Gbemisola Ikumelo
A BAFTA-winning writer, actor and director, returning for her third year as a judge for The Pitch. Ikumelo co-wrote and starred in Famalam, for which she won the Royal Television Society award for Female Comedy Performance, and has appeared in more than 30 radio plays including Radio 4’s adaptation of the classic novel Half Of A Yellow Sun. In 2020 she won a BAFTA for her comedy short Brain In Gear. She starred in BIFA-winning film The Last Tree, as well as Amazon’s TV adaptation of Penny Marshall’s film A League Of Their Own, for which she was a staff writer. She was most recently seen in BBC cop comedy Black Ops, ‘a pitch-perfect, star-packed joy’ (The Guardian), which she also co-created, winning her a BAFTA.
Neville Pierce
An award-winning filmmaker and award-losing journalist. Pierce’s first short as director, Bricks, was praised by David Fincher and won the Melies d’Argent at the Abertoir Film Festival. He has directed an array of great British acting talent – including Jason Flemyng, Lucy Boynton, Nicholas Pinnock and Tim McInnerny – in four shorts, and produced several others. He produced and directed Promise, a short written by Pitch finalist Hannah Lee and described by Never Let Me Go director Mark Romanek as “superbly done” and The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw as “excellent”. He has written on commission for several companies, including Netflix, and has two features in development as director. He is also writing a book about the making of Fight Club and serves as a contributing editor to Empire (the world’s biggest film magazine) and as a consultant for The Pitch. This will be his tenth year as a judge.
Alice Cabañas
Alice Cabañas is head of BFI NETWORK, the British Film Institute’s UK-wide talent development programme, which provides short film and early feature development funding for filmmakers throughout the UK, as well as professional development and networking support for producers, writers and directors. Cabañas oversees all BFI NETWORK funding, its professional development programmes such as BFI Flare x BAFTA and NETWORK@LFF, alongside industry partnerships such as Doc Society, BAFTA and the British Council. She was previously a Talent Executive for BFI Network in the South West, as well as Film Programme Manager for the British Council and Head of Communications and Development for the Encounters Short Film Festival.
Elizabeth Oldfield
The author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times and the host of The Sacred podcast, Elizabeth Oldfield has spent her career trying to lever open space for deeper conversations – about what it means to be a human being, where we can find wisdom and how we build a society where we hate each other a little less. She has worked at the BBC, led a Westminster think tank, and now lives with her family in a Christian intentional community in South London.
