Eldar Rapaport is an American-Israeli film director, screenwriter and producer, best known for his 2011 feature film August . [1]
Originally from Tel Aviv, [2] he moved to the United States in 1991 to attend Emerson College [2] and the New York University Film School. He won the Iris Prize in 2009 for his third short film Steam. [3]
He is currently based in New York, where he works as Chief Creative Officer for the digital media production firm Screenz. [4] He has also served on the jury for the Iris Prize several times since his own award win.
Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
Imre Kertész was a Hungarian author and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". He was the first Hungarian to win the Nobel in Literature. His works deal with themes of the Holocaust, dictatorship, and personal freedom.
Iris is a 2001 biographical drama film about novelist Iris Murdoch and her relationship with her husband John Bayley. Directed by Richard Eyre from a screenplay he co-wrote with Charles Wood, the film is based on Bayley's 1999 memoir Elegy for Iris. Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent portray Murdoch and Bayley during the later stages of their marriage, while Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville appear as the couple in their younger years. The film contrasts the start of their relationship, when Murdoch was an outgoing, dominant individual compared to the timid and scholarly Bayley, and their later life, when Murdoch was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and tended to by a frustrated Bayley in their North Oxford home in Charlbury Road. The beach scenes were filmed at Southwold in Suffolk, one of Murdoch's favourite haunts.
Claude Lanzmann was a French filmmaker, best known for the Holocaust documentary film Shoah (1985), which consists of nine and a half hours of oral testimony from Holocaust survivors, without historical footage. He is also known for his 2017 documentary film Napalm, about a love affair he had with a North Korean nurse whilst visiting North Korea in 1958, several years after the Korean War.
Branko Lustig was a Croatian film producer best known for winning Academy Awards for Best Picture for Schindler's List and Gladiator. He is the only person born in the territory of present-day Croatia to have won two Academy Awards.
Nikita Sergeyevich Mikhalkov is a Russian filmmaker, actor, and head of the Russian Cinematographers' Union. Mikhalkov is a three-time laureate of the State Prize of the Russian Federation and is a Full Cavalier of the Order "For Merit to the Fatherland".
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist. He is known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Here I Am (2016), and for his non-fiction works Eating Animals (2009) and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019). He teaches creative writing at New York University.
Michael Christopher White is an American writer, actor and producer for television and film. He has won numerous awards, including the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award for the 2000 film Chuck & Buck, which he wrote and starred in. He has written the screenplays for films such as School of Rock (2003) and has directed several films that he has written, such as Brad's Status (2017). He was a co-creator, executive producer, writer, director and actor on the HBO series Enlightened. White is also known for his appearances on reality television, competing on two seasons of The Amazing Race and later becoming a contestant and runner-up on Survivor: David vs. Goliath. He created, writes and directs the ongoing HBO satirical comedy anthology series The White Lotus, for which he has won three Primetime Emmy Awards.
Edward M. Zwick is an American filmmaker. He has worked primarily in the comedy drama and epic historical film genres and has received nominations for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.
Michael David Rapaport is an American actor and comedian. Beginning his career in the early 1990s, he has made over 100 appearances in film and television. His film roles include Zebrahead (1992), True Romance (1993), Higher Learning (1995), Metro (1997), Cop Land (1997), Deep Blue Sea (1999), The 6th Day (2000), Dr. Dolittle 2 (2001), Big Fan (2009), and The Heat (2013). On television, he headlined the Fox sitcom The War at Home (2005–2007) and was a series regular on the Fox drama Boston Public (2001–2004), the fourth season of the Fox serial drama Prison Break (2008–2009), and the Netflix comedy drama Atypical (2017–2021). Rapaport held recurring roles on the NBC sitcoms Friends (1999), My Name Is Earl (2007–2008), and Justified (2014). Outside of his acting career, Rapaport directed the 2011 documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest about the hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest. Active on several podcasts, he is the host of the I Am Rapaport Stereo Podcast.
Claudia Lonow is an American actress, comedian, television writer, and producer. She is best known for her portrayal of Diana Fairgate on Knots Landing.
Eldar Aleksandrovich Ryazanov was a Soviet and Russian film director, screenwriter, poet, actor and pedagogue whose popular comedies, satirizing the daily life of the Soviet Union and Russia, are celebrated throughout the former Soviet Union and former Warsaw Pact countries.
Rappaport is an Ashkenazi surname, with the individuals bearing it being descendants of the Rabbinic Kohenic Rappaport family. Variants of the name include Rapaport, Rapa Porto, Rappeport, Rappoport and Rapoport.
The Iris Prize, established in 2007 by Berwyn Rowlands of The Festivals Company, is an international LGBTQ film prize and festival which is open to any film which is by, for, about or of interest to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or intersex audiences and which must have been completed within two years of the prize deadline.
Oren Rudavsky is an American documentary filmmaker specializing in work about individuals and communities outside the mainstream. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1979. Oren Rudavsky is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Rudavsky is currently producing the NEH funded American Masters documentary: Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People. He is also working on a documentary for a program called Witness Theater, which will chronicle the relationships formed between high school students and Holocaust survivors, culminating with a dramatization of the lives of the survivors. His films Colliding Dreams co-directed with Joseph Dorman, and The Ruins of Lifta co-directed with Menachem Daum, were released theatrically in 2016.
Thor Freudenthal is a German film director, screenwriter, animator and special effects artist best known for his work on Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters.
Benjamin Berkley "Ben" Sherwood is an American writer, journalist, and producer who was formerly the President of Disney-ABC Television Group and ABC News.
The Last Exorcism is a 2010 American found footage supernatural horror film directed by Daniel Stamm. It stars Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Iris Bahr, Caleb Landry Jones, and Louis Herthum.
Benjamin Harold Zeitlin is an American filmmaker, best known for directing and co-writing the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild, for which he received two Academy Award nominations.
Andrew Jacobs is an American correspondent for The New York Times.