Lauren Saarimaki is a Toronto-based producer, educator, and mental health advocate. As Program & Operations Lead at POV Film, they support emerging creatives through training and mentorship. They are also a co-founder of Toronto-based production company Area V5 Pictures. Projects they have produced have screened at festivals including Toronto International Film Festival, Canneseries, Nightmares Film Festival, Image+Nation, Inside Out, Canadian Film Festival, and the Kingston Canadian Film Festival.
Lauren is one of our jury members for the 2026 Pitch, Please! Competition. The winner will be announced tomorrow at our Awards Ceremony.
Judith Schuyler is a filmmaker, writer and director from the Oneida Nation in Ontario, Canada. Her work centers on Indigenous storytelling through genre filmmaking, with a focus on horror, comedy, LGBTQ+ and drama. In 2023, she won the Pitch Please! competition at the Inside Out Festival for her short film There Is Light. The film screens this Thursday as part of the Local Heroes Shorts Program.
Judith is one of our jury members for the 2026 Pitch, Please! Competition. The winner will be announced tomorrow at our Awards Ceremony.
Wayne Burns is a queer Canadian-American filmmaker, actor, and creative producer from Truro, Nova Scotia. His work has screened internationally and received support from the National Film Board of Canada, CBC, OUTtv, the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Wayne has written and directed the award-winning short films EEL, fastLOVE, and LIAR, the latter two premiering at Inside Out in the Local Heroes program. He champions bold, character-driven work that explores intimacy, identity, and human contradiction.
Wayne is one of our jury members for the 2026 Pitch, Please! Competition. The winner will be announced tomorrow at our Awards Ceremony.
Jaye Hudson is a London-based film programmer, trans historian, and actor working across queer cinema, archival practice, and digital culture. After programming with Fringe! Queer Film Festival, she launched her trans-femme focused programming project, TGirlsonFilm. Her work and commentary have been featured in The Face, Little White Lies, and Autostraddle. She currently serves on the selection committee for BFI Flare.
Jaye is one of our Canadian Jury members for #InsideOut26! The winners will be announced tomorrow at our Awards Ceremony.
@tranne_boleyn ❤️
Nosa Eke is an acclaimed platform-agnostic writer and director whose innovative work has earned her recognition as a Film London Lodestar, a BAFTA mentee, and Apple’s “Britain’s Next Level Gaming Talent.” Her extensive credits span directing television for Channel 4, Sky, BBC, and Apple, designing narrative games for EA, and creating interactive scripted content for Meta and Amazon Alexa. Currently, she is developing a television series with StudioCanal alongside her debut feature film, The Young and The Dopeness, which is backed by the BFI and was featured at Inside Out’s Finance Forum in 2025.
Nosa is one of our Canadian Jury members for #InsideOut26! The winners will be announced tomorrow at our Awards Ceremony.
