DIG Awards 2023. The Video Jury

Each year, DIG’s international jury awards the best investigative journalism work from hundreds of submissions, honoring excellence and courage of reporters from around the world. This year’s DIG Awards 2023 jury welcomes a wide range of distinguished professionals from a variety of disciplines, including documentary reporting, investigative journalism, virtual reality, and movie production from France, Sweden, India, UK, Italy and Turkey.

Florence Aubenas (President)

Florence Aubenas is a French journalist and author. In over 35 years of career, she reported from dozens of different frontlines, from Algeria to Rwanda to Afghanistan and Syria. She is known for her ability in telling incredible human stories with rigor and accuracy, while pursuing an unwavering and relentless quest for truth. Her best-selling books include La Méprise: l’affaire d’Outreau and Le Quai de Ouistreham, which won the Jean-Amilia-Meckert and the Joseph Kessel prizes. Her latest book, Ici et Ailleurs (L’Olivier, 2023) is a a journey through France and the world, from the Yellow Vests Protests to the war in Ukraine. After working for Libération (1986 – 2006) and Le Nouvel Observateur (2006 – 2012), she is now a contributor for Le Monde. In 2005, Aubenas was kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq, alongside her interpreter Hussein Hanun. They were both freed after a 157-day captivity.

Mandy Chang

Mandy Chang is the Head of Global Documentaries at Fremantle. Before, she was the Commissioning Editor at BBC Storyville and the Head of Arts at ABC TV. Previously an award winning documentary producer, director and filmmaker, Mandy has won respect in her industry for her work and has received many nominations and several eminent awards including an Emmy for her films. Her work has spanned a range of factual genres – music, arts, history, observational, polemical & biographical. She has a successful track-record for developing projects and for making, developing and commissioning visually arresting, intelligent films. She also has extensive experience as an executive and series producer, and script writer. Mandy has been a regular juror for the Emmy, London Film Festival and Grierson Awards and is on the board of AIDC.

Axel Björklund

Axel Björklund is the Head of Uppdrag granskning (”Mission investigate”), the most-acclaimed television program for investigative journalism in Sweden. Björklund started to work as SVT three years ago, after spending more than a decade at newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Uppdrag granskning is an investigative long runner that’s been serving scoops since 2001.

Manisha Ganguly

Manisha is an Investigations Correspondent at The Guardian, focusing on international conflict and dissidents. She is an award-winning journalist & documentary producer, known for pioneering open-source investigations (OSI) to expose war crimes. She is a judge for the International Emmy® Awards, a Forbes Under 30 media honouree, and a two-time Amnesty Award winner. Her documentaries for the BBC World Service, investigating human rights abuses across the Middle East, North Africa, Russia and China, have won numerous international awards and been broadcast to over 300 million. Manisha also holds a PhD in OSINT, AI and automation and the future of investigative journalism funded by the University of Westminster.

Coşkun Aşar

Coşkun Aşar is an independent photographer and film-maker based in Turkey. His interest in photography began in 1995. He focuses on stories about socially isolated, marginalized people, poverty, immigration and issues related to gender. He has exhibited his projects in galleries and museums worldwide. Coşkun worked with legendary Magnum Photographer Josef Koudelka for his photographic project Ruins for more than ten years, and filmed him while working. He completed his first feature documentary film which titled Koudelka Crossing the Same River in 2022.

Francesca Panetta

Francesca Panetta is an Emmy Award winning director and artist and the Director of the AKO Storytelling Institute at UAL, where she works with talented professionals across industries and disciplines to experiment with new forms of storytelling that can drive social impact. Panetta is widely considered an industry leader in the world of immersive and experimental storytelling, using emerging technologies to innovate forms of documentary and journalism. In the past, she worked as Creative Director in the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality, and at The Guardian, where for over a decade she led the paper’s in-house VR studio as Executive Editor.

Édouard Perrin

Édouard Perrin is a freelance investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker. He previously worked with French public television France 2 and for the Cash Investigation series. In a 2012 investigation, Perrin revealed secret agreements between the Luxembourg tax authorities and multinational corporations that allowed companies to drastically reduce their tax bills. In cooperation with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, his investigation morphed into the Luxleaks scandal in 2014. Perrin was awarded the Louise Weiss prize for European Journalism and the Ilaria Alpi “Best Television Investigation” in Italy for his part in the investigation.

Maria Bonsanti

Maria Bonsanti is currently Deputy Director of CSC – Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia of Rome, the Italian Institute of the National School of Cinema and the National Film Library. Maria established herself in the world of documentary cinema, collaborating with Festivals such as Festival dei Popoli in Florence and Cinéma du Réel in Paris, of which she was Artistic Director from 2012 to 2017. She also repeatedly collaborated with the Locarno Film Festival. From 2017 until 2022, she was the Head of Eurodoc – European training for documentary producers. She has served on several festivals juries and collaborates in workshops and as member of Funding Bodies, such as the CNC in France.

Marco Nassivera

Marco Nassivera is a staunch European. Born in France of Italian parents, he has been working for the French-German TV station ARTE for 30 years. He started as a reporter for news shows. In 2000, he created the international news magazine ARTE Reportage. From 2013 to 2023, he has been News Director and is thus in charge of the daily news, the international reports and the geopolitics, investigation and international documentary programs. In 2023, he decided to quit ARTE to pursue personal projects.

Tim Travers Hawkins

Tim Travers Hawkins is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker. His debut feature XY Chelsea was a portrait of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, which followed her after she left prison for leaking 300,000 classified documents to Wikileaks. He has since directed films for Netflix, Paramount, HBO; done award-winning investigative work for The Guardian; collaborated on a AAA video game and made interactive projects; and is currently developing an experimental VR project exploring the symbiosis between body and environment.