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One of Sweden’s most renowned directors, Lasse Hallström is best known to international audiences as the maker of such poignant but resolutely unsentimental coming-of-age films as My Life as a Dog and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

The son of an amateur filmmaker, Hallström was born in Stockholm on June 2, 1946. He began his professional career in high school when, with the assistance of a group of friends, he made a short film about some school mates who had formed a band. The film was shown on Swedish television, and after graduating high school, Hallström went on to do more work for television. His Shall We Dance? was aired in 1969, while The Love Seeker (1972) was Sweden’s entry at the Montreux Television Festival. The following year, Hallström’s Shall We Go to My or to Your Place or Each Go Home Alone?, a televised film about Swedish youth, was so well received that he was able to make his feature film directorial debut.

Hallström made his debut with the romantic drama En Kille och en tjej (A Guy and a Gal) in 1975. Two years later, he focused his lens on one of Sweden’s most famous exports in ABBA – The Movie. He subsequently made a number of romantic comedies, but it was not until 1985, with Mitt Liv Sond Hund (My Life as a Dog), that Hallström had his international breakthrough. A bona fide art-house hit, My Life was the touching and wholly un-patronizing coming-of-age story of a young boy sent to live with relatives when his terminally ill mother can no longer care for him. The film earned a score of international honors, including the Best Foreign Film Golden Globe and New York Film Critics Circle award, and Hallström received Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Following the success of My Life as a Dog, Hallström remained in Sweden, making children’s films. In 1991, he came to the U.S. and made his stateside debut with Once Around. A romantic comedy starring Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfuss, it enjoyed a favorable reception. Two years later, the director’s international reputation was further solidified with the film that many regard as one of his best, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Another unsentimental coming-of-age story, it was centered around the travails of the title character (played by Johnny Depp), a young man longing for change from his mundane everyday existence. It featured strong performances all around, particularly from Depp and a then-unknown Leonardo DiCaprio, who earned Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for his portrayal of Gilbert’s retarded younger brother.

Hallström’s follow-up to Gilbert, Something to Talk About (1995), returned him to the realm of romantic comedy. Starring Julia Roberts as a woman bent on getting revenge on her philandering husband (Dennis Quaid), it earned a less enthusiastic reception than Hallström’s previous film, but still managed to be fairly successful. The director did not make another film for four years; when he re-emerged, it was with an adaptation of John Irving’s The Cider House Rules. Featuring a script by the author, it starred Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, and Michael Caine, the latter playing his first ever American-accented role as a kindly doctor and occasional abortionist. The following year Hallstrom scored yet another art-house hit with the romantic comedy drama Chocolat, the tale of a small-town candy maker who shakes up her community by staying open on Sundays earned numerous award nominations including four Golden Globe Nominations and five Oscar nominations. Hallstrom’s pace showed no signs of lagging with the release of The Shipping News in 2001, and though the film may have not been as universally adored as his previous few films it nevertheless earned positive critical notice and earned a healthy keep at art-house box-offices.

Keeping the drama personal for his next film, An Unfinished Life, audiences eagerly awaited the tale of a down-on-her-luck woman (Jennifer Lopez who moves in with her estranged father in law (Robert Redford) in order to ensure her daughter a safe and sheltered upbringing.

Since 1994, Hallström has been married to actress Lena Olin, with whom he has a daughter. —allmovie guide

As a writer, director, actor, producer, author, and entrepreneur, Spike Lee has revolutionized the role of black talent in Hollywood, tearing away decades of stereotypes and marginalized portrayals to establish a new arena for Afro-American voices to be heard. His movies, a series of outspoken and provocative socio-political critiques informed by an unwavering commitment toward challenging cultural assumptions not only about race but also class and gender identity, both solidified his own standing as one of contemporary cinema’s most influential figures and furthered the careers of actors including Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett, and Laurence Fishburne. Born Shelton Jackson Lee in Atlanta, GA, on March 20, 1957, he was raised in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. After attending Atlanta’s prestigious Morehouse College, returned to New York to make his first movie, 1977’s Last Hustle in Brooklyn, a portrait of the area’s Black and Puerto Rican communities. Later, he enrolled in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, earning his Master of Fine Arts Degree in film production. His senior feature, 1982’s Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, was the first student effort ever showcased in Lincoln Center’s “New Directors, New Films” series, and also garnered the Student Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

His 1986 comedy She’s Gotta Have It, took the Prix de Jeunesse award at Cannes and earned close to 9 million dollars at the box office. Soon Hollywood came calling, and in 1988, he released his major studio debut School Daze; however, it was his third film, 1989’s Do the Right Thing, which launched Lee to the forefront of the American filmmaking community. A provocative, insightful meditation on simmering racial tension, it was among the year’s most controversial and talked-about films and went on to net an Oscar nomination for “Best Screenplay.” The jazz world was the subject of ‘90s Mo’ Better Blues, which opened to lukewarm press; however, with his next film, Jungle Fever, Lee was again at the center of controversy over the picture’s subject matter, interracial romance. Afterwards he started his dream project, 1992’s Malcolm X. Shot at various points across the globe, the three-hour biopic of the slain civil-rights leader reached theaters in its intended form only after celebrities including Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Prince helped defray financing costs in the wake of Warner Bros.’ mandate that Lee trim the film’s running time by half an hour. Lee next shot the change-of-pace Crooklyn, a relatively light serio-comedy based largely on his own experiences growing up in Brooklyn in the early ‘70s and written in tandem with his sisters Joie and Cinqué. Next up was 1995’s Clockers, a highly regarded urban crime drama based on the novel by Richard Price. In 1996, Lee released two very different feature:. Girl 6, looked at the world of a young actress forced to accept work as a phone-sex operator,and Get on the Bus, paid tribute to the historic Million Man March. Upon signing a three-year, first-look production contract with Columbia, he then began work on He Got Game, a study of the politics of high-school basketball. Lee’s next film, Summer of Sam, set in Brooklyn during the long, hot summer of 1977 when serial killer David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz terrorized the city.The director’s subsequent project, Bamboozled (2000) was another testament to Lee’s status as one of the most complex and divisive filmmakers of both the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

In the following years Lee would tackle a quartet of more personal projects with A Huey P. Newton Story, Come Rain or Come Shine, Jim Brown: All-American, and a ten-minute segment of Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet before again turning to feature films with The 25th Hour. The film found Lee branching off to surprising effect, even if it didn’t score a direct hit at the box office. After stepping behind the camera to direct the Showtime gang drama Sucker Free City in 2004, Lee moved back into feature territory with the 2004 comedy drama She Hate Me. In addition to his primary work as a filmmaker, Lee has also written a number of books about filmmaking, as well as the 1997 Best Seat in the House: A Basketball Memoir. Additionally, he directed a number of commercials, most famously a series of Nike spots in which he appeared (in the guise of his She’s Gotta Have It character, Mars Blackmon) alongside basketball superstar Michael Jordan, as well as music videos for the likes of Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, and Prince. To aid aspiring filmmakers, Lee also founded the 40 Acres and Mule Film Institute on the campus of Brooklyn’s Long Island University

