Gong Li is a Chinese actress. She starred in three of the four Chinese-language films that were nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.
Alex Christophe Dupont, best known as Leos Carax, is a French film director, critic, and writer. Carax is noted for his poetic style and his tortured depictions of love. His first major work was Boy Meets Girl (1984), and his notable works include Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), Holy Motors (2012) and Annette (2021). For the latter, he won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. His professional name is an anagram of his real name, 'Alex', and 'Oscar'.
Edward Yang was a Taiwanese filmmaker. Yang, along with fellow auteurs Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, was one of the leading film-makers of the Taiwanese New Wave and Taiwanese cinema. He won the Best Director Award at Cannes for his 2000 film Yi Yi.
Still Life is a 2006 Chinese film directed by Jia Zhangke. Shot in the old village of Fengjie, a small town on the Yangtze River which is slowly being destroyed by the building of the Three Gorges Dam, Still Life tells the story of two people in search of their spouses. Still Life is a co-production between the Shanghai Film Studio and Xstream Pictures.
Maria Giese is an American feature film director and screenwriter. A member of the Directors Guild of America, and an activist for parity for women directors in Hollywood, she writes and lectures about the under-representation of women filmmakers in the United States.
Crazy Love is a 2007 American documentary film directed by Dan Klores and Fisher Stevens. The screenplay by Klores explores the troubled relationship between New York City attorney Burt Pugach and his ten-years-younger girlfriend Linda Riss, who was blinded and permanently scarred when thugs hired by Pugach threw lye in her face.
Silent Light is a 2007 film written and directed by Carlos Reygadas. Filmed in a Mennonite colony close to Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua State, Northern Mexico, Silent Light tells the story of a Mennonite married man who falls in love with another woman, threatening his place in the conservative community. The dialogue is in Plautdietsch, the Low German dialect of the Mennonites. The film was selected as the Mexican entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 80th Academy Awards, but it did not make the shortlist. The film was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 24th Independent Spirit Awards. It gained nine nominations, including all major categories, in the Ariel Awards, the Mexican national awards.
Dans Paris is a 2006 French romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Christophe Honoré and starring Romain Duris, Louis Garrel, Guy Marchand, Joana Preiss, Alice Butaud and Marie-France Pisier.
Daniela Thomas is a Brazilian film director, screenwriter and editor.
Azazel Jacobs is an American film director and screenwriter. He is the son of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs. His short films include Kirk and Kerry and Message Machine, and his features include the acclaimed Momma's Man,Terri,The Lovers, and French Exit.
Maren Ade is a German film director, screenwriter and producer. Ade lives in Berlin, teaching screenwriting at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg. Together with Janine Jackowski and Jonas Dornbach, she runs the production company Komplizen Film.
Searching for Sugar Man is a 2012 documentary film about a South African cultural phenomenon, written and directed by Malik Bendjelloul, which details the efforts in the late 1990s of two Cape Town fans, Stephen "Sugar" Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom, to find out whether the rumoured death of American musician Sixto Rodriguez was true and, if not, to discover what had become of him. Rodriguez's music, which had never achieved success in the United States, had become very popular in South Africa, although little was known about him in that country.
Andy Siege is a director. His debut feature film Beti and Amare (2014), which he directed, wrote, cinematographed, edited and acted in, was made with a 14,000 euro budget. So far, it has been nominated for the Golden St. George Award at the 36th Moscow International Film Festival and has been featured in the Official Selection of film festivals around the world.
Thomas Imbach is an independent filmmaker based in Zürich, Switzerland. With his production company Bachim Films, Imbach produced his own work until 2007. He then founded Okofilm Productions together with director/producer Andrea Staka. All of his films have been released theatrically and Imbach has won numerous awards for his work, both in Switzerland and abroad. With Well Done (1994) and Ghetto (1997) Imbach established his trademark audio-visual style, which is based on a combination of cinema- verité camera-work and fast-paced editing. His fiction features Happiness is a Warm Gun, as well as Lenz (2006), I Was a Swiss Banker (2007) and the fictive autobiography Day is Done (2011) all premiered at the Berlinale. His latest feature film Mary Queen of Scots celebrated its premiere in Locarno and at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013. His latest documentary Nemesis celebrated its international premiere at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam 2020, where it received the Prize for Best Cinematography. Thomas Imbach is currently considered one of the most unconventional and consistent Swiss filmmakers.
The 66th Berlin International Film Festival was held from 11 to 21 February 2016, with American actress Meryl Streep as the President of the Jury. The Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement was presented to German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. Hail, Caesar!, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, was selected to open the festival. The Golden Bear was awarded to the Italian documentary Fire at Sea, directed by Gianfranco Rosi, which also serves as closing night film.
Sand Storm is a 2016 Israeli drama film directed by Elite Zexer. It was shown in the Panorama section at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival. At the 2016 Sundance Film Festival it won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Dramatic section. It won the Best Film Award at the Ophir Awards. It was selected as the Israeli entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards but it was not nominated.
The 37th Durban International Film Festival took place from the 16th to 26th of June 2016. The festival included 150 screenings of feature films, documentaries and short films in 15 different venues in Durban. The Festiveal was opened with the world premiere of The Journeymen which took place in The Playhouse. Part of the 37th DIFF was the 11th Wavescape Film Festival, which showed 21 films with a focus on outdoor activities.
The 70th annual Berlin International Film Festival took place from 20 February to 1 March 2020. It was the first under the leadership of new Berlin Film Festival heads, business administration director Mariette Rissenbeek and artistic director Carlo Chatrian. The festival opened with the opening gala presented by actor Samuel Finzi followed by the world premiere of the film My Salinger Year which was selected for the Berlinale Special section. The Golden Bear was awarded to the Iranian film There Is No Evil, directed by Mohammad Rasoulof.
Kelly Daniela Norris is a Mexican-American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Her feature directorial debut Sombras de Azul was shot on-location in Cuba and premiered at the Austin Film Festival in 2013, winning the Texas Independents Audience Award. Her second feature, Nakom, co-directed alongside her collaborator T.W. Pittman, and was shot in the Upper East Region of Ghana. Nakom had its world premiere at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival in the Panorama section 2016, was selected for the prestigious New Directors/New Films, was nominated for an Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award for Best Picture made for under $500,000, and had a limited theatrical release in NYC in March 2017. In 2016, Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman were selected for Filmmaker Magazine's “25 New Faces of Filmmaking."
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is a 2021 German-Georgian drama film written and directed by Alexandre Koberidze. The film stars Ani Karseladze, Giorgi Bochorishvili and Vakhtang Panchulidze.
