In 1986, four years after it was founded, the Pordenone Silent Film introduced the Jean Mitry Award. Initially sponsored by the Province of Pordenone and subsequently by the Fondazione Friuli, the award remembers one of the most important cinema theorists of the twentieth century, a founder of the Cinémathèque Française, and the first Chairman of the festival. The prize celebrates figures and institutions who have distinguished themselves in the field of conservation and study of silent-film heritage. This year’s award goes to Bryony Dixon, a curator at the BFI National Archive in London, responsible for the silent film collection, and Mark-Paul Meyer, who is retiring as senior curator of the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. The presentation ceremony will open the evening of Friday, 11 October 2024 at Teatro Verdi, at 9.00 p.m.

One of the world’s leading curators of early film, Bryony Dixon is a curator at the BFI National Archive, responsible for silent film in the National film collection. She has researched and written on many aspects of early and silent film and programmed for a variety of film festivals and events worldwide.
She is the author of BFI Screen Stories: The Story of Victorian Film (2023), BFI Screen Guide: 100 Silent Films (2011) and has written numerous articles and book chapters on silent cinema and film archiving for publications worldwide. She is a regular contributor to Sight and Sound and the BFI’s DVD BluRay publications. She has been lead curator on a number of the BFI’s film restorations, including Underground (1928), Shooting Stars (1927), The Great White Silence (1924), South (1919) and on the Silent Hitchcock project, restoring all nine surviving Hitchcock silent films.
After holding research and programming positions at the BFI National Archive in London, where she has worked since 1992, she has been curator in charge of silent film collections since 2005.
Since 1998 she has also been co-director (with Laraine Porter) of the British Silent Film Festival – a peripatetic festival (Nottingham, London, Leicester) dedicated to screening British silent films with a strong research element, now complemented by the British Silent Film Symposium with Kings College, University of London.
In addition, she has been programmer of the monthly Silent Cinema strand at BFI Southbank since 2018.

Mark Paul Meyer is retiring as senior curator of the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. After his studies in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, he worked as an editor and film critic for the independent film magazine Skrien.  A regular visitor of Le Giornate del Cinema Muto since 1987, he developed a keen interest in silent film and film preservation.
He joined the Nederlands Filmmuseum in 1990 as a curator and film restorer. One of his earliest and eye-catching restorations was Lucky Star (1929) by Frank Borzage, presented at the Giornate in 1990. Many restoration projects followed, such as the Lumière Project, Archimedia and the Gamma Group. This resulted in a short film An Inflammable Film Heritage (1994) and the book Restoration of Motion Picture Film (Oxford 2000), edited in collaboration with Paul Read. In 2003 he stood at the cradle of the Master programme Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image at the University of Amsterdam where he served as a staff member for twenty years. As a curator he encouraged the exploration and use of the archive by film makers, artists, researchers and programmers. He also stimulated to include new forms of cinema in the collection, in particular film installations.
He was programmer of the Filmmuseum Biennale, which was discontinued when the Nederlands Filmmuseum became Eye Filmmuseum and moved to a new building with four cinemas and a large exhibition space. For Eye he worked on exhibitions on Found Footage (2012), Johan van der Keuken (2013) and Jean Desmet (2015). He is currently working on the exhibition Underground, American avant-garde of the 1960s, which will open on October 12, 2024.