Feature film jury

Gábor Csupó

Producer and animator

Gábor CsupóProducer and animator Gábor Csupó is one half of the cartoon enterprise responsible for some of the most popular animated programs of the '90s. He is also a gifted electronic musician and executive producer in charge of the record label Tone Casualties and Casual Tonalities.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, he started animating at Pannonia Studios before moving to Stockholm, Sweden, where he met graphic designer Arlene Klasky. The couple relocated to L.A. and Klasky Csupo, Inc. was officially born.

Their first major job was in 1989, producing The Simpsons animated shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show, which led to his first Emmy award and several other nominations. This was quickly followed by The Rugrats, Duckman, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Santo Bugito, and The Wild Thornberrys. Csupó was also the executive producer for both The Rugrats Movie and The Wild Thornberrys. Other cartoon series developments include Rocket Power and As Told by Ginger, both on Nickelodeon.

A lifelong fan of Frank Zappa, Csupó provided the cover artwork for the 1996 Zappa album The Lost Epsiodes.

Gábor’s live action film directorial debut was “Bridge to Terabithia” for Walt Disney Pictures in 2007. Since then, he directed several other feature films, including Moon Princess, The Immigrants, and Pappa Pia.

Gábor is living in Los Angeles, California, with his wife Kimber and daughter Kelcy.

János Szabolcs

Set and visual designer, inventor

János SzabolcsAfter his general architectural studies, he studied interior design and furniture design at the then College of Applied Arts, as well as set design at the College of Fine Arts. Subsequently completing his studies, he worked as a set designer for the Katona József Theater and the MAFILM Studio, among others.

With his theatrical and cinematic visual designs, he has contributed to major feature films, television productions, commercials, and theatrical productions both in Hungary and abroad for the past ten years.

For the past twenty years, he has worked on visual designs for domestic and foreign productions such as The Pillow of Jadwiga, Freedom, Love, Fresh Air, Chameleon, The Cathedral, Cottage and Pappa Pia. He worked with Steven Spielberg on the Oscar- and Golden Globes-nominated film Munich. He was also nominated for an Emmy Award in 2004 for his artistic performance as Andrei Konchalovsky in his film “The Lion in Winter”.

Inspired by the search for extraordinary solutions in every design process, also led to his latest invention, LavosBall, a new kind of spatial logic puzzle.

Claudia Kovács

Cinematographer, and camera operator

Claudia KovácsClaudia Kovács has been working in the film industry for 12 years. As a cinematographer, and camera operator she worked in different productions, features, documentaries, commercials and video clips.

When she was only 13 years old, she just started learning photography. Later on, she had two exhibitions, where she presented her photos for the public in Budapest. She graduated in 2013 at the University of Theater and Film Arts Budapest, majoring in cinematography. After university she has started her postgraduation program at the Tel Aviv University writing her feature film between 2015-2016.

In 2015 she was selected to the Sarajevo Talents Cinematography Masterclass with Fred Kelemen. She continuously improved her skills to be able to study at the VFX artist school at MOME University in the semester of 2017-2018. Now she is writing her diploma at the ELTE-BTK on film history and aesthetics.

She has participated in various international productions during her career. In 2006 she worked as a camera trainee, in the BBC series, called Robin Hood, and in 2007 in the production: Hell Boy II., (directed by Guillermo del Toro) by the Universal Pictures. In 2012 she was the a camera operator in the HBO series called In Treatment, and in Son of Saul, director László Nemes Jeles in 2014. The film won the Academy Awards Oscar in the USA as the Best Foreign Language Film in 2016. In the last few years she worked as a camera operator in Romeo and Juliet with the Royal Ballet and in the horror movie Midsommar, or the series Treadstone.

Her specialty is to do underwater photography, which she was doing in Bad Poems, a film by Gábor Reisz, or in her own graduation movie.

As a documentary cinematographer, she was the DOP of a feature documentary film, Euphoria of Being -directed by Reka Szabo- in 2019. In 2013 she has worked on the film, Impasse by was Zsófia Szilágyi, and on Besence Open by Kristóf Kovács. Both films were selected for A category film festivals. Right now she is filming a Danish experimental feature documentary 2158 historier om en almindelig mand with the director Ida Marie Gedbjerg Sørensen.

Parallel she makes photographs, and working on own project ideas, which are mostly international. Her aim is to open the gates between people with the common language of visual arts, to induce a constant dialogue.