Frances Louise McDormand is an American actress and producer. Throughout her career spanning over four decades, McDormand has received numerous accolades, including four Academy Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and one Tony Award, making her one of the few performers to achieve the "Triple Crown of Acting". Additionally, she has received two Golden Globe Awards, three British Academy Film Awards, and four Screen Actors Guild Awards. Although primarily recognized for her roles in small-budget independent films, McDormand's worldwide box office gross exceeds $2.2 billion helped by her appearances in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) and Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (2012).
Fernando Ferreira Meirelles is a Brazilian film director, producer and screenwriter. He is best known for co-directing the film City of God, released in 2002 in Brazil and in 2003 in the U.S. by Miramax Films, which received international critical acclaim. For his work in the film, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director. He was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Director in 2005 for The Constant Gardener, which garnered the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Rachel Weisz. He also directed the 2008 adaptation of José Saramago's novel Blindness, and the 2011 film 360. In 2019 Meirelles directed and produced in Brazil the HBO original series Joint Venture and also directed The Two Popes for Netflix.
Maya the Bee is the main character in The Adventures of Maya the Bee, a German book written by Waldemar Bonsels and published in 1912. The book has been published in many other languages and adapted into different media. The first American edition was published in 1922 by Thomas Seltzer. The latter's wife Adele Szold-Seltzer (1876-1940), the daughter of Benjamin Szold and younger sister of Henrietta Szold, was the translator.
Emily Margaret Watson is an English actress. She began her career on stage and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992. In 2002, she starred in productions of Twelfth Night and Uncle Vanya at the Donmar Warehouse, and was nominated for the 2003 Olivier Award for Best Actress for the latter. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her debut film role as Bess McNeil in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996) and for her role as Jacqueline du Pré in Hilary and Jackie (1998), winning the British Independent Film Award for Best Actress for the latter. For her role as Margaret Humphreys in Oranges and Sunshine (2010), she was also nominated for the AACTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
Homerun is a 2003 Singaporean Mandarin-language period film. A remake of the award-winning Iranian film Children of Heaven, Homerun is a drama about two poor siblings and their adventures over a lost pair of shoes. Set in 1965, the year Singapore separated from Malaysia, the film satirises the political relations between the two countries, leading to its banning in Malaysia.
Ruskin Bond is an Indian author. His first novel, The Room on the Roof, was published in 1956, and it received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1957. Bond has authored more than 500 short stories, essays, and novels, including 64 books for children. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992 for Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and Padma Bhushan in 2014. He lives with his adopted family in Landour, Mussoorie, in the Indian state of Uttarakhand.
The Little Rascals is a 1994 American family comedy film produced by Amblin Entertainment, and released by Universal Pictures on August 5, 1994. The film is an adaptation of Hal Roach's Our Gang, a series of short films of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s which centered on the adventures of a group of neighborhood children. Directed by Penelope Spheeris, who co-wrote the screenplay with Paul Guay and Stephen Mazur, the film presents several of the Our Gang characters in an updated setting, featuring re-interpretations of several of the original shorts. It is the first collaboration by Guay and Mazur, whose subsequent comedies were Liar Liar and Heartbreakers.
Linda Diane Thompson is an American songwriter, former actress and beauty pageant winner.
Rowland Stuart Howard was an Australian rock musician, guitarist and songwriter, best known for his work with the post-punk group The Birthday Party and his subsequent solo career.
Joseph David Wolfgang Pichler is an American child actor. He is perhaps best known for his roles in Varsity Blues (1999), and Beethoven's 3rd (2000) and Beethoven's 4th (2001).
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 Holocaust novel by Irish novelist John Boyne. Much like the process he undertakes when writing most of his novels, Boyne has said that he wrote the entire first draft in two and a half days, without sleeping much, but also that he was quite a serious student of Holocaust-related literature for years before the idea for the novel even came to him. The book has received mixed reviews; while positive reviews praise the story as a moral, negative reviews attack the book's historical inconsistencies, and the potential damage it could cause to people's Holocaust education.
Georgia "George" Fayne is a character in the popular Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series. She is one of Nancy's best friends and cousin of Bess Marvin. Her birth name is Georgia, although no one calls her that except her parents.
John Arthur Lithgow is an American actor. Lithgow studied at Harvard University and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art before becoming known for his diverse work on the stage and screen. He has been the recipient of numerous accolades including six Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and two Tony Awards. He has also received nominations for two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, and four Grammy Awards. Lithgow has received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2001 and he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2005.
The Graveyard Book is a young adult novel by the English author Neil Gaiman, simultaneously published in Britain and America in 2008. The Graveyard Book traces the story of the boy Nobody "Bod" Owens who is adopted and reared by the supernatural occupants of a graveyard after his family is brutally murdered.
Jillian Clare is an American actress and singer. She is best known for her role as pre-teen Abigail "Abby" Deveraux on Days of Our Lives, Hayley on Victorious, and her lead role as Lindsey Lou in the film Pretty Broken.
The Worry Website is a children's novel by Jacqueline Wilson published in 2002. It is illustrated by Nick Sharratt.
Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life is a 2006 children's novel by Wendy Mass. The story follows twelve-year-old Jeremy Fink and his neighbor Lizzy Muldoun as they attempt to retrieve four keys that unlock a wooden box delivered one month before Jeremy's 13th birthday. The novel contains information that provides a connection to Every Soul a Star, a children's novel also by Wendy Mass.
"Children on Their Birthdays" is a short story by Truman Capote, published serially in the late 1940s and appearing in A Tree of Night and Other Stories in 1949; it is noted as one of his better quality early short stories.
Joselito Altarejos is an accomplished Filipino filmmaker having won several prestigious awards in the Philippines as well as internationally. He is well known for his ground-breaking openly gay-themed film features like The Man in the Lighthouse, Antonio's Secret, Kambyo, The Game of Juan's Life, Pink Halo-Halo, Unfriend, The Commitment. His 2017 film Tale of the Lost Boys was filmed in Taiwan. His films were celebrated at international LGBT film festivals. With his newly formed production, 2076 Kolektib, his ultimate goal is to create and produce multimedia contents that will arouse, educate, and inspire his audiences to become more vigilant and conscious of the social issues and challenges they face in the age of yet another strongman rule. In the true spirit of independent filmmaking, Altarejos’ decades of experience and continued quest to acquire more profound knowledge and creative enrichment is geared towards marshaling the sentient and jolting the uninformed – while still very much adhered to forming the Brockanian concept of the Great Filipino Audience. Altarejos has also worked for Filipino television doing series and anthologies including the long-running TV series Legacy on the GMA Network. In most of his television work, he is credited as Jose Altarejos and Jay Altajeros.
