Moral Approach Award Jury

Maureen Prins

Maureen Prins graduated in 2000 from the Northern Media School – Sheffield, UK as a director, editor and production designer. She pursued a career in making independent short films and has specialized in using film as a tool for social change and awareness-raising. Passionate about democratizing cinema by giving access to all audiences, in 2006 she started the first Solar Cinema in the Netherlands, a mobile cinema that powers its equipment with 100% solar power, with the aim to take films to the most culturally deprived areas in the world.

In 2009 her foundation Solar World Cinema was set up with the mission to take the concept abroad and create an open source digital toolkit to inspire others to set up a solar powered cinema. As a result, currently there are eleven solar powered cinemas running across the globe that form the Solar Cinema Network. Apart from working as a film curator, currently she is also the coordinator of a talent program for emerging filmmakers.

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Mira Gakjina

Mira Gakjina (North Macedonia) is a senior curator, art critic, and researcher whose work delves into issues of identity, migration, and social justice. Her curatorial practice is motivated by a commitment to examining the intersection of art, activism, and social change, with a focus on art’s role in fostering critical dialogue and promoting institutional and societal transformation.

She served as Commissioner of the North Macedonia Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. She has contributed to several publications and has also lectured at various institutions and international conferences and symposiums in Rijeka, Zagreb, Paris, Warsaw, Chengdu and Ljubljana. Gakjina served as a President of AICA Macedonia (2014-2018). She was director of the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje (2017-2023).

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Kapka Kassabova

Dubbed ‘the poet laureate of the margins’, Kapka Kassabova is a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer best known for her Balkan quartet exploring people and places and comprising Border (2017), To the Lake (2020), Elixir (2023), and Anima, a wild pastoral (2024).

These books create their own literary form blending memoir, anthropology, history and ecology to explore the human experience in a Balkan setting. Kapka Kassabova grew up in Sofia and emigrated as a teenager with her family to New Zealand. As an adult she returned to Europe and has lived in Scotland for 20 years. Her work is translated into many languages and has won multiple literary prizes including a British Academy Prize and the Prix Nicholas Bouvier.