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:99175~T1)

Once the vanguard of 1960s-1970s Hollywood New Wave, director Arthur Penn saw his cinematic fortunes decline with the mid-‘70s rise of more straightforward blockbuster entertainment. Even as he struggled through the ’80s and ’90s, however, Penn’s legacy was assured by such films as Little Big Man (1970), Night Moves (1975), and the pivotal masterwork Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
Born in Philadelphia, Penn was trained to follow in his father’s footsteps as a watchmaker, but by high school, he knew he preferred theater. While stationed at Fort Jackson, SC, during World War II, Penn formed a small drama circle with his fellow infantrymen, and continued his education as an actor at school in North Carolina and Italy after the war. Though Penn acted in Joshua Logan’s theater company and studied with Michael Chekhov at the Actors Studio’s Los Angeles branch, he opted for a career behind the scenes when he got a job at NBC TV in 1951. By 1953, Penn was writing and directing live TV productions for the Philco Playhouse and Playhouse 90. Earning a shot at feature films, Penn combined the Method acting concentration on character psychology with the story of legendary Western outlaw Billy the Kid in The Left-Handed Gun (1958). Starring Paul Newman as Billy and shot in crisp black-and-white, The Left-Handed Gun emphasized ‘50s rebel neuroses over pastoral spectacle, becoming more of a character study of youthful revolt spiked with dramatic violence than a typical good vs. bad oater. Though European audiences loved it, Americans were unimpressed. Having directed the Broadway success Two for the Seesaw that same year, Penn stuck with theater and quickly established a sterling reputation with consecutive Broadway hits: The Miracle Worker, Toys in the Attic, and All the Way Home.
Penn returned to movies with the film adaptation of The Miracle Worker (1962). Resisting pressure to cast Elizabeth Taylor, Penn insisted that Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke reprise their stage roles as intrepid tutor Annie Sullivan and her blind and deaf charge Helen Keller. Saccharine-free and masterfully acted, The Miracle Worker became a hit, earning an Oscar nomination for Penn and Oscar wins for Bancroft and Duke. Penn’s Hollywood glow quickly diminished, however, when star Burt Lancaster abruptly fired Penn two days into shooting on The Train (1964). Angry and undaunted, Penn proceeded to make the underrated and little seen Mickey One (1965). Shot with French New Wave aplomb and starring Warren Beatty, Mickey One eschewed all narrative certainty in its highly personal exploration of a nameless man’s paranoid flight from the Mob, presaging the enormous influence New Wave technical freedom, genre revision, and ambiguity would have on Hollywood a few years later. Penn left filmmaking again in disgust after producer Sam Spiegel fired him from The Chase (1966) and recut the film.
After a year off, however, Penn was coaxed back into movies by Beatty to helm Bonnie and Clyde. Though they clashed during production, Beatty saw to it that he and Penn could cast the film with unknowns from New York theater and TV, shoot with no studio interference on location in Texas, and edit the film in New York. With his producer-star’s full support, Penn aimed to make the violence as brutal as possible, culminating with the incendiary quick-cut, slow-motion climax showing the eponymous glamour outlaws riddled by bullets. Though critics were repulsed by the bloodshed and the notion of criminals as beautiful doomed heroes, Beatty, armed with a rave by Pauline Kael and reports of audience enthusiasm, fought Warner Bros. for a re-release and Penn’s combination of French New Wave style with an American genre finally made an impact. Hailed as a visionary work and embraced by the youthful Vietnam-era audience, Bonnie and Clyde became a pop-culture phenomenon, inspiring a cycle of revisionist gangster movies that included Thieves Like Us (1974) and Badlands (1973), making stars out of Faye Dunaway and Gene Hackman, and altering the visual language of Hollywood violence. Penn lost the Best Director Oscar, though, to The Graduate‘s (1967) Mike Nichols.
Penn confirmed his place in the new Hollywood counterculture firmament with _Alice’s Restaurant_ (1969) and Little Big Man (1970). Adapted from Arlo Guthrie’s song and starring Guthrie, Alice’s Restaurant was a dreamy, satirical, fun, yet downcast look at life in a hippie commune that garnered Penn his third Oscar nod for directing. More epic in form and content, Little Big Man mordantly re-framed the glorious myth of the Western frontier as a tragic comedy of genocide and white stupidity and amorality. Though star Dustin Hoffman’s misadventures as a snake oil salesman, gunfighter, and adopted Cheyenne provided comic relief, Penn’s tough depiction of the Washita Massacre and different take on Custer’s Last Stand powerfully revealed which side was “civilized.” Though Little Big Man was a major hit, Penn took a hiatus from films (save for the omnibus documentary Visions of Eight ¹⁹⁷³) until Night Moves (1975). As with The Long Goodbye (1973) and Chinatown (1974), Night Moves recast the potent film noir detective as a man overwhelmed by the corruption he uncovers. Despite the presence of Gene Hackman as the doomed PI, Night Moves’ rigorously downbeat tone was no longer in synch with audience tastes. Penn’s next effort, The Missouri Breaks (1976), was intended to be a blockbuster pairing of Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando as a horse thief and the gunfighter hired to kill him. Though Brando and Nicholson made a fascinating pair, the film’s shifting tones and defiant eccentricity turned off audiences and critics. Penn didn’t direct another film until his critique of the 1960s, Four Friends (1981).
Never able to recapture his late-‘60s success, Penn directed only the workmanlike spy actioner Target (1985) and thriller Dead of Winter (1987) before the barely released Penn & Teller Get Killed (1990) essentially ended his feature-film career. Returning to the more welcoming environs of TV, Penn scored a critical success with The Portrait (1993), a finely crafted character study starring Gregory Peck and Lauren Bacall. The made-for-cable feature Inside (1996) dealt with the kind of politically charged subject matter — in this case, South African apartheid — reminiscent of Penn’s best films. Though he was long past retirement age, Penn, via his director son Matthew Penn, signed on as an executive producer for Law & Order‘s 2000 season to help punch up the long-running series’ New York grit; a skill he exercised again helming an episode of Sidney Lumet’s cable series 100 Centre Street (2001). —AllMovie guide

Born Liv Johanne Ullmann on 16 December 1938 in Tokyo. Her father Viggo was an international aircraft engineer, hence her childhood spent in Tokyo (which her family left upon Japan’s alliance with Germany in 1940), Toronto and New York. Following an accident, Viggo Ullmann died in New York in 1944, and when the War ended in 1945 Liv’s mother Janna moved with her two daughters home to Trondheim. Liv was seven years old when she first set foot in Norway.

