Fiction Jury President

Permanent jury member

Belgian actor Pascal Duquenne was born on August 8, 1970 in Vilvorde. He has Down syndrome and is famous for having played the role of a young man afflicted with that same disability in the film The Eighth Day by Jaco Van Dormael, for which he was awarded the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor and the Joseph-Plateau Prize of the Flanders International Film Festival Ghent in 1996. In 2004, Albert II of Belgium named him Commander of the Order of the Crown.

Jury President

Doctor by training, Jean-Baptiste Richardier launched the foundation of Handicap International with his friend and colleague Dr. Claude Simonnot in 1982. As they were outraged by the fate of thousands of Cambodian refugees that were amputated due to the explosion of anti-personnel landmines, the two doctors decided to rally by building prostheses for the victims.

For over 30 years, Jean-Baptiste Richardier spread the action of Handicap International worldwide. He notably highly contributed to the commitment of the organisation against anti-personnel landmines, a battle for which the NGO received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

Successively holding the position of communication and development manager as well as landmines department manager before becoming the director general of Handicap International in 2003, he went into retirement in 2016 but keeps a role on the board of directors.

Pascal Plisson is a film director, scriptwriter and author, but first and foremost, he’s passionate about travels and adventures. He directed his first feature film Massaï, les guerriers de la pluie (Maasai, the rainwarriors) in Africa in 2003.

Sur le chemin de l’école (On the way to school), his second feature film, won the César award for Best Documentary in 2014. This story about four children from India, Kenya, Morocco and Argentina facing many obstacles on their long and tiring way to school moved the entire world.

Adda Abdelli is an author and comedian born in Algeria in 1967. He contracted a disability on both legs after catching polio when he was only one year old.

He’s the co-creator and co-writer of the successful French series Vestiaires (Locker rooms), which breaks taboos by showing disabled and uninhibited actors in a municipal swimming pool.

In 2017 he wrote Comme sur des roulettes as a way to talk about his disability, always humorously.

Actor Anthomy Lemke has been an ambassador of Handicap International in Canada since November 2015. He participates in raising awareness amongst Canadians towards the goals, the work and the impact of the organisation worldwide.

In over 15 years, Lemke has done one role after another as a forefront actor in the Canadian film and TV industry and, more recently, as one of the main characters in the internationally successful show Dark Matter. Very much awaited, the third season was recently launched in Canada, in the USA and in more than 150 territories around the world, including France, Italy, the UK and Germany.

He played very important roles in many TV series such as The Listener, the awarded series 19-2, Lost Girl and Blue Mountain State. As a bilingual actor, he’s also one of the rare Canadian actors who found success as much in English speaking productions as in French ones. Les Hauts et les bas de Sophie Paquin, Mirador, Mémoires Vives and 30 Vies are all productions that have been praised by the public. Lemke has a degree in civil law and common law from the McGill University and currently lives with his family in Prince Edward County.

After studying engineering and getting a degree from the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA) in Lyon, Gabion turned to comedy and started training as an actor.

The public mostly knows him for his numerous roles on television (he can be seen in over 20 films and series, including French TV series Kaamelott by Alexandre Astier, in which he plays Knight Bohort, one of the main recurring characters), his artistic activities expanded towards many fronts.

In theatre, he plays under the guidance of many directors and was led to participate in many plays by great authors from the past (Chekhov, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Seneca the Younger, Choderlos de Laclos, Schnitzler, Brecht, Gogol, Corneille…) but also contemporary authors such as Englishman Jezz Butterworth or the American Ira Levin.

He’s also a scriptwriter (he collaborated in the writing of Kaamelott’s season 2 and is the author of The Fabulous, a feature film still in development) and a stage director (Le Sas by Michel Azama, Epopée Lubrique co-directed with Marion Aubert at the Centre Dramatique National of Montpellier).

Nick Spark is a writer and documentary-maker based in Los Angeles. He’s passionate about unconventional characters as well as the too often neglected woman characters.

His film Right Footed about Jessica Cox, disability rights advocate, was projected in over 50 film festivals over the world and won 17 major awards, including Best Documentary in the Mirabile Dictu film festival of the Vatican, and Best Social Action film in the prestigious Hollywood Film Festival. Right Footed is now available on the National Geographic Channel in 83 countries and has been translated in many languages.

Nick also made apparitions in many TV and radio programmes to talk about his research. He has a Masters of Fine Arts degree from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television as well as a degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona. As a student, he won two Emmy Awards for his documentaries, respectively while attending each of these two colleges.

director, scriptwriter