Rajesh Touchriver is an Indian filmmaker, production designer and scriptwriter. He has won several state awards, national and international awards for his feature films, documentaries and short films. He worked with the National School of Drama, New Delhi as a designer in 1995. By the year 1998, he had directed more than 30 plays in Malayalam, English and Telugu languages. Rajesh won the Charles Wallace Trust Award in 2001 and pursued his master's degree in visual language/scenography and direction from the Wimbledon College of Art, London.
Yusuf Khwaja Hamied is an Indian scientist, billionaire businessman and the chairman of Cipla, a generic pharmaceuticals company founded by his father Khwaja Abdul Hamied in 1935. He is also an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy.
Thomas "Thom" Fitzgerald is an American-Canadian film and theatre director, screenwriter, playwright and producer.
Anurag Kashyap is an Indian filmmaker and actor known for his works in Hindi cinema. He is the recipient of several accolades, including four Filmfare Awards. For his contributions to film, the Government of France awarded him the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2013.
Sridhar Rangayan is an Indian filmmaker who has made films with special focus on queer subjects. His queer films, The Pink Mirror and Yours Emotionally, have been considered groundbreaking because of their realistic and sympathetic portrayal of the largely closeted Indian gay community. His film The Pink Mirror remains banned in India by the Indian Censor Board because of its homosexual content.
68 Pages is a 2007 Indian film about an HIV/AIDS counselor and five of her clients who are from marginalized communities. The film is directed by Sridhar Rangayan and produced by Humsafar Trust in association with Solaris Pictures. It had its world premiere at the International Film Festival of Kerala and screened at several international film festivals. It won the Silver Remi award at WorldFest Houston International Film Festival 2008, USA. The film was also screened in the Pink Ribbon Express, a National AIDS Control Organisation initiative.
Solaris Pictures is an Indian film production company based in Mumbai. It was created by Sridhar Rangayan, and Saagar Gupta in 2001. The two have gone on to create several award-winning films under Solaris Pictures' banner, focusing on LGBT issues and HIV/AIDS.
Dhvani Desai is an Indian animation filmmaker and poet. She is best known for her animated films Manpasand and Chakravyuh.
Ram Mohan was an Indian animator, title designer and design educator, who was also known as father of Indian Animation and was a veteran in the Indian animation industry, who started his career at the Cartoon Films Unit, Films Division of India, Government of India in 1956. He was chairman and chief creative officer at Graphiti Multimedia, a Mumbai-based animation company which was established in 1995, and later he also established the Graphiti School of Animation in 2006.
We Were Here is a 2011 American documentary film about the HIV/AIDS crisis in San Francisco. The film, produced and directed by David Weissman with editor and co-director Bill Weber, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011, with its international festival premiere following at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2011. The theatrical premiere took place at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco on February 25, 2011.
Aarti Shrivastava is a national award-winning Indian documentary filmmaker and Asia 21 IPRYLI Fellow based in Mumbai.
Ritesh Batra is an Indian film director and screenwriter. Batra's Hindi-language debut feature film The Lunchbox premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and won the Rail d’Or. Batra also won the Toronto Film Critics Association Award for Best First Feature Film in 2014. The Lunchbox was the highest-grossing foreign film in North America, Europe and Australia for 2014 grossing over US$25 Million. The film was also nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language in 2015.
Catherine Gund is an Australian-born American producer, director, writer, and activist who founded Aubin Pictures in 1996. Gund's films have screened around the world in festivals, theaters, museums, and schools; on PBS, the Discovery Channel, Sundance Channel, Netflix, and Amazon Prime.
Dylan Mohan Gray is an Indian and Canadian filmmaker. His documentary feature film Fire in the Blood, premiered in competition at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and went on to enjoy the longest theatrical run of any non-fiction film in Indian cinema history . An official selection at over 100 leading film festivals which was honoured with major awards and accolades worldwide, Fire in the Blood altered the global conversation around access to essential medicine, and in 2018 was named one of "26 landmark documentary films of the past seven decades" in a major retrospective curated by legendary documentarian John Pilger.
Peter Ndimbirwe Mugyenyi, MBChB, DCH, FRCPI, FRCPE, ScD, commonly known as Peter Mugyenyi, is a Ugandan physician, HIV/AIDS researcher, medical administrator and author. He is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Joint Clinical Research Centre (JCRC), and a leading International authority on treatment of HIV/AIDS in Africa.
Vipin Vijay is an Indian film director and screenwriter. He received his post-graduate degree in filmmaking from the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute SRFTI, Calcutta. He received the Charles Wallace Arts Award for research at the British Film Institute, London, 2003. Vipin is the recipient of "The Sanskriti Award" (2007) for social & cultural achievement. His works are made under independent codes and defy any categorisation eluding all traditional genre definitions and merge experimental film, documentary, essay, fiction all into one.
Talal Derki is a Syrian Kurdish director, producer and screenwriter. Born in Damascus and of Kurdish descent, Derki studied film directing in Athens at Stavrako High Institute of Cinematographic Art and Television, graduation in 2003. He worked as an assistant director for feature film productions and was a director for different Arab TV programs & TV films between 2009 and 2012. He worked as a freelance cameraman for CNN and Thomson Reuters. He was Oscar nominated in 2019 and became a member of the Academy. He is the winner of the German Film Awards, Lola, in 2019. Talal Derki's short films and feature length documentaries received tens of awards at various festivals. Both of his films Return to Homs and Of Fathers and Sons won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival 2014 and 2018.
Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukthankar were an Indian filmmaker duo working predominantly in Marathi cinema and Marathi theatre. Bhave and Sukthankar had made seventeen feature films, more than fifty short films, and four TV serials; all of which had been written by Bhave. Sunil Sukthankar, a Film and Television Institute of India graduate (1989) is also an actor and a lyricist. He has written more than 90 songs for their own films as well as various other Marathi and Hindi films. The duo had won various national and international accolades for the films Doghi (1995), Dahavi Fa (2002), Vastupurush (2002), Devrai (2004), Astu (2016) and Kaasav (2017). At the 64th National Film Awards, their feature film Kaasav won the prestigious President Golden Lotus National Award.
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival took place from January 20 to 30, 2022. Due to COVID-19 pandemic protocol it was going to be a hybrid festival, but on January 5, 2022 it was announced that the in-person components would be scrapped in favor of a virtual festival due to the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant. The first lineup of competition films was announced on December 9, 2021.
Writing with Fire is a 2021 Indian documentary film directed by filmmakers Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas about the journalists running the Dalit women led newspaper Khabar Lahariya, as they shift from 14-years of print to digital journalism using smartphones. It is the first Indian feature documentary to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
