Meet the Proxima Jury for the 60th KVIFF

Proxima Jury

Estrella Araiza is the General Director of the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG) and Cineteca UDG, where she has focused on strengthening the presence of Mexican and Latin American cinema across both institutions. Her professional career includes experience as Director of Industry and Market at FICG, as well as work as a sales agent, academic, and film distributor in Mexico. She began her career in international film distribution in 2005, and in 2012 founded her own company, Vendo Cine. Since 2018, she has overseen FICG’s special projects, including the acclaimed exhibition Guillermo del Toro: At Home with My Monsters in Guadalajara.

Dirk Decker is a producer and co-founder of Hamburg-based Tamtam Film. Through Tamtam, he works with emerging talents and supports distinctive auteur cinema across fiction and documentary. His productions have premiered at major international festivals. Recent titles include Rain Fell on the Nothing New (Karlovy Vary 2025), Short Summer (Venice 2025, Lion of the Future) and Trial of Hein (Berlinale 2026, Teddy Jury Award).

Jakub Felcman is a Czech screenwriter, festival organizer, film critic, creative producer, director, and qualified plumber. He studied film at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and FAMU, published interviews and film analyses (for Cinepur), programmed film festivals, and co-founded two of them (Ostrava Kamera Oko, Marienbad). As a script editor he collaborated on films by Jan Němec, Petr Václav, Radu Jude, and Corneliu Porumboiu. Cinemas have screened several films that he co-wrote or produced (such as A Night Too Young, A Certain Kind of Silence, and The Wolf from Royal Vineyard Street).

Devika Girish is editor at Film Comment magazine and a Talks programmer at the New York Film Festival. Her writing also appears in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Sight & Sound, The Criterion Collection, and others, and she has programmed series and festivals for the Criterion Channel, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Film at Lincoln Center, the Mumbai Film Festival, the Berlin Critics' Week, and more. Devika has been invited to juries at CPH:DOX, the Locarno Film Festival, SEMINCI, and Visions du Réel.

​Marija Kavtaradze is a Lithuanian director and screenwriter. Graduating from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in 2014, she made her feature debut with Summer Survivors in 2018, which premiered at the Toronto IFF, followed by Slow (2023), which earned her a Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival and had its European premiere at KVIFF in 2023. Marija works as a screenwriter on shorts and feature films, including The Visitor (dir. Vytautas Katkus, KVIFF 2025), Runner (dir. Andrius Blaževičius, KVIFF 2021), the animated TV series BFF for kids, and others.