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Abderrahmane Sissako was born in Kiffa, Mauritania, in 1961 and raised in Mali, his father’s homeland. When he returned to Mauritania in 1980, the emotional and financial difficulties of adjustment made him turn to literature and film. A study grant allowed him to attend the Institute of the University of Moscow. Le Jeu (1990), first presented as a graduation assignment, won the prize for best short at the Giornate del Cinema Africano of Perugia in 1991.
In 1993, Octobre was shown at Locarno and won prizes the world over. His film, Waiting for Happiness, was screened at Cannes 2002 and was winner of the FIPRESCI award for best film in the Un Certain Regard section. It was also shown at the New York Film Festival in 2002 and won the Grand Prize at FESPACO in 2003. His last film, the overtly political Bamako represents a move away from autobiography but the explicit subject of Bamako had been the implicit themes of his other films: the legacy of colonialism and the lopsided relationship between the first and third worlds. —World Cinema Foundation

The highly acclaimed director from India, Mira Nair leapt into the world’s spotlight with her film Salaam, Bombay! This film is considered by many to be her best work although she may be better known for the controversial subject matter of her latest film Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love.

Mira Nair was born in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa to a civil servant in 1957. She went on to attend the University of New Delhi where she studied Sociology and Theater. Dissatisfied with the quality of the education, she applied elsewhere. As result she came to Harvard in 1976 on full scholarship to continue studying Sociology. While at Harvard her focus drifted to documentary film. She describes documentary as “a marriage of my interests in the visual arts, theatre, and life as it is lived”.

Mira’s first film was Jama Masjid Street Journal which was also her Master’s thesis project. This film explores the life of a traditional Muslim community from the Western perspective. Her most acclaimed documentary was India Cabaret. Ultimately, the standards of objectivity and non interference inherent in documentary film proved to be a trying constraint. She told the West Side Spirit writer, “While I was working in documentary I was impatient sometimes, many times, with waiting for something to happen and not having it happen like I hoped it would.” She goes on to say that she wanted “a lot more control over gesture and drama and faces” in her work. As result she tried her hand at fictional narrative. Her greatest recognition came with her first feature film Salaam, Bombay! She was awarded the Best New Director at the Cannes Film Festival as well as a nomination for best foreign film at the Academy Awards. —http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Nair.html

A director who is capable of crafting both deeply unconventional independent films and mainstream crowd-pleasers, Gus Van Sant has managed to carve an enviable niche for himself in Hollywood. Since debuting in 1985 with Mala Noche, Van Sant has become one of the premiere bards of dysfunction, populating his films with a parade of hustlers, junkies, psychopathic weather girls, homicidal teens, and troubled geniuses.

The son of a traveling salesman, Van Sant was born in Louisville, KY, on July 24, 1952. One constant in the director’s early years was his interest in painting and Super-8 filmmaking. Van Sant’s artistic leanings took him to the Rhode Island School of Design in 1970, where introduction to Avant-Garde cinema quickly inspired him to change his major from painting to cinema. After mobving to LA, Van Sant became fascinated by the existence of the marginalized section of L.A.‘s population, especially in context with the more ordinary prosperous world that surrounded them.Van Sant would repeatedly focus his work on those existing on society’s fringes, beginning with his 1985 Mala Noche, which was a tale of a doomed love between a gay liquor store clerk and a Mexican immigrant. The film featured some of the director’s hallmarks, notably an unfulfilled romanticism, a dry sense of the absurd, and the refusal to treat homosexuality as something deserving of judgment. Unlike many gay filmmakers, Van Sant, who had long been openly gay, declined to use same-sex relationships as fodder for overtly political statements, although such relationships would frequently appear in his films.Mala Noche earned its director almost overnight acclaim on the festival circuit. Later, with the assistance of independent production company Avenue, the director made Drugstore Cowboy, his 1989 film about four drug addicts who rob pharmacies to support their habit.The film’s exploration of the lives of those living on society’s outer fringes were mirrored in Van Sant’s next effort, the similarly acclaimed My Own Private Idaho (1991). Centering around the dealings of two male hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves). The film won him an Independent Spirit Award for his screenplay, as well as greater prestige.

