New Mistakes

Michel Franco, born in 1979 in Mexico City, is one of Mexico’s most celebrated filmmakers. The films he has written, directed, and produced include Chronic (Best Screenplay Award, Cannes Film Festival 2015), April’s Daughters (Jury Prize, Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival 2017), and After Lucia (Top Prize, Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival 2012). Among the films he has produced are 600 Millas (directed by Gabriel Ripstein, Best First Feature Award, Berlinale 2015) and From Afar (directed by Lorenzo Vigas, winner of the Golden Lion, Venice Film Festival 2015). In 2020, his film New Order, a dystopian drama, was awarded with the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. A year later, Michel returned to the festival to premiere Sundown, a drama starring Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg. In September 2023, Michel’s film Memory, starring Academy Award-winner Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, premiered at Venice, where Sarsgaard won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor.

Adam Schorin grew up in New York but is now based in Poland. His fiction and non-fiction films have appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Forward, Paper Brigade, and elsewhere. He has received support for his writing from Stanford University and the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture; his fiction work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2024. He has worked as a tour guide and educator for a handful of institutions in Poland, and as an editor for the Polish magazine Przekrój and the online journal Gazeta. For two years he served as a co-director of a festival of critically minded Jewish art and activism in Krakow, Poland. In 2021, he curated a year-long exhibition about his grandfather and the photographs he took in the Krakow Ghetto, which has since transferred to Los Angeles and Detroit. He has worked as a writing assistant for Academy Award-winning director Paweł Pawlikowski and as a consultant for actress Joanna Kulig.