Meet Our 2022 Film & TV Funding Award Judges
Announcing the judging line-up for our 2022 Film & TV Funding Award! We welcome back Dogwoof’s Oli Harbottle, Netflix’s Kate Townsend, award-winning Producer, Gary Kam and our very own Editorial Consultant, Jane Mote. We are also thrilled to welcome two new additions, BBC Storyville’s Jo Lapping and Sheffield Doc/Fest’s Raul Niño Zambrano. Who will win our coveted £100,000 award this year? Our esteemed judges will decide.
Oli Harbottle has been at Dogwoof since 2006, and was part of the original team who made the decision to specialise in documentaries the following year. As Head of Distribution and Acquisitions, he is responsible for acquisitions and overseeing all film releases, which in recent years have included successes such as The Act of Killing, Blackfish, The Look of Silence, Cartel Land, Weiner, Life, Animated, Three Identical Strangers, Free Solo, and Apollo 11. Oli is now also actively involved in the sourcing of projects for Dogwoof’s new production fund and recent executive producer credits include Maiden, Playing With Sharks: The Valerie Taylor Story and The Lost Leonardo.
Kate Townsend commissions original documentaries out of the UK for the global streaming platform Netflix. Kate has worked across titles such as Fyre, The Devil Next Door, Tell Me Who I Am, Don’t F**k With Cats, Tiger King and American Murder. Prior to Netflix, Kate was Commissioning Editor of the BBC’s Storyville.
Gary Byung-Seok Kam is the first ever Korean documentary producer nominated for an Academy Award. He is committed to crafting compelling stories and supporting independent documentary makers. His films in release include Planet of Snail (2011, director Seung-jun YI), the first Asian documentary that won Best Feature-Length Documentary at the Int’l Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the OSCAR®-nominated In the Absence (2018), Shadow Flowers (2019) and Crossing Beyond, the official Olympic film for the 2018 Pyeong Chang Winter Olympics.He has served as a tutor and juror at various international documentary forum and festivals. Gary is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science.
Jane Mote is a journalist, storyteller, TV executive, and a champion for the power and accessibility of documentary. As Consultant Editor for documentary foundation The Whickers, she nurtures and supports new audio and film documentary-makers who share a curiosity for the world. She has helped develop filmmakers at Docs by the Sea (Bali), MyDocs (Malaysia), AND – Asian Network of Documentary (Busan) – as well as leading documentary training in Uganda and for the BFI London. The former UK MD of Al Gore’s documentary channel Current, and Executive Editor at BBC London, Jane has also worked for Discovery, Turner, BBC Worldwide, UKTV and the Africa channel. She is also Director of UK-based beechtobeach ltd.
Jo Lapping is Head of Factual Acquisitions at BBC Storyville. She has worked for Storyville, the BBC’s international documentary strand, developing, commissioning and producing documentary films since its launch in 1997. Jo acquires both documentary films and factual programming, working closely alongside the Commissioning Editor at Storyville to expand the range of feature documentaries available to audiences across BBC channels and BBC iPlayer.
Raul Niño Zambrano is the Head of Film Programmes at Sheffield DocFest. He was previously a Senior Programmer at IDFA where he started as a programmer in 2008. During his tenure at IDFA, Raul conducted a ground-breaking study on the position of women within the documentary world (The Female Gaze, 2014) and initiated the IDFA Queer Day (2013, ongoing). In addition to being a lead programmer on the overall selection, he curated such programmes as Emerging Voices from Southeast Asia and Cinema do Brasil. He has participated in many international festivals as a juror (Hot Docs, DocPoint, Guanajuato International Film Festival) and as an expert/tutor (DocMontevideo, FESPACO, If/Then Shorts Global Pitch, DocNet Southeast Asia, Guadalajara Doculab).
Find out more about the 2022 Film & TV Funding Award HERE.