Mariusz Rusiński
Mariusz Rusiński is the President of the Jury of the 22nd edition of the Early Bird International Student Film Festival.
A directing student at the National Film School in Łódź, he graduated from the same institution with a degree in screenwriting in 2022. He is also a 2024 alumnus of the Biennale College Cinema. His short films have screened at numerous festivals worldwide.
His recent fiction short, Houdini, won several awards both in Poland and internationally. His latest documentary, Sister of Mine, garnered widespread acclaim, including the Best Youth Documentary Award at IDFA. The film was officially selected for over 60 festivals and received more than 30 awards.
Currently, he is developing a short dark comedy alongside his feature-length directorial debut. Meanwhile, his feature-length screenwriting debut, Miłka, is currently in production.
Nairy Eivazy
Nairy Eivazy is an animation artist and design researcher specializing in animated film with a participatory approach. She received her PhD in the Arts from LUCA School of Arts/KU Leuven, where her research focused on expanding animation film into a socially engaged art practice using methodological tools of participatory design.
Her short films and animation installations have been presented internationally, with exhibitions in cities including Barcelona, Ghent, Leuven, Vienna, Yerevan, Tehran, and Isfahan. Nairy’s research has been published in international peer-reviewed conference proceedings, with a focus on participatory design and animation film.
Nairy is a member of Animating Together, a FilmEU dynamic cluster that explores the potentials of collective storytelling through participatory animation.
Kalina Nikolova
Kalina Nikolova was born in 1999 in Sofia. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in Film Studies from the University of Strasbourg. In 2021, she returned to Bulgaria, where she continued her studies in Film Directing under the mentorship of Prof. Georgi Djulgerov.
In 2024, she became a laureate of the "Tzvetan Todorov" scholarship of the French Institute in Sofia, which provided her with a two-month stay at La Maison des Écritures in La Rochelle, where she developed the script for her next documentary project.
She has experience in professional documentary and fiction feature film productions, including The Fault (2025, dir. Georgi Djulgerov).
Her documentary directorial debut was with the short film Natural Novel (2026)—an attempted portrait of the Bulgarian writer and international "Booker" prize winner Georgi Gospodinov, nominated for Best Debut at the "Vasil Gendov" Bulgarian Cinema Festival (2026) and included in the program of cinemas across the country. She also has experience in Valeska Grisebach's The Dreamed Adventure (Jury Prize, Cannes, 2026) and Dear Maria (2026, dir. Svetoslav Draganov), among others.
She runs the "Kinoskop" cinema column in the newspaper Literaturen Vestnik, in which she publishes film reviews.
Prof. Dr. Bülent Küçükerdoğan
Bülent Küçükerdoğan was born in Braunschweig, Germany. He completed his undergraduate degree at Istanbul University, Department of French Language and Literature. He went on to do his masters degree at the same university’s Department of Radio-Television and Cinema.
In 2000, he completed his PHD degree in the same area of study. Küçükerdoğan has written extensively on film editing, on which he has books. He was the first head and the one of the creator of the South Eastern European Cinema Schools (SEECS) and a member of European Film Academy. He is the Turkish national coordinator for the "BEFMA" (Film and Media Education for Trainers) program, of which BRICS countries are members.
Furthermore, he was invited as a jury member to several film festivals, nationally as well as internationally. Küçükerdoğan is a professor at the Faculty of Communication of Hasan Kalyoncu University in Gaziantep/Turkey, where he teaches in communication and film. He is also the department head of the Department of Cinema and Television, Faculty of Communication at Hasan Kalyoncu University in Gaziantep/Turkey.