Berlinale Documentary Award and Jury

If Pigeons Turned to Gold
by Pepa Lubojacki
produced by: Klára Mamojková, Wanda Kaprálová

© Getty - Bromberger Hoover Photography

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TUTU
by Sam Pollard

© Bildersturm Filmproduktion

©

Was an Empfindsamkeit bleibt (Sometimes, I Imagine Them All at a Party)
by Daniela Magnani Hüller

© Jens Koch

Lemohang Mosese (Lesotho)

Lemohang Mosese is a Berlin-based director and visual artist from Lesotho. His essay film Mother, I Am Suffocating, This Is My Last Film About You premiered in the Berlinale Forum in 2019 and was showcased at major festivals and art institutions. His acclaimed feature This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019) screened at Venice and Rotterdam and won over 30 awards, including Sundance’s Jury Award for Visionary Filmmaking. In 2025, Ancestral Visions of the Future celebrated its world premiere in Berlinale Special and opened Cinéma du Réel. Mosese is a Berlinale Talents alumnus and served on the Berlinale International Short Film Jury in 2020. His video installations, including Sculpting God and New God, have been exhibited around the world.

© Jens Koch

B Ruby Rich (USA)

B Ruby Rich is a film scholar, critic and professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz. She coined the term “New Queer Cinema” in a 1992 “Village Voice” essay, identifying a wave of radical queer films. A specialist in feminist, queer, Latin American, independent and documentary cinema, Rich’s career spans programming (Art Institute of Chicago), teaching (UC Berkeley, UCSC), public funding (New York State Council on the Arts), and film criticism for outlets like “The Village Voice” and “Sight & Sound”. She is the author of “Chick Flicks” (1998) and “New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut” (2013) and was editor-in-chief of “Film Quarterly” from 2013 to 2024. Rich received the SCMS Distinguished Career Achievement Award and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

© Jens Koch

Shaunak Sen (India)

Shaunak Sen is an acclaimed filmmaker and writer based in Delhi. Cities of Sleep (2016), his first feature-length documentary, was shown at various major international film festivals and won six international awards. His film All That Breathes (2022) received nominations at the Academy and BAFTA Awards and won a Peabody Award as well as awards at Cannes, Sundance, BFI London, the IDA Documentary Awards, and Cinema Eye, among others. Shaunak served on juries for the Sundance and Zurich Film Festivals and received grants from Sundance, Tribeca, IDFA, and Catapult. He recently produced the fiction feature Shadowbox (directed by Tanushree Das and Somo Sahi), which premiered in the Berlinale Perspectives section in 2025.