After a period of study at the Webber-Douglas Academy in London, Liv Ullmann made her stage debut in Stavanger in Anne Frank’s Diary (roughly the same time that Harriet Andersson was playing the same part in Stockholm). Her film debut came in Fjols til fjells in 1957. Following a number of promising film and stage roles in Norway, Liv Ullmann came to Sweden to make her breakthrough film Persona, and remained in the country as Ingmar Bergman’s partner for five years. She played major roles in his films up until Autumn Sonata in 1978, including Hour of the Wolf, Shame, A Passion, Cries and Whispers, and Scenes from a Marriage.

Liv Ullmann met Bergman via Bibi Andersson, whom Ullmann had got to know during the shooting of Bjarne Henning-Jensen’s Short is the Summer. One crucial reason for landing the part in Persona was her physical similarity with Andersson, and she became the first non-Swede to play a major part in a Bergman film. In the same year that the film had its premiere (1966), Bergman and Ullmann’s daughter Linn was born.

Liv Ullmann played Kristina in Jan Troell’s film version of Vilhelm Moberg’s emigrant novels The Emigrants and The New Land, a role for which she in 1973 won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar. Her subsequent fortune outside Scandinavia with films such as the comedy 40 Carat, or as Queen Kristina in The Abdication was somewhat less sparkling.

From time to time Liv Ullmann has returned to the theatre. She played the role of Eliza in Pygmalion alongside Erland Josephson at Maxim in Stockholm in 1975 and enjoyed considerable success in Noël Coward’s comedy Private Lives in Oslo in 1989. Her role in Richard Rodgers musical I Remember Mama on Broadway in 1979 was, however, less highly acclaimed.

In the 1980s Ullmann became a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. Her debut as a film director came in 1982 with Parting, one of the films in the Canadian episode film Love. She continued her role as a director through the 90s with Sofie, Kristin Lavrandsatter (a role she had previously played on the stage), Private Confessions and Faithless, the latter two films based on screenplays by Ingmar Bergman. In 2003 she also repeated her celebrated role as Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage in Saraband.

Liv Ullmann has also written two autobiographical works –Changing (1976) and Choices (1984). She was the editor of the collection Letters to my Grandchild (1997). She has been married twice, first to the Norwegian doctor Gappe Stang between 1960–65 and since 1985 to the American property developer Donald Saunders.

Of her strong personal involvement with her roles she has commented:

“When I decide to portray a part, I can never completely hide who I am, what I am. At the point of identification, the audience encounters a person, not a role, not an actress. A face to face. It’s what I know about women. It’s what I have experienced, what I’ve seen. That’s what I want to share with you.” —Stiftelsen Ingmar Bergman

Born in Dusseldorf just after the end of World War II, German film director Wim Wenders grew up with an insatiable appetite for American movies. Not all that interested in big-budget products, he, instead, developed a fascination with B-movies, notably melodramas and Westerns. After studying Medicine and Philosophy in his native country, Wenders took up art in Paris (a mecca for viewing American films), and then returned to his homeland to attend Munich’s Academy of Film and Television. Like many of his French movie-fan brethren, Wenders began his career writing film criticism before directing a few short subjects of his own, and, in 1970, he and several other young filmmakers formed a production-distribution firm, Filmverlag Der Autoren. Summer in the City (1970) was Wenders’ first feature film, but it was his 1973 adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter that first brought him attention outside of Germany. The film included many accomplishments, most notably coaxing a superb performance from Senta Berger as Hester Prynne, and managing to make the landscapes of Spain resemble 17th century New England.

At this point, Wenders began his road movie cycle, inspired by such American pictures as Easy Rider (1970) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). Three films in this genre followed in quick succession: Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976). For his first English-language picture, The American Friend (1977), Wenders cast three of his American movie idols: actor Dennis Hopper (director/star of Easy Rider) and “cult” directors Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause) and Samuel Fuller (The Steel Helmet). Wenders would later co-direct Lightning Over Water (1980) with Ray.

Wenders’ American-financed films Hammett (1980) and Paris, Texas (1983) were remarkable in their evocation of time and place, and the director could certainly have continued quite satisfactorily in Hollywood. However, he seemed to prefer activity in Europe, even though he was always one step ahead of his creditors — especially when running his own studio, Gray City. Wenders’ return to German filmmaking was rewarded in 1987 with the release of Der Himmel Über Berlin, or Wings of Desire. The story of an angel who wants to become human after finding earthly love met with an enthusiastic international response, culminating in a slew of honors for Wenders (including a 1987 Cannes Best Director award, a 1988 European Film Academy award for Best Director, and a host of awards from the New York Film Critics Circle) and an eventual 1998 American remake, City of Angels.

In the 1990s, Wenders’ love of on-the-road location filming was again manifested in such films as Until the End of the World (1991) (filmed on four continents and designed to be “the ultimate road movie”), and Faraway, So Close (1993), a marathon experience (which originally ran 164 minutes) wherein an angel wanders about to observe the changing scene in a newly unified Germany. In 1995, Wenders made a road movie of a different sort with Par-Dela les Nuages/Beyond the Clouds, which he co-directed with legendary Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. Set in various European countries, the film explored the vagaries of love and lust through the experiences of several principle characters. Receiving decidedly mixed reviews, it differed strongly from Wenders’ next effort, Die Gebrüder Sklandanowsky/A Trick of the Light, a 1996 historical tribute to some of the more neglected developers of moving picture technology. Wenders returned to the States the following year with The End of Violence, a film that explored the effects of violence on the intertwining of people’s lives. Featuring Bill Pullman, Andie McDowell, and Gabriel Byrne, it was not a great commercial or critical success, but Wenders did win acclaim the following year for The Buena Vista Social Club. A documentary about Cuban music, the film was the result of a successful collaboration between Wenders and musician Ry Cooder, who had previously supplied the score for the director’s Paris, Texas. —allmovie guide

Zhang Yimou is one of the best-known directors of the Chinese Fifth Generation and one of the most influential and widely respected filmmakers working today. Zhang was born in 1950, in the city of Xi’an in Shaanxi Province, to a future in Communist China that seemed unpromising; his father was an officer in Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang Army and one of his brothers was accused of being a spy, while another fled to Taiwan. During the 1950s, his family’s background was suspect and during the convulsive tumult of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, it was criminal. Zhang was pulled out of high school and sent to toil with the peasants. Later, he transferred to a textile factory. While working there, Zhang reportedly sold his own blood to buy his first camera.

In 1978, at the age of 27, Zhang passed the entrance exam for the Beijing Film Academy but was rejected on account of his age. After an appeal to the Ministry of Culture, however, he was enrolled in the B.F.A.‘s class of 1982. His classmates included Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Zhang Junzhao, filmmakers who would eventually form the core of the Fifth Generation. Zhang, along with three others, with government permission, formed the Youth Team and began making their own films. Zhang worked as a cinematographer on a number of significant films, including Zhang Junzhao’s groundbreaking One and Eight (1984) and Chen Kaige’s masterpiece Yellow Earth (1984), which took the Hong Kong Film Festival by storm and brought worldwide attention to Chinese cinema. Later, Zhang was transferred to his hometown of Xi’an and served as both cinematographer and lead actor in Wu Tianming’s Old Well (1987), which won him a best actor award at the Tokyo International Film Festival. After this initial success, Zhang’s fortunes improved significantly when he was permitted to direct his first film, Red Sorghum (1987), which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and achieved critical and commercial success, both internationally and domestically. But Zhang’s biggest stroke of luck turned out to be his discovery of a vivacious 21-year-old named Gong Li at the Central Drama Academy in Beijing. Their professional and well-publicized personal relationship would shape Chinese cinema for the better part of a decade. His movies made her an international star and her presence gave his films an exoticism and feminist-edged sex appeal that pulled in audiences.

After the thoroughly forgettable Codename Cougar (1987), Zhang made Ju Dou (1989), which won Best Film at the Chicago Film Festival and garnered an Academy Award nomination. Zhang’s first film after the Chinese government’s bloody 1989 crackdown at Tianamen Square was a thinly veiled political allegory about a young woman who is forcibly married to an abusive, sexually impotent old man who runs a dye-house. His next film, Raise the Red Lantern (1992), widely considered his finest, also concerned a woman married into a controlling, abusive patriarchal world. Both movies were seen everywhere but China, thanks to government censors. Both were set in the 1920s before the Communists came to power; and both featured sumptuous photography and a formal, controlled style that made heavy use of montage. In each film, Zhang meticulously explored the interiors that these women are forced to inhabit, creating settings that radiated repressed sexuality as much as oppression.

Just as critics seemed to have identified a specific Zhang Yimou style, he released The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), about a pregnant peasant women seeking legal justice after her husband is beaten by a village leader. Although setting a film in contemporary China was a significant political risk, the government approved of The Story of Qiu Ju, largely because it coincided with an anti-corruption campaign. Zhang’s previous masterpieces were taken off the blacklist and the director was hailed as a hero. But Zhang’s fortunes dissipated after Shanghai Triad (1995). The Chinese government pulled the film from the New York Film Festival after it learned that Gate of Heavenly Peace (1995), a scathing documentary about the Tianamen Square massacre, was also programmed. He directed Puccini’s opera Turandot with an international cast in 1996 and released the comedy Keep Cool in 1997, featuring Jiang Wen, who starred in Red Sorghum. In 1999, though, Zhang caused some controversy at the Cannes Film Festival when he suddenly withdrew his two most recent films from competition. His film Not One Less (1999) won the coveted Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Film Festival. Zhang’s other 1999 effort, the poignant drama The Road Home, also took home numerous film awards including the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Zhang’s next film Happy Times lightened the mood a bit with its humorous tale of an ageing bachelor who transforms a schoolbus into a no-tell motel in hopes of gaining the funds to marry his true love, and given the controversy surrounding his subsequent film a little lightening of mood would be much in order. A historic, period action film dealing with an assassination attempt on the powerful ruler of China’s Northern Province, Hero teamed the acclaimed director with such notable onscreen talent as Jet Li, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. Of course for Zhang fans it likely goes without saying that the film is undeniably gorgeous thanks cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s masterful eye for detail, and the beautiful landscapes combined with remarkable costume detail placed the lavish action epic towards the top of Zhang’s cinematic oeuvre. Regardless of the fact that the film was both an Oscar and Golden Globe nominated for Best Foreign Film in addition to sweeping the Hong Kong Film Awards with an impressive seven wins and becoming the highest grossing film in Chinese history, American distributors Miramax inexplicably sat on the major release even though the rest of the world had seen the 2002 film by early 2003. By the time Miramax’s tentative April 2004 release date rolled around, it would be nearly two-full years since Hero’s original 2002 release date in mainland China. As if to add insult to injury, Miramax subsequently announced plans to edit the film for American distribution, which combined with Miramax’s similar treatment of such Asian imports as Shaolin Soccer, resulted in a notable “Appeal to Disney for Respectful Treatment of Asian Films” campaign by concerned online film buffs.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:117624~T1)

Thanks to the content of his films, American director James Ivory has spent much of his long career being mistaken for an Englishman. Few filmmakers have been more closely associated with a particular type of genre than Ivory and his longtime collaborator, producer Ismail Merchant. The very mention of the hyphenate Merchant-Ivory effortlessly conjures up heavily stylized images of Edwardian England, replete with stiff upper lips, effete aristocrats, and young women confined by both corsets and repressed desire. However, although much of Ivory’s reputation has been built on his E.M. Forster-adapted period dramas, he has also earned considerable respect for the insightful examinations on the interplay of different cultures inherent in almost all of his work — particularly his earlier films about India — and his and Merchant’s ability to make quality films on a minimal budget.

Born in Berkeley, California, on June 7, 1928, Ivory grew up in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where his father ran a sawmill. Having decided at the age of 14 that he wanted to go into film as an art director, he attended the University of Oregon, where he majored in fine arts. Following graduation, Ivory traveled to Tours, France, to study the language, but he soon lost interest in his studies. He relocated to the University of Southern California, where he entered the film department. It didn’t take Ivory long to realize that he hated film school, so he took a leave of absence to travel to Venice, where he worked on his masters thesis, Venice: Themes and Variations. However, his work was interrupted by the Korean War, for which he did two years service in Germany; his time there was mainly spent putting on Soldier Shows, which, as he would later remark, gave him his introduction to show business.

While working on Venice, a 28-minute documentary that juxtaposed contemporary views of the city with paintings by the masters, Ivory was introduced to art from India’s golden age. His ensuing fascination with the country’s culture was manifested in his next film, a documentary on Indian artifacts called The Sword and the Flute (1959). The film was hailed by a number of critics, as well as New York’s Asia Society, and it was during a visit to New York for a screening of the film that Ivory met Ismail Merchant. A young Indian who had been sent to the United States for business school, Merchant was passionate about film. He and Ivory became fast friends, and in 1961 they formed Merchant Ivory Productions. The two also became acquainted with novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala around this time; Jhabvala would become irrevocably associated with the two, acting as the screenwriter for all but a handful of their films.

The trio’s first films were set in India, dramas concerned with questions of cultural interplay, personal identity, and physical and emotional isolation. All of these films were made independently (only one, the poorly received The Guru (1969), has been made for a studio during the course of Merchant and Ivory’s years together), and ably demonstrated the kind of technical expertise the filmmakers were capable of achieving with a very limited budget. Their first film, The Householder (1962), was an adaptation of a novel by Jhabvala about an Indian couple experiencing the travails of an arranged marriage. It was shot in black and white by Subrata Mitra, otherwise known as Satyajit Ray’s cameraman; Ivory had befriended Ray, who reportedly acted as the film’s uncredited editor and music supervisor.

Shakespeare Wallah (1965), the trio’s second film, was the one that first gave the filmmaking team international recognition. A sensitive, thoughtful portrayal of a family of English actors traveling through India, it helped to establish Ivory as a director adept at capturing particular moods through visual representation, much in the style of Ray or Jean Renoir. The film was a critical and financial success, winning an award at the Berlin Film Festival and grossing four times what it cost to make.

