Villa Medici Film Festival | 2024 Edition

Clément Cogitore is a Franco-German artist and filmmaker, trained at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg and Le Fresnoy.
Winner of several awards, including the Grand Prix du Salon de Montrouge in 2011 and the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2018, he was also a Fellow at the French Academy in Rome in 2012. In 2015, his first feature film Ni le Ciel, Ni la Terre won an award at Cannes and was nominated for the César for Best First Film. His work for the opera Les Indes galantes in 2019 has been widely acclaimed. In 2022, his second feature Goutte d’Or won an award and was shortlisted to represent France at the Oscars. Since 2018, he has been a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Vimala Pons is a circus artist and actress. After studying art history at Paris 4 and film history at Paris 8, she continued her training at the Cours Florent, the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique de Paris (CNSAD), and the Centre National des Arts du Cirque (CNAC).
Since 2013, Vimala Pons has distinguished herself in independent and auteur cinema, collaborating with such renowned directors as Antonin Peretjatko, Bertrand Mandico, Christophe Honoré, Jacques Rivette, and Alain Resnais. In 2023, she played in Stephan Castang’s Vincent doit mourir, and will appear in Baya Kasmi’s Mikado, Victor Rodenbach’s Le Beau Rôle, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Le Voyage essentiel.

Rasha Salti is a researcher, writer and curator of art and cinema. She has co-curated several film programs, including Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s until Now (MoMA, New York), and Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin). She is currently commissioned editor for La Lucarne, Arte France’s experimental documentary program. Rasha Salti also co-curated the exhibition Past Disquiet with Kristine Khouri. In 2022, Salti was one of the co-curators of the 8th Triennial of Photography in Hamburg, and a member of the curatorial committee for the 12th Berlin Biennale.

Lili Hinstin is a programmer and artistic festival director. In charge of cinema at Villa Medici between 2005 and 2009, she became a programmer for the Cinéma du Réel festival from 2010 to 2013. Lili Hinstin then became artistic director of the Belfort Film Festival (2013-2018), then of the Locarno International Film Festival (2018-2020). She is the director of programming for the Biarritz International Festival – Nouvelles Vagues.

Julian Ross is a researcher, curator and writer based in Amsterdam. He is co-programmer of Doc Fortnight 2024 at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and co-programmer of the upcoming 69th Flaherty Seminar. He is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, where he is co-director of the interdisciplinary research centre ReCNTR. He joined the selection committee of Villa Medici Film Festival in 2024.

Valentine Umansky has worked for various visual arts institutions and is currently curator at the Tate Modern in London. Between 2015 and 2020, she held positions in the United States at the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Modern Art and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. She is also a curator and author.  

Jean-Marc Zekri has been for many years the director of the Reflet Médicis art-house cinema in Paris, where he organizes a wide range of events focusing on repertory films, often previously unreleased, and films from emerging cinematographies. He is also a member of the board of the endowment fund of the Parisian cinema association La Clef. He has been a member of the Quinzaine des Cinéastes selection committee since 2023 and joined the Villa Medici Film Festival selection committee in 2024.