Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress. Known for her versatility and accent adaptability, she has been described as "the best actress of her generation". She has received numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over four decades, including a record 21 Academy Award nominations, winning three, and a record 33 Golden Globe Award nominations, winning eight.
The Deer Hunter is a 1978 American epic war drama film co-written and directed by Michael Cimino about a trio of Slavic-American steelworkers whose lives are upended after fighting in the Vietnam War. The three soldiers are played by Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and John Savage, with John Cazale, Meryl Streep and George Dzundza in supporting roles. The story takes place in Clairton, Pennsylvania, a working-class town on the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh, and in Vietnam.
Harry Dean Stanton was an American actor. In a career that spanned more than six decades, Stanton played supporting roles in films including Cool Hand Luke (1967), Kelly's Heroes (1970), Dillinger (1973), The Godfather Part II (1974), Alien (1979), Escape from New York (1981), Christine (1983), Repo Man (1984), One Magic Christmas (1985), Pretty in Pink (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Wild at Heart (1990), The Straight Story (1999), The Green Mile (1999), The Man Who Cried (2000), Alpha Dog (2006), and Inland Empire (2006). He had rare lead roles in Paris, Texas (1984) and in Lucky (2017).
Michael Antonio Cimino was an American film director, screenwriter, producer and author. Notorious for his obsessive attention to detail and determination for perfection, Cimino achieved fame with The Deer Hunter (1978), which won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
John Holland Cazale was an American actor. He appeared in five films over seven years: The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974), The Godfather Part II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and The Deer Hunter (1978). Cazale started as a theater actor in New York City, ranging from regional, to off-Broadway, to Broadway acting alongside Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Sam Waterston. Cazale soon became one of Hollywood's premier character actors, starting with his role as the doomed, weak-minded Fredo Corleone opposite longtime friend Al Pacino in Francis Ford Coppola's film The Godfather and its 1974 sequel, as well as Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon. In 1977, Cazale was diagnosed with lung cancer, but he chose to complete his role in The Deer Hunter. He died shortly after, in New York City on March 13, 1978.
Euzhan Palcy is a French film director, screenwriter, and producer. Her films are known to explore themes of race, gender, and politics, with an emphasis on the perpetuated effects of colonialism. Palcy's first feature film Sugar Cane Alley received numerous awards, including the César Award for Best First Feature Film. With A Dry White Season (1989), she became the first black female director to have a film produced by a major Hollywood studio, MGM.
Gordon Hugh Willis Jr., ASC was an American cinematographer and film director. He is best known for his photographic work on eight Woody Allen films, six Alan J. Pakula films, four James Bridges films, and all three films from Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather series.
Sara Miller Driver is an American independent filmmaker and actress from Westfield, New Jersey. A participant in the independent film scene that flourished in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s, she gained initial recognition as producer of two early films by Jim Jarmusch, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Driver has directed two feature films, Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993), as well as a notable short film, You Are Not I (1981), and a documentary, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017), on the young artist's pre-fame life in the burgeoning downtown New York arts scene before the city's massive changes through the 1980s. She served on the juries of various film festivals throughout the 2000s.
Stephen Kijak is an American film director. He is known for films about music and musicians, most notably the feature documentaries Scott Walker – 30 Century Man (2006), Stones in Exile (2010), We Are X (2016), If I Leave Here Tomorrow (2018), and Sid & Judy (2019). His collaborators and subjects include such musical legends and icons as David Bowie, Scott Walker, The Rolling Stones, Jaco Pastorius, Rob Trujillo, Backstreet Boys, X Japan, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Judy Garland, and The Smiths.
Shimon Dotan is an Israeli film director, screenwriter, and producer.
Richard Shepard is an American film and television director and screenwriter.
Amiel Courtin-Wilson is an Australian filmmaker. He has directed over 20 short films and several feature films. His debut feature film, Hail, premiered internationally at Venice Film Festival in 2011. He is also a musician, music producer, and visual artist.
Cable News Network Films is a motion picture division of CNN under Warner Bros. Pictures, originally launched in 2012. Its first film, Girl Rising premiered in spring 2013 in the United States.
Nicolas McCarthy is an American film director and writer based in Los Angeles. A lifelong lover of film, McCarthy struggled for the first decades of his career, receiving his first break into the motion picture industry at the age of 40 with the release of his 2012 feature film The Pact. In 2014 he released At the Devil's Door, establishing himself primarily as a maker of horror film.
Laurent Bouzereau is a French-American documentary filmmaker, producer, and author.
Isidore Bethel is a French-American filmmaker who was among Filmmaker's "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in 2020 and DOC NYC's "40 Under 40" in 2023. The films he edits, directs, and produces use filmmaking to make sense of overwhelming experiences and touch on recurrent themes of displacement, sexuality, aging, trauma, grief, therapy, and art-making. His first feature film as director, Liam, premiered at the Boston LGBT Film Festival in 2018 and received the Jury Prize in the Documentary section of the Paris LGBTQ+ Film Festival. His second film, Acts of Love, which French actor Francis Leplay co-directed, premiered at Hot Docs, received the Tacoma Film Festival's Best Feature Award, and appeared on MovieWeb's list of the top LGBTQ+ films of 2021.
Matthew Heineman is an American documentary filmmaker, director, and producer. His inspiration and fascination with American history led him to early success with the documentary film Cartel Land, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film, a BAFTA Award for Best Documentary, and won three Primetime Emmy Awards.
Penny Lane is an American independent filmmaker, known for her documentary films. Her humor and unconventional approach to the documentary form, including the use of archival Super 8 footage and YouTube videos, have earned her critical acclaim.
Marina Zenovich is an American filmmaker known for her biographical documentaries. Her films include LANCE, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which won two Emmy awards.
Nanfu Wang is a Chinese-born American filmmaker. Her debut film Hooligan Sparrow premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017. Her second film, I Am Another You, premiered at SXSW Film Festival in 2017 and won two special jury awards, and her third film, One Child Nation, won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Feature at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Wang is the recipient of a 2021 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Filmmaking, from the Vilcek Foundation.