Following the disastrous The Guru (1969) (a production reportedly ill-fated from start to finish) and Bombay Talkie (1970), Merchant-Ivory relocated to the wilds of upstate New York for Savages (1972). A black and white allegory about the nature of modern “civilization,” it represented a complete departure from Ivory’s earlier work. The film received mixed reviews, all of which were incredibly favorable when compared to those that greeted Ivory’s next effort, The Wild Party (1974). Based upon the infamous Roscoe \“Fatty\” Arbuckle/Virginia Rappe case, the film was such a badly edited mess that Ivory subsequently disowned it.

Roseland (1977), a series of vignettes set in New York’s legendary dance hall, saw Ivory back in form, and it received a standing ovation when it premiered at the 1977 New York Film Festival. The film was praised for the sort of naturalism and keenly portrayed sense of isolation apparent in Ivory’s earlier films about India. It was followed by another widely praised Indian excursion, Hullabaloo over Georgie and Bonnie’s Pictures (1978), and then by a 1979 adaptation of Henry James’ The Europeans. A richly detailed picture that maintained an intense — some would say exhaustive — faithfulness to the book, The Europeans was the sort of literary adaptation with which Merchant-Ivory would become synonymous. After Quartet (1981), which was based upon the relationship between Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford, and Heat and Dust (1982), adapted from Jhabvala’s Booker Prize-winning novel, another James adaptation, The Bostonians, followed in 1984. A love triangle set against the backdrop of the early stages of the suffragette movement, it featured another strong script by Jhabvala, minutely detailed period authenticity, and an Oscar-nominated performance from Vanessa Redgrave.

Although The Bostonians was moderately successful, Ivory’s reputation was sealed the next year with his adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. A romantic comedy set during the Edwardian period, it was a lush, witty affair, one that proved to be enormously popular with critics and audiences alike. Nominated for eight Academy Awards (it won three, including Best Adapted Screenplay for Jhabvala), it was praised for its beauty and its fidelity to the spirit (and content) of Forster’s novel. Another Forster adaptation, Maurice, was released the following year. Taken from Forster’s posthumously published novel about homosexual love during the early 1900s, it earned a respectable amount of praise, although a number of critics felt that Ivory’s extraordinary adherence to the novel made for a painfully long, slow film.

Ivory’s third Forster excursion, the 1992 Howards End, was undoubtedly his most accomplished film to date. Another exploration of the repercussions of class collision in the early part of the 20th century, it featured gorgeous detail (made all the more remarkable by a modest budget) and all-around stellar performances from the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave, and Emma Thompson, the last of whom won a well-deserved Oscar for her work. In total, Howards End earned nine Oscar nominations, including one for Best Director, and a multitude of international honors.

Ivory’s next film, The Remains of the Day (1993), also earned a lavish dose of critical acclaim. Adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about an emotionally stunted butler (superbly played by Anthony Hopkins) who refuses to admit his love for a housekeeper (another great performance from Thompson) or the error of his employer’s ways, the film was essentially an emotionally wrenching character study. It earned a number of international award nominations, including Oscar nominations for Thompson, Hopkins, Jhabvala, and Ivory.

Ivory subsequently turned away from literary adaptation, though he remained immersed in the period drama genre. Jefferson in Paris (1995), which proved to be a substantial disappointment, focused on the public and personal affairs of the American President, while Surviving Picasso (1996) — which also failed to draw critical or commercial favor — was a detailed epic about Picasso and his long-suffering lovers. In 1998, Ivory ventured into a more modern milieu with A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries. Based upon a novel by Kaylie Jones, the daughter of novelist James Jones, the film was a poignant study of an expatriate family straddling two worlds (Paris and the U.S.) and coping with change and alienation. Ivory’s most celebrated film since The Remains of the Day, it combined a sterling lead performance by Leelee Sobieski with the director’s usual talent for graceful, studied detail. —allmovie guide

David Lynch grew up as a Presbyterian. David Lynch spent his childhood throughout the Pacific Northwest and Durham, North Carolina depending on where his father’s job as a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture took him. His mother was an English tutor whose parents immigrated to the United States from Finland in the 19th century. David Lynch attained the rank of Eagle Scout and, as a teenager served as an usher at John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Inauguration. David Lynch took courses at The Corcoran School of Art during his high school career at Francis C. Hammond High School in Alexandria, Virginia. He enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for one year (where he was a roommate of Peter Wolf) before leaving for Europe with childhood friend and contemporary artist Jack Fisk. In 1966 he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA).

While enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) he created the visual work, Industrial Symphonies. During this time David Lynch created his first short film Six Men Getting Sick (1966) which played as a loop at an art exhibit. This film won the Academy’s annual film contest leading to a commission with H. Barton Wasserman. The commission resulted in the creation of The Alphabet in 1968. The Alphabet is a dark short film featuring a young girl tormented by the incessant ringing of the alphabet. This film was inspired by a nightmare in which his niece stood up in her bead and began reciting the alphabet. In 1970 The American Film Institute awarded a grant to Lynch to produce The Grandmother, a short film about a neglected boy who grows a grandmother from a seed.

In 1977 Lynch moved to L.A. to study for his MFA at the AFI Conservatory. With $10,000 in grant money from the AFI he began work on his feature debut film Eraserhead (1977), a nightmarish meditation on family life. The $10,000 did not cover the production costs and Lynch restored to gathering funds from friends and even took on a paper route. This disturbing film set the tone for Lynch’s career and brought him to the attention of producer Mel Brooks who hired him to direct The Elephant Man (1982). Elephant Man was Lynch’s first commercial success earning eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Lynch’s feature film Blue Velvet (1986), cemented his critical success. The film is a dark story of college student (Kyle MacLachlan) who discovers the dark side of his idealic American hometown after finding a severed ear in a field. The film featured performances from Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper. The film earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. The film has drawn controversy since its opening. For this film Lynch began his collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti, who would contribute to all of his future full-length films except Inland Empire (2006).

The end of the 80’s were a period where Lynch made the transition from big screen to television. His first television production was The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1989) produced for French television. With producer Mark Frost, Lynch created Twin Peaks (1990), a television drama series which takes place in a small town in Washington. Popular high school student Laura Palmer’s rape and murder causes FBI agent Dale cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) to investigate the town where he reveals the many layers of secrets and supernatural events surrounding the crime. Twin Peaks was a cultural phenomenon and led to Lynch appearing on the cover of Time Magazine.