Van Sant’s next project, a 1994 adaptation of Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, was an excessive flop, both commercially and critically. His next project, 1995’s To Die For, helped to restore his luster.The same year, he served as executive producer for Larry Clark’s Kids. In 1997 came true mainstream acceptance for the director; Good Will Hunting. Starring and written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, the film, about a troubled, blue-collar genius, was a huge critical and commercial success. In addition to taking in more than 220 million dollars worldwide, it received a number of Academy Award nominations, including a Best Director nomination, and it won a Best Screenplay and a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. The unprecedented success of Good Will Hunting allowed Van Sant to pursue whatever project his heart desired, which ended up being an unusually faithful remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho. In addition to directing, Van Sant also devoted considerable energy to releasing two albums and published a novel, Pink.

Van Sant fared somewhat better with 2000’s Finding Forrester, a drama about a high-school student from the Bronx (Rob Brown) who becomes unlikely friends with a crusty, reclusive author (Sean Connery). Later Van Sant – longing to return to more-intimate production methods — decided to leave behind big-budget studio filmmaking for his next two features. Inspired by the works of Hungarian director Bela Tarr and American maverick John Cassavetes, Van Sant retreated to the deserts of Argentina, Utah, and Death Valley for 2002’s Gerry. It took Gerry over a year to make it to theaters, in which time Van Sant began production on his next film, the controversial Elephant. Melding improvisational long takes like those in Gerry with Savides’ fluid camerawork, the finished film provoked strong reactions from audiences at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, who either embraced or rejected Van Sant’s aesthetic decision not to offer a definitive rationale for his characters’ homicidal tendencies. The Cannes jury awarded Elephant with their top prize, the Palm d’Or, and Van Sant with his first Best Director statue from the festival.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:115102~T1)

Jan was a student at the Arts Décoratifs in Nice, France, (E.P.I.A.R.). He learned cinema, animation and pixillation and passed his diploma in 1988 (Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique) while shooting his first super 8mm (soft) and 16mm (Yellow Death – The Broadword) short films, as well as his first animated films for Dutch TV. He became assistant operator, directed his first video clips and documentaries, started as a cameraman/reporter for an image agency.

In 1989, he directed Gisele Kerosene, “Grand Prix du Court-Métrage” award at the Avoriaz Festival.

In 1990, he directed the popular L’age de Plastic music video for Elmer Foot Beat. Busy working on several projects (a screen version of a Serge Brussolo novel, the Gisele Kerosene TV series), Jan also directed his first music videos for Pauline Ester (Le Monde est Fou_), another Elmer Foot Beat video (Daniela_), videos for Chihuahuas and Erasure (Voulez-vous, Lay All Your Love on Me). Jan also directed numerous commercials in France, Germany and UK (Nuts, Peugeot, Tang, Gordon’ s Gin, Miko, Adidas…).

In 1991, Jan Kounen wrote Vibroboy with Carlo of Boutiny and directed it in 1993. (“Prix de la Recherche” award at the Clermont-Ferrand festival). Next was Captain X an “unfinished” short followed by Le Dernier Chaperon Rouge a musical/short starring Emmanuelle Beart, with a stunning choregraphy by Philippe Découflé and cinematography by Tetsuo Nagata.

In 1995, Jan directed his first, controversial, feature film Dobermann.

On locations in Mexico and Peru for Blueberry, Jan discovered Shamanism and the Shipibo-Conibos culture, and fell in love with it. He spent several months there filming a feature-length documentary: Other Worlds (2004). He also created a fund raising association: Spirit of the Anaconda and a TV series of one hour documentaries: _Another Reality.

Baldheaded Franco-Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noé has made some seriously disturbing films during his relatively short career. He has also won several critical awards and festival acclaim for each of his works. Noé made his first film in 1991 with the short Carne, an introduction to the character of the Butcher, played by Philippe Nahon. An angry man, the Butcher seeks revenge on whoever hurt his disabled daughter. After working as an actor, cinematographer, writer, and director on some other projects, Noé made his first feature film, I Stand Alone, continuing the story of the Butcher after he does time in jail and abandons his daughter. In 2002 he received major public notice and outrage with the controversial Irréversible, mostly due to the much-publicized eight-minute rape scene. Starring real-life married couple Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, the film is a brutal look at male violence shown in reverse chronological order. —allmovie guide

Interview with Gaspar Noé

Rising to prominence in the 1990s, New Zealand director Jane Campion is known as one of the contemporary cinema’s most distinctive personalities. Her feature films, though varied in quality, have been united by their compelling depictions of the lives of women who are in some way outside of society’s mainstream. Campion’s films explore what makes these women different, and the repercussions of their refusal, or inability, to conform. Thanks to this subject matter, Campion has often been labeled a feminist director, a label that, while not inaccurate, fails to fully capture the dilemmas of her characters and the depth of her work. Born in Waikenae, New Zealand, on April 30, 1954, Campion was the product of a theatrical family. Her mother, Edith Campion is an actress and writer, while her father, Richard, is a theater and opera director. Educated at Wellington’s Victoria University, where she earned a B.A. in structural arts, Campion went on to study fine arts at London’s Chelsea School of Arts. Her interest in filmmaking led her to begin making short films in the late 1970s; one of these, Tissues, led to her acceptance into the Australian Film and Television School in 1981. After earning her degree in direction, she took a job with the Australian Women’s Film Unit. Campion began directing short films in the early 1980s. Her short films garnered a fair amount of acclaim and were widely screened on the international film festival circuit. One of these shorts, Peel, won the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at the 1986 Cannes Festival.

Campion made her feature directorial debut in 1985 with Two Friends, which was made for Australian television. The film, told in reverse narrative that allows its protagonists to grow younger as the story progresses, depicted the connection between a pair of teenagers and the changes they experience in their friendship. Campion followed it up four years later with Sweetie, her first theatrical feature. A very, very black comedy about the strained relationship between an overweight, fairly insane young woman, her meek, skinny sister and the rest of her family, the film received a markedly love-it-or-hate-it response. In contrast, Campion’s subsequent effort, An Angel at My Table (1990), earned an incredibly enthusiastic response, one that heralded her breakthrough as a director. Taken from a three-part miniseries made for New Zealand television, the film tells the story of renowned New Zealand writer Janet Frame, who endured years of institutionalization after being falsely diagnosed with schizophrenia. Rather than going for easy cliches about the triumph of genius over adversity, Campion chose a simple, but never simplistic, approach to her material, using unsentimental honesty to blend comedy, tragedy, naturalism, and surrealism. Her resulting portrait of a woman’s intellectual evolution won great acclaim and a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

With The Piano (1993), Campion traded intellectual evolution for sexual and erotic development. A beautifully told, deceptively simple story, it had as its protagonist Ada (Holly Hunter), a willfully mute Scottish widow who travels with her nine-year-old daughter (Anna Paquin) to New Zealand, where she enters into an arranged marriage with a taciturn, emotionally distant farmer (Sam Neill). Her subsequent affair with her neighbor (Harvey Keitel), which is carried out under the guise of piano lessons, was depicted with scorching yet understated passion, and ably underscored Ada’s own multifaceted emotional and erotic development. One of the year’s most celebrated films, The Piano put Campion at the forefront of contemporary cinema. It earned a score of international awards, including the Cannes Festival’s Palme d’Or, the French César for Best Foreign Film, a number of Australian Film Institute Awards, and Oscars for Hunter and Paquin’s performances as well as Campion’s original screenplay. Campion followed The Piano with a 1996 adaptation of Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. A moody, highly stylized piece, it fused the director’s proclivity for surrealist fantasy with her fascination with strong women chafing against the bonds of society, and featured stellar performances all around, particular from Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer. It received mixed, generally lackluster reviews, however, and when compared to The Piano, it was seen as something of a disappointment. Campion resurfaced in 1999 with Holy Smoke. Starring Kate Winslet as a young Australian woman whose family brings in a deprogrammer (Harvey Keitel) to “cure” her of the cultish spiritual teachings she picked up on a trip to India, it revolved around yet another strong, vibrant woman’s turbulent relationship with the society surrounding her.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:83988~T1)