medieval musical play created by an amazing company of artists living with and without Down syndrome, including award-winning playwrights Niall McNeil and Marcus Youssef, and iconic musician Veda Hille. 

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, programmer, producer and founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She is the author of House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022), A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007), and has been an editor on numerous books. She was a producer on David Gregory’s Tales of the Uncanny (2020) and wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021) for Severin Films, where she is a house producer. She is currently at work on several books including a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter.

Brendan Prost is an actor turned filmmaker from Calgary, currently based between Vancouver and Toronto. His four features and more than a dozen shorts have played major international, Oscar qualifying, and queer film festivals around the world. He holds a BFA in Film from Simon Fraser University, an MFA in Film and Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, and he is an alumnus of the Directors’ Lab at the Canadian Film Centre.

Liz is an award-winning filmmaker and a graduate of the Director’s Lab at the Canadian Film Centre. Her short films have played at festivals including TIFF, Interfilm Berlin, Female Eye Film Festival and VIFF, among others. Her short film The Horses is currently making its festival run, playing Palm Springs ShortFest, HollyShorts, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, and VIFF, where it won Best BC Short Film. Liz is currently in post-production for her first feature, Inedia.

Pawan Deol (she/her) is devoted to exploring the truth that connects us all and is particularly drawn to themes of identity, belonging, and brown-ness. She believes deeply that art has the power to heal. Deol has written/produced several Leo award-winning short films. She has worked in TV/radio to bring more representative storytelling to the forefront. Currently, Deol is the Executive Director of Programming at Indian Summer. She is (re)writing her first feature.

Clement Virgo is Canada’s foremost Black film director. His recent feature Brother won 12 CSA awards and premiered at TIFF 2022. His first feature, Rude, premiered at Cannes in 1995 in Official Selection. Other films include Poor Boy’s Game (TIFF, Berlinale 2007), and Lie with Me (TIFF, Berlinale, Busan 2005). TV credits include The Wire (HBO), Monster (2022 for Ryan Murphy & NETFLIX) and OWN’s Greenleaf (2017), where he served as an EP with Oprah Winfrey. In 2015, Virgo’s six-part series The Book of Negroes opened MIPCOM and was nominated for a Peabody Award.

Nadia Shihab is an artist and filmmaker and the director of Echolocation, Amal’s Garden and the feature documentary Jaddoland, which was awarded five festival jury awards including the Independent Spirit Award “Truer than Fiction” award. Her films have screened internationally, and her creative practice is supported by a decade of work as a community practitioner. She is an Assistant Professor in Film in the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

Shaun Inouye is the artistic director of The Cinematheque, a non-profit film institute located on the unceded, ancestral homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. He holds an MA in film studies from the University of British Columbia and has published essays on Jean-Luc Godard, Harmony Korine, Ellie Epp, among others. At The Cinematheque, Inouye has programmed numerous retrospectives devoted to Canadian and international film and filmmakers.