Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German filmmaker, playwright, author, and photographer. He is a major figure in New German Cinema. Among many honors, he has received three nominations for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature: for Buena Vista Social Club (1999), about Cuban music culture; Pina (2011), about the contemporary dance choreographer Pina Bausch; and The Salt of the Earth (2014), about Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado.
Steve McCurry is an American photographer, freelancer, and photojournalist. His photo Afghan Girl, of a girl with piercing green eyes, has appeared on the cover of National Geographic several times. McCurry has photographed many assignments for National Geographic and has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1986.
Kim Longinotto is a British documentary film maker, well known for making films that highlight the plight of female victims of oppression or discrimination. Longinotto has made more than 20 films, usually featuring inspiring women and girls at their core. Her subjects have included female genital mutilation in Kenya, women standing up to rapists in India, and the story of Salma, an Indian Muslim woman who smuggled poetry out to the world while locked up by her family for decades.
Ettore Scola was an Italian screenwriter and film director. He received a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 1978 for his film A Special Day and over the course of his film career was nominated for five Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.
Nujoom Alghanem is an Emirati poet, artist and film director. She has published eight poetry collections and has directed more than twenty films. Alghanem is active in her community and is considered a well established writer and filmmaker in the Arab world. Her achievements in the arts have been recognized both nationally and internationally. She is the cofounder of Nahar Productions, a film production company based in Dubai. Currently she works as a professional mentor in filmmaking and creative writing, as well as a cultural and media consultant.
Steff Gruber is a film director, photographer, author, entrepreneur and telecommunications and internet pioneer.
Julien Hequembourg Bryan was an American photographer, filmmaker, and documentarian. He is best known for documenting the daily life in Poland, Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1939, in the leadup to and early days of the Second World War. He was honored with Zasłużony dla Kultury Polskiej" during his last visit in Poland (1974) for showing the truth about the Invasion of Poland.
Catfish is a 2010 American documentary film directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. It involves a young man, Nev, being filmed by his brother and friend, co-directors Ariel and Henry, as he builds a romantic relationship with a young woman on the social networking website Facebook. The film was a critical and commercial success. It led to an MTV reality TV series, Catfish: The TV Show. The film is credited with coining the term catfishing: a type of deceptive activity involving a person creating a fake social networking presence for nefarious purposes.
Moon in Taurus is a 1980 film directed by Swiss filmmaker Steff Gruber.
Fetish & Dreams is a 1985 film by Swiss filmmaker Steff Gruber. The film premiered at the Film Festival Locarno 1985.
Location Africa is a 1987 documentary film by Swiss filmmaker Steff Gruber.
The Imposter is a 2012 documentary film about the 1997 case of a French confidence trickster Frédéric Bourdin, who pretended to be Nicholas Patrick Barclay, an American boy who had disappeared in Texas at the age of 13 in 1994. The film was directed by Bart Layton. It mainly includes interviews with Bourdin but also with members of Barclay's family, as well as archive television news footage and reenacted dramatic sequences.
Driving with Selvi is a Canadian documentary film that focuses on South India's first female taxi driver, a young woman named Selvi who had previously escaped a child marriage. The film was directed by Elisa Paloschi, who also acted as producer for the project.
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck is a 2015 American documentary film about Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain. The film was directed by Brett Morgen and premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. It received a limited theatrical release worldwide and premiered on television in the United States on HBO on May 4, 2015. The documentary chronicles the life of Kurt Cobain from his birth in Aberdeen, Washington in 1967, through his troubled early family life and teenage years and rise to fame as frontman of Nirvana, up to his suicide in April 1994 in Seattle at the age of 27.
Jerry Rothwell is a British documentary filmmaker best known for the award-winning feature docs How to Change the World (2015), Town of Runners (2012), Donor Unknown (2010), Heavy Load (2008) and Deep Water (2006). All of his films have been produced by Al Morrow of Met Film.
Something Better to Come is a Danish-Polish documentary film about children living on a garbage dump near Moscow directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hanna Polak and produced by Sigrid Dyekjær of Danish Documentary – one of the world's key players in creative documentary film production. Something Better to Come won the Special Jury Award at the world's biggest documentary festival – IDFA, where the film had premiered.
Life, Animated is a 2016 American documentary by director Roger Ross Williams. It is co-produced by Williams with Julie Goldman, Carolyn Hepburn and Christopher Clements. Life, Animated is based on journalist Ron Suskind's 2014 book Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism, which tells the story of his son, Owen Suskind, who struggled with autism and learned how to communicate with the outside world through his love of Disney films.
This River is a 2016 Canadian short documentary film directed by Katherena Vermette and Erika MacPherson. The film centres on Drag the Red, a volunteer group in Manitoba who search the Red River for the bodies of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.
Jane is a 2017 American biographical documentary film directed and written by Brett Morgen about primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist Jane Goodall. It makes use of footage filmed by Hugo van Lawick that was rediscovered in 2014.
Where Is Elle Kari and What Happened to Noriko-san? is an Israeli documentary by Dvorit Shargal from 2014. It deals with the photo books from the series Children's Everywhere by Anna Riwkin-Brick, Astrid Lindgren, Leah Goldberg and Elly Jannes. Where Is Elle Kari and What Happened to Noriko-san? is the first part of a film trilogy. The follow-up films, which also deal with the photo books from the series Children's Everywhere, were filmed in 2016 and 2017.
