One of my favourite parts of running the festival (other than finding so many awesome films and filmmakers) is getting to work with other film industry professionals, and each year I’ve been honoured and delighted to have such great people on our juries. This year is no exception. I’m very proud to introduce you to the fine group of people who will be judging 2020’s crop of narrative films:
Jim Cummings
Jim Cummings is the Sundance-winning filmmaker behind Thunder Road. He is a writer/director and actor and spends his time helping short filmmakers expand into feature filmmaking.
Robyn Citizen
Robyn Citizen, PhD is the Senior Manager of Festival Programming at Toronto International Film Festival. From 2012-2017 she was a lecturer on genre and transnational cinemas at the University of British Columbia. She has served on numerous film festival juries and is co-chair of the Breakthroughs Film Festival. A lifelong fan of anything in anthology format, she recently published chapters on Get Out and East Asian Cult cinema in edited volumes and is always on the lookout for new omnibus films.
Jason Ryle
Jason Ryle is a producer, programmer, curator, and arts consultant based in Toronto, Canada. From July 2010 to June 2020, Jason was the executive director of imagineNATIVE, an Indigenous-run organization mandated to support Indigenous screen-content creators. In this capacity, Jason oversaw all operational and artistic aspects of the annual imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and the organization’s year-round activities, including international partnerships and special projects. Since 2006, Jason has been a script reader for the Harold Greenberg Fund (which provides financial support to Canadian screenwriters) and currently serves as the chair of the Toronto Arts Council’s Visual & Media Arts Committee. From 2013 until 2019, he was an advisor for Indigenous films at the Berlinale. Jason has produced two short animations and is currently in development as a producer on three feature films, a short, and one documentary feature.