Sam Pollard chairs the official jury of the 70th London Film Festival

The 70th London Film Festival, organised by the British Film Institute (BFI), has made public this year’s four competition juries, with American documentarian Sam Pollard at the head of the Official Jury that will select the winner of the Best Film award, as ScreenDaily reports. Pollard, whose career spans more than four decades, has won Peabody and Emmy awards and was nominated for an Oscar as a producer of Spike Lee’s documentary “4 Little Girls”.

This year, Pollard is joined on the official jury by Argentine director Mariano Llinás and Julie La Bassiere, a strategic executive at the DDA agency. The first-features jury (the Sutherland Award) is chaired by British-Egyptian actor Amir El-Masry, the documentary jury (the Grierson Award) by director Sandhya Suri, and the short-film jury by producer Helen Simmons.

Ten titles are competing in the official competition for Best Film, among them May el-Toukhy’s “Woman Unknown”, the winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival, Hirokazu Koreeda’s “Look Back” and Benjamín Naishtat’s “Glaxo”. The winners will be announced on Sunday, 18 October, while the festival takes place in London from 7 to 18 October.

The London Film Festival remains one of the main stops of the film awards season, and the composition of this year’s juries brings together documentary veterans with new voices of international cinema.