Lynch could not stay away from feature films and in 1997 released the film Lost Highway co-written by Barry Gifford, starring Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette. Despite the film’s limited commercial success and mixed critical reviews it brought Lynch to a new generation of fans. His next feature film Muholland Drive (1999) performed better at ticket counters and was acclaimed by critics. For the film Lynch won Best Director at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and a Best Director award from the New York Film Critics Association. The film’s non-linear structure weaves together a surrealist tale of the dark underbelly of Hollywood, starring Naomi Watts, Laura Harring and Justin Theroux. Inland Empire (2006) continued the theme of non-linear narrative structures. It starred Lynch regulars Laura Dern, Harry Dean Stanton, and Justin Theroux, with cameos by Naomi Watts and Laura Harring (voices of Suzie and Jane Rabbit), and a performance by Jeremy Irons.

Lynch is not only a film director, his artistic work crosses the field to include photography, soundscapes, sculpture and multimedia works. The internet provided a new medium with which Lynch found material for his artistic creations. In 2002 he launched Davidlynch.com. Dumbland, a series of short films, was released via his website. The disturbing shorts were later released as an eight episode DVD. From his website he also released Rabbits a sitcom about a family of humanoid rabbits. In 2007, the Foundation Cartier in Paris hosted an exhibition of Lynch’s artwork spanning more than 40 years.

David Lynch’s unique vision is influenced by a traumatic understanding of Francis Bacon that has impacted him since the early 1960’s. Surrealism also shapes Lynch’s distorted perspective in which as he says in an interview with Air France Magazine, “I put as much energy into distortion and twists as I do in actually creating, in the strictest sense of the term” (2007). Growing up in the 1950’s provided the foundation to his unique cinematic vision. As Lynch says in a commonly used quote about America in the fifties, “All the problems were there, but it was somehow glossed over. And then the gloss broke, or rotted, and it all came oozing out. I grew up in Middle America as it’s supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there’s this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.”

Lynch has been engaged with Transcendental meditation since 1973. The David Lynch Foundation For Consciousness-Based Education and Peace was created in 2005, providing scholarships for middle and high school students interested in studying Transcendental meditation. His book Catching The Big Fish (2006) discusses the relationship between Transcendental meditation and Lynch’s creative process. In 2009 Lynch began working on a documentary on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (January 12, 1914 – February 5, 2008). Lynch tells Dave Metz in a Vogue interview, “See, I love ideas, and ideas are thoughts, right? So the source of all thought is the unified field, the absolute. It´s pure consciousness. And the whole process of these thoughts rising out is the principle of TM” (2003). Lynch stresses that Transcendental Mediation is not a religion, but rather a practice. Practice or religion, if Transcendental Mediation is key to the genius of Lynch then the world can only hope he is meditating right now. –egs.edu

Boorman was born in Shepperton, Surrey, England, the son of Ivy (née Chapman) and George Boorman. He was educated at the Salesian School in Chertsey, Surrey, even though his family was not Roman Catholic.
Boorman first began by working as a drycleaner and journalist in the late 1950s and then he moved into TV documentary filmmaking, eventually becoming the head of the BBC’s Bristol-based Documentary Unit in 1962.

Capturing the interest of producer David Deutsch, he was offered the chance to direct a film aimed at repeating the success of A Hard Day’s Night (directed by Richard Lester in 1964): Catch Us If You Can (1965) is about competing pop group Dave Clark Five. While not as successful commercially as Lester’s film, it smoothed Boorman’s way into the film industry. Boorman was drawn to Hollywood for the opportunity to make larger-scale cinema and in Point Blank (1967), a powerful interpretation of a Richard Stark novel, brought a stranger’s vision to the decaying fortress of Alcatraz and the proto-hippy world of San Francisco. Lee Marvin gave the then-unknown director his full support, telling MGM he deferred all his approvals on the project to Boorman.

After Point Blank, Boorman re-teamed with Lee Marvin and Toshirō Mifune for the robinsonade of Hell in the Pacific (1968), which tells a fable story of two representative soldiers stranded together on an island.

Returning to the UK, he made Leo The Last (US/UK, 1970). This film exhibited the influence of Federico Fellini and even starred Fellini regular Marcello Mastroianni, and won him a Best Director award at Cannes.

Boorman achieved much greater resonance with Deliverance (US, 1972, adapted from a novel by James Dickey), the odyssey of city people played by Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ronny Cox and Ned Beatty as they trespass into Appalachian backwoods and discover their inner savagery. This film became Boorman’s first true box office success, earning him several award nominations.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Boorman was planning to film The Lord of the Rings and corresponded about his plans with the author, J. R. R. Tolkien. Ultimately the production proved too costly though some elements and themes can be seen in Excalibur.

A wide variety of films followed: Zardoz (1974), starring Sean Connery, was a post-apocalyptic science fiction piece, set in the 24th century. According to the director’s film commentary, the ‘Zardoz world’ was on a collision course with an “effete” eternal society, which it accomplished, and in the story must reconcile with a more natural human nature.

Boorman was selected as director for Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), but the resultant film was widely ridiculed and regarded by many as a total failure.

Excalibur (UK, 1981), a long held dream project of Boorman’s, is well-remembered as a mythical film and one of the very few “true” retellings of the Arthurian legend and tragedy. Boorman cast actors Nicol Williamson and (now Dame) Helen Mirren against their protests as the two disliked each other intensely, but Boorman felt their mutual antagonism would enhance their characterizations of the characters they were playing. The production was based in the Republic of Ireland where Boorman had relocated. For the film he employed all of his children as actors and crew and several of Boorman’s later films have been ‘family business’ productions.

Hope and Glory (1987, UK) is his most autobiographical movie to date, a retelling of his childhood in London during The Blitz. Produced by Goldcrest Films with Hollywood financing the film proved a Box Office hit in the US, receiving numerous Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations. However his 1990 US produced comedy about a dysfunctional family, Where the Heart Is, was a major flop.

Very eco-conscious, Boorman’s The Emerald Forest (1985), a rainforest adventure, casts his actor son Charley Boorman as an eco-warrior, mingling commercially-required elements — action and near-nudity — with anthropological detail and the gorgeous threat of a green inferno (the film was adapted into a book of the same name by award winning author Robert Holdstock). When his friend David Lean died in 1991, Boorman was announced to be taking over direction of Lean’s long planned adaptation of Nostromo, though the production collapsed. Beyond Rangoon (US, 1995) and The Tailor of Panama (US/Ireland, 2000) both explore unique worlds with alien characters stranded and desperate in them.

