Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker, actor, opera director, and author. Regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema, his films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature. His style involves avoiding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing his cast and crew into real situations mirroring those in the film they are working on.
Franka Potente is a German actress. She first appeared in the comedy film After Five in the Forest Primeval (1995), for which she won a Bavarian Film Award for Best Young Actress. Her breakthrough came in 1998, when she starred in the acclaimed action thriller Run Lola Run, for which she won a BAMBI Award for Best Actress. She received further critical acclaim and a Bavarian Television Award nomination for her performance in the television film Opernball.
Friedrich Gustav Maximilian Schreck, known professionally as Max Schreck, was a German actor, best known for his lead role as the vampire Count Orlok in the film Nosferatu (1922).
Béla Tarr is a Hungarian filmmaker. Debuting with the film Family Nest (1979), Tarr began his directorial career with a brief period of what he refers to as "social cinema", aimed at telling everyday stories about ordinary people, often in the style of cinema vérité. Over the next decade, he changed the cinematic style and thematic elements of his films. Tarr has been interpreted as having a pessimistic view of humanity; the characters in his works are often cynical, and have tumultuous relationships with one another in ways critics have found to be darkly comic. Almanac of Fall (1984) follows the inhabitants of a run-down apartment as they struggle to live together while sharing their hostilities. The drama Damnation (1988) was lauded for its languid and controlled camera movement, which Tarr would become known for internationally. Sátántangó (1994) and Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) continued his bleak and desolate representations of reality, while incorporating apocalyptic overtones. The former sometimes appears in scholarly polls of the greatest films ever made, and the latter received wide acclaim from critics. Tarr would later compete at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival with his film The Man from London, which opened to moderately positive reviews.
Gene Saks was an American director and actor. An inductee of the American Theater Hall of Fame, his acting career began with a Broadway debut in 1949. As a director, he was nominated for seven Tony Awards, winning three for his direction of I Love My Wife, Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues. He also directed a number of films during his career. He was married to Bea Arthur from 1950 until 1978, and subsequently to Keren Saks from 1980 to his death in 2015.
Knut Berger is a German actor. He was born in 1975 in Gelsenkirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia. He played Axel Himmelman in the 2004 Israeli film Walk on Water.
Swoon is a 1992 American crime drama film written, directed, and edited by Tom Kalin in his feature directorial debut. It stars Craig Chester and Daniel Schlachet, with Michael Kirby, Michael Stumm, and Ron Vawter in supporting roles. It recounts the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case, focusing more on the homosexuality of the killers than other films based on the case. Swoon is considered an integral part of the New Queer Cinema movement.
Keren Cytter is an Israeli visual artist and writer.
Birgit Minichmayr is an Austrian actress born in Linz, Austria. She studied drama at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna. For her work in Maren Ade's film Everyone Else she won Silver Bear for Best Actress at 59th Berlin International Film Festival. She is the only Austrian actress to win this award in history of the festival and the first Austrian actress to win best actress award at a major European film festival since 1956. She worked with several major European directors including Michael Haneke, Tom Tykwer and Jessica Hausner.
Navid Akhavan is an Iranian-German actor and film director. He is also known as Navid Navid.
Donald Francis "Don" Draper, born Richard "Dick" Whitman, is a fictional character and the protagonist of the AMC television series Mad Men (2007–2015), portrayed by Jon Hamm. At the beginning of the series, Draper is the charismatic yet enigmatic creative director at the fictional Manhattan advertising firm Sterling Cooper. In spite of his success, he is plagued by several personal problems, including the issues of identity and social alienation, in part due to his difficult past. His personal and professional developments in the show are frequently situated against the larger social, political, and economic events of the 1960s. In 2024, Hamm reprised his role as Draper in a cameo role in the comedy film Unfrosted.
Tom Schilling is a German film and television actor.
Marco Johann Kreuzpaintner is a BAFTA-winning German film director, screenwriter, showrunner and executive producer. He is widely known for his coming-out coming-of-age feature film Summer Storm, the critical acclaimed Netflix series Bodies, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts winning series The Lazarus Project and his Amazon Prime series Beat which won him Germany’s prestigious Grimme Preis and. His fantasy film Krabat starring Daniel Brühl and David Kross and the screen adaptation of the Ferdinand von Schirach novel The Collini Case starring Elyas M’Barek, Alexandra Maria Lara and film legend Franco Nero were box office hits in their original territory Germany. Kreuzpaintner’s U.S. feature film Trade, starring Academy Award winner Kevin Kline, is a story about human trafficking. It was the first film to premiere at the United Nations on Invitation of former U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon. The film played a key to finally passing a law against sex trafficking role in the state of New York.
Krista Elyse Ramona Hidalgo Sullivan, better known by her stage name Bela Padilla, is a Filipino actress.
Sebastian Schipper is a German actor and filmmaker.
The 69th British Academy Film Awards, more commonly known as the BAFTAs, were held on 14 February 2016 at the Royal Opera House in London, honouring the best national and foreign films of 2015. Presented by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, accolades were handed out for the best feature-length film and documentaries of any nationality that were screened at British cinemas in 2015.
Fabian Wagner is a German cinematographer. His roles in the production of the television shows Sherlock and Game of Thrones have earned him two Creative Arts Emmy Award nominations. In 2017 and 2020 respectively, he won the American Society of Cinematographers Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in Regular Series for his work on the Game of Thrones episode "Battle of the Bastards" and for his work on season 3 of The Crown.
Oliver Herbrich is a German filmmaker working as an author, film director and producer. He is associated with the very end of the New German Cinema movement. From 2016 to 2018, his films were digitally remastered and re-released in the Fiction – Non-Fiction Film Edition. In 2018, the Film Museum Düsseldorf added all archival documents to its collection.
Bones and Names is a 2023 German drama film written and directed by Fabian Stumm in his feature directorial debut, starring himself along with Knut Berger, Marie-Lou Sellem and Susie Meyer. The relationship drama presents subtle irony of the partnership between an actor and an author that turns out to be more vulnerable to crises than expected.
Sad Jokes is a 2024 German comedy-drama film, directed by Fabian Stumm. The film stars Stumm as Joseph, a gay film director who is co-parent to Pino with his friend Sonya, and is forced to adapt to the demands of being the boy's primary caregiver after Sonya is hospitalized for depression.
