Balázs Béla Award-winning cinematographer, university professor. He has photographed more than 30 feature films as well as documentaries, short films, TV films, ads, video clips and concert films. His films have received a number of international prizes, The Revolt of Job was even nominated for an Academy Award. Meteo became a cult classic in the movies after the democratic transformation of 1989. In 2017, he was awarded Best Cinematographer (in Budapest and in Parma) via three separate forums for the film Strangled, which was available on HBO and Netflix.
Besides making films, he has taught cinematography at a number of universities both in Hungary and abroad for decades. As a cinematographer, he was the first to have a PhD/DLA, to habilitate and to receive the title of university professor. He teaches even today, and his A Film Book has become a must-read in film studies. He is the founder and current president of the Hungarian Cinematographers Association (HCA).
Festival jury
Agnesh Pakozdi graduated as an economist in 2007 in Budapest, then, as a student majored in film theory and film history at ELTE university, studied experimental video at the Universität der Künste in Berlin for a year. Then she studied cinematography at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, where her diploma film, “Das melancholische Mädchen”, received the prestigious Max Ophüls Award and was also nominated for the Michael Ballhaus cinematography award. In 2015, she received a scholarship to do the “Expanded Cinematography” course at the Global Cinematography Institute led by Vilmos Zsigmond and Yuri Neyman.
She has worked as cinematographer in six feature films, in more than twenty short films, in international series, documentaries and video art works both in Hungary and abroad. Her feature films premiered at well-known international film festivals (Cannes, Locarno, Sarajevo, Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, Berlinale), her second feature received the best cinematography award in 2017 in Valladolid. At the Zsigmond Vilmos International Film Festival in 2025, her film Blackbird, Blackbird, Blackberry received the cinematography award of Vantage Vision and Special Grip Hungary as well as the Critics’ Award for best cinematography.