Boorman won the Best Director Award at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival for The General, his black-and-white biopic of Martin Cahill. The film is about the somewhat glamorous, yet mysterious, criminal in Dublin who was killed, apparently by the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

In 2004, Boorman was made a Fellow of BAFTA

Released in 2006, The Tiger’s Tail was a thriller set against the tableau of early 21st century capitalism in Ireland. At the same time, Boorman began work on a long-time pet project of his, a fictional account of the life of Roman Emperor Hadrian (entitled Memoirs of Hadrian), written in the form of a letter from a dying Hadrian to his successor. In the meantime, a re-make/re-interpretation of the classic The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz with Boorman at the helm has been announced in August 2009. —Wikipedia

Youssef Chahine (born in Alexandria, Egypt, 1926) started studying in a friars’ school, and then turned to English College until the High School Certificate. After one year in the University of Alexandria, he moved to the U.S. and spent two years at the Pasadena Play House, taking courses on film and dramatic arts. After coming back to Egypt, cinematographer Alevise Orfanelli helped him into the film business. His film debut was Baba Amin (1950): one year later, with Ibn el Nil (1951) he was first invited to the Cannes Film festival. In 1970, he was awarded a Golden Tanit at the Carthage Festival. With Le moineau (1973), he directed the first Egypt-Algeria co-production. He won a Silver Bear in Berlin for Iskanderija… lih? (1978), the first installment in what proved to be an autobiographic trilogy, completed with adduta misrija (1982) and Iskanderija, kaman oue kaman (1990).

In 1992, Jacques Lassalle proposed him to stage a piece of his choice for Comédie Française: Chahine chose to adapt Albert Camus’ “Caligula,” which proved hugely successful. The same year he started writing Al-mohager (1994), a story inspired by the Biblical character of Joseph, son of Jacob. This had long been a dream-project, and he finally got to shoot it in 1994. In 1997, 46 years and 5 invitations later, he was again selected Hors Competition in Cannes with Al-massir (1997). —IMDb

The French director Alain Corneau made 16 films in a variety of genres, from Série Noire, the bleak, sordid 1979 drama that featured a compelling performance by Patrick Dewaere as a door to door salesman looking for redemption in the wrong places, to Crime D’Amour [Love Crime], the psychological thriller starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier, which opened in French cinemas to critical acclaim a fortnight before his death from lung cancer. “He was a cinema great,” Scott Thomas said, “an absolutely adorable, funny and sharp-witted man.” Corneau was best known internationally for Tous Les Matins Du Monde (All The Mornings Of The World), a delicate, painterly film about the relationship between the Versailles court composer Marin Marais – Gérard Depardieu and his son Guillaume – and his aesthetic teacher Jean de Sainte-Colombe, played by the ever-excellent Jean-Pierre Marielle. First screened at the end of 1991, Tous Les Matins became a word-of-mouth success with over two million tickets sold in France alone, and won seven César awards, including Best Film and Best Director, the following year. “Many people got emotional about this picture, and that made it possible for it to escape cult status,” said Corneau. Tous Les Matins was released in over 30 countries and inspired a revival in French Baroque music and the viola da gamba, a bowed, fretted, stringed instrument which had been prevalent throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Jordi Savall, the Catalan musician who recorded the award-winning soundtrack with Le Concert Des Nations ensemble, recalled Corneau’s constant presence in the studio, motivating and directing them, and displaying the same focus and determination as Sainte-Colombe.

Born in 1943 in a small town in the Loiret area of central France, he developed a passion for cinema when he began accompanying his father, who was a vet, to screenings in neighbouring Orléans. The proximity of a Nato air base helped feed his love of jazz and by the late 1950s he was drumming with a group entertaining officers and servicemen. His fascination for American culture was at the centre of Le Nouveau Monde, his 1995 autobiographical picture, and also informed Is There Jazz In Harlem?, the short film he made in New York in 1969 following his graduation from L’Institut Des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques in Paris. After assisting Roger Corman on Istanbul, Mission Impossible (Target: Harry, 1969), he worked with Costa-Gavras on L’Aveu (The Confession, 1970) and struck up a friendship with the film’s lead, the singer-turned-actor Yves Montand, who agreed to play the tough police inspector in the violent thriller Police Python 357, Corneau’s second movie, in 1976. “He got me out of the jam I was in after the terrible failure of my first film, France Société Anonyme,” said the director who worked with Montand again on two further polars – police dramas – La Menace (1977) and Le Choix Des Armes (Choice Of Arms, 1981). The latter also starred Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve, who both signed up for Corneau’s next project, the colonial epic Fort Saganne (1984) shot on location in Mauritania, which lived up to its extravagant budget and delivered big audiences despite its three-hour running time.

The quest for identity was one of Corneau’s constants, developed most effectively in Nocturne Indien (1989), set in India and filmed in English, Le Prince Du Pacifique (2000) made on an island in French Polynesia, and Stupeur Et Tremblements (Fear And Trembling, 2003), shot in Paris in the phonetically-correct Japanese which actress Sylvie Testud learned in three months. After the melodrama Les Mots Bleus (Some Kind Of Blue, 2005), also with Testud, Corneau returned to the polar genre with Le Deuxième Souffle (The Second Wind, 2007), a reimagining rather than a remake of the José Giovanni noir novel first adapted by the influential Jean-Pierre Melville four decades earlier. Corneau’s version featured Daniel Auteuil, Monica Bellucci and Eric Cantona. The director attributed his versatility to the fact that most of his films were based on novels, such as A Hell Of A Woman by the US writer Jim Thompson in the case of Série Noire, or Tous Les Matins Du Monde by Pascal Quignard. —Pierre Perrone

Costa-Gavras is a Greek filmmaker, best known for films with overt political themes, most famously the fast-paced thriller, Z (1969). Most of his movies were made in French; starting with Missing (1982), several were made in English.

Gavras was born in Loutra Iraias, Arcadia. His family spent the Second World War in a village in the Peloponnese, and moved to Athens after the war. His father had been a member of the left-wing EAM branch of the Greek Resistance, and was imprisoned after the war as a suspected communist. His father’s record made it impossible for him to attend university or emigrate to the United States, so after high school Costa Gavras went to France, where he began his studies of law in 1951.

In 1956, he left his university studies to study film at the French national film school, IDHEC. After film school, he apprenticed under Yves Allégret, and became an assistant director for Jean Giono and René Clair. After several further positions as first assistant director, he directed his first feature film, Compartiment Tueurs, in 1965. Costa Gavras was president of the Cinémathèque Française from 1982 to 1987, and again from 2007 to the present. He is a first cousin of recording artist Jimmie Spheeris, filmmaker Penelope Spheeris, and musician Chris Spheeris.His daughter Julie Gavras and his son Romain Gavras are also filmmakers.

In Z (1969), an investigating judge, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, tries to uncover the truth about the murder of a prominent leftist politician, played by Yves Montand, while government officials and the military attempt to cover up their roles. The film is a fictionalized account of the events surrounding the assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963. It had additional resonance because, at the time of its release, Greece had been ruled for two years by the “Regime of the Colonels”. Z won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Gavras and co-writer Jorge Semprún won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Film Screenplay. L’Aveu (The Confession, direction, 1970) follows the path of Artur London, a Czechoslovakian communist minister falsely arrested and tried for treason and espionage in the Slánský ‘show trial’ in 1952.

State of Siege (1973) takes place in Uruguay under a conservative government in the early 1970s. In a plot loosely based on the case of US police official and alleged torture expert Dan Mitrione, an American embassy official (played by Yves Montand) is kidnapped by the Tupamaros, a radical leftist urban guerilla group, which interrogates him in order to reveal the details of secret US complicity with repressive regimes in Latin America.

Missing (1982) concerns an American journalist, Charles Horman, who disappeared in the bloody coup led by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973. Horman’s father, played by Jack Lemmon, and wife, played by Sissy Spacek, search in vain to determine his fate. Nathaniel Davis, US ambassador to Chile from 1971–1973, a version of whose character had been portrayed in the movie (under a different name), filed a US$150 million libel suit, Davis v. Costa-Gavras, 619 F. Supp. 1372 (1985), against the studio and the director, which was eventually dismissed. The film won an Oscar for Best Screenplay Adaptation.

In Music Box (1989), a respected naturalized American citizen (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) is accused of being a Nazi war criminal. The film is loosely based on the case of John Demjanjuk.

Amen. (2003), was based in part on the highly controversial 1963 play, Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy), by Rolf Hochhuth. The movie alleges that Pope Pius XII was aware of the plight of the Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, but failed to take public action to publicize or condemn the Holocaust. These issues have continued to be disputed, with the Vatican thus far declining to open to historians all of its archives relating to the extent of the Pope’s knowledge during World War II

Costa Gavras is known for merging controversial political issues with the entertainment value of commercial cinema. Law and justice, oppression, legal/illegal violence, and torture are common subjects in his work, especially relevant to his earlier films. Costa Gavras is an expert of the “statement” picture. In most cases, the targets of Gavras’s work have been right-of-center movements and regimes, including Greek conservatives in and out of the military in Z, and authoritarian governments that ruled much of Latin America during the height of the Cold War, as in State of Siege and Missing.

In a broader sense, this emphasis continues with Amen. given its focus on the conservative leadership of the Catholic Church during the 1940s. In this political context, L’Aveu (The Confession) provides the exception, dealing as it does with oppression on the part of a Communist regime during the Stalinist period.

Gavras has brought attention to international issues, some urgent, others merely problematic, and he has done this in the tradition of cinematic story-telling. Z (1969), easily his most famous work, is an account of the undermining in the 1960s of democratic government in Greece, his homeland and place of birth. The format, however, is a mystery-thriller combination that transforms an uncomfortable history into a riveting story. This is a clear example of how he pours politics into plot, bringing epic conflicts into the sort of personal conflicts we are accustomed to seeing on screen.

His accounts of corruption propagated, in their essence, by European and American powers (Z, State of Siege and Missing) highlight problems buried deep in the structures of these societies, problems which not everyone is comfortable addressing. The approach he adopted in L’Aveu also subtly invited the audience to a critical look focused on structural issues, delving this time into the opposite Communist bloc. —wikipedia

Raymond Depardon is a photographer, a journalist and a filmmaker. He was born into a family of farmers in 1942 in Burgundy and went to Paris in 1958, wishing to be a photographer. He was first taken on as a messenger in an agency and was sent to take photos of an opening-night at the cinema: the movie was none other than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. He finally established his own agency, Gamma, together with three reporters, in 1966 ‘not for money but for the freedom’. He suggested to set up a cinema department: ‘we bought an Eclair- camera and tried to make news-films for television in addition to taking news-photograhs… It was then that I learned to hold the camera." When Depardon films people, he is silent. If one has the impression that he always keeps his eyes lowered in the face of the world’s miseries, it is untrue. Raymond Depardon looks as through a lattice and reacts like quicksilver, keeping his deepest, innermost emotion secret, and allows his pictures to speak for themselves. His films are now screened in all international film festivals, from Cannes to Hong Kong. He won a Pulitzer for his photography in Chad. —IMDb

An avant-gardist who earned surprising access to the mainstream, Peter Greenaway is among the most ambitious and controversial filmmakers of his era. Trained as a painter and heavily influenced by theories of structural linguistics, ethnography, and philosophy, Greenaway’s films traversed often unprecedented ground, consistently exploring the boundaries of the medium by rejecting formal narrative structures in favor of awe-striking imagery, shifting meanings, and mercurial emotional tension; fascinated by formal symmetries and parallels, his material displayed an almost obsessive interest in list-making and cataloguing, earning equal notoriety for its provocative eroticism as well as its almost self-conscious pretentiousness. Born April 5, 1942, in Newport, Wales, Greenaway was raised primarily in nearby Chingford. After deciding at the age of 12 to become a painter, he entered the Walthamstow College of Art. By 1965, Greenaway had begun working as a film editor for the Central Office of Information, where within a year he started making his own experimental short features. The first of Greenaway’s experimental short films to gain widespread distribution was 1969’s seven-minute Intervals. He continued releasing work sporadically throughout the first half of the 1970s, ranging in length from 1974’s four-minute Windows to 1976’s 40-minute Goole by Numbers. With 1978’s A Walk Through H and Vertical Features Remake, Greenaway first garnered festival notice, and with 1980’s The Falls, a “documentary” set in the future, he made his long-awaited feature debut. The 1982 17th century drama The Draughtsman’s Contract was his critical breakthrough, and the film launched him to the forefront of the global experimental film community.

In 1983, Greenaway helmed documentaries on the American composers Robert Ashley, John Cage, Philip Glass, and Meredith Monk for Britain’s Channel Four television network. Over the next two years he produced only short films and did not return to feature filmmaking prior to 1985’s superb A Zed and Two Noughts. Two years later he released The Belly of an Architect, its focus on themes of obsession clearly mirroring Greenaway’s own persona. Even more detailed was 1988’s Drowning by Numbers, which stuffed its blackly comic tale of a murderous family with numerological references ranging in tone from broad visual puns to nods to Dante’s Divine Comedy. With 1989’s more accessible The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Greenaway made his American breakthrough. A corrosive allegory of life in contemporary England, the film became the subject of much controversy in the U.S. when it fell subject to the MPAA’s new “NC-17” rating, consequently winning the biggest audiences of the director’s career. The follow-up, 1991’s Prospero’s Books, was his most experimental feature yet. A radical reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, it employed a revolutionary new device called an electronic paintbox which allowed Greenaway to fill the screen with an intricate series of intertextual double exposures and transparent overlays, eliciting some of his most extreme viewer response yet. Greenaway then returned to television for the next two years, helming 1991’s M Is for Man, Music, Mozart and the 1993 revisionist biopic Darwin. Also in 1993 he returned to feature films with the highly controversial The Baby of Macon, a grim, violent satire of life in the 17th century which failed to find an American distributor. Two years later Greenaway directed Stairs 1 Geneva, a documentary commissioned for Swiss television, as well as The Pillow Book, an erotic fable again utilizing the electronic paintbox first seen on Prospero’s Books. In 1997 the film was finally picked up for American release, where it garnered some of Greenaway’s most favorable response to date. In 1999, he released 8 1/2 Women, a black comedy about the roots and consequences of male sexual fantasy.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:92456)

Hugh Hudