FIPRESCI Award

With this award for an outstanding film in the competition ON THE RISE, the jury combines the goal of promoting cinematic art and encouraging new and young cinema.

The jury of the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique (International Federation of Film Critics/ FIPRESCI) consists of three international film critics. The FIPRESCI has been represented at the film festival in Mannheim (today Mannheim-Heidelberg) since 1960. The IFFMH is one of the first film festivals in the world to have a jury of film critics.

This is our FIPRESCI-Jury 2025!

Assiya Issemberdiyeva

Assiya Issemberdiyeva is a London-based film critic and researcher. A PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London (School of he Arts), she specialises in representations of Central Asia in Soviet wartime cinema, with interests in art cinema and postcolonial, decolonial and feminist film theory. She is a member of FIPRESCI and the Kazakhstan Film Critics Association, curated Kazakh Film Week in London (2019, 2021), and created/hosted KinoScope on El Arna TV channel (2022–23). Her writing appears in Azattyq (RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service), Qalam Global, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Apparatus, KinoKultura and The Calvert Journal. Current projects include pieces in development for Senses of Cinema, Central Asian Survey and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema. She has led film-literacy workshops for Internews and mentors early-career critics. She champions distinctive authorial voices, formal rigour and ethically attentive storytelling, with a particular interest in debut and second features.

Britta Schmeis

Britta Schmeis, born near Düsseldorf in 1972, is a freelance cultural journalist in Hamburg specializing in film and literature. Her first film in a small-town cinema was ‘The Rescuers’. Since then, her passion has shifted to arthouse cinema. Among other things, she was film editor at the German Press Agency and culture editor at Der Spiegel. For many years now, she has been working as a freelance critic for epd Film, Welt am Sonntag and NDR Kultur, among others. She has already contributed her expertise to various juries.

Tereza Brdeckova

Tereza Brdečková studied at the Prague Film Academy FAMU from 1977 to 1982. She worked as an editor and film critic in the Czech media, at the BBC, and at Radio Suisse romande. In 1992, she was the program director of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and later spent many years in leading program positions a festival Febiofest. From 1996 to 2012, she created her own documentary tv program Ještě jsem tady (I'm Still Here) and other documentaries for Czech Television. She is the author of several novels and non-fiction works: Jiří Brdečka (monograph), Jiří Brdečka- Life animation, magic. As a screenwriter, she collaborated with Jan Němec and Jiří Menzel. She wrote the miniseries Bohéma about Czech filmmakers during the Nazi occupation. Her family publishing house, Limonadovy Joe, publishes film literature by Jean Claude Carrière (Telling a Story). She is an associate professor at the Prague Film Academy, where she teaches screenwriting. She has served on many FIPRESCI juries, including Cannes, Berlinale, Locarno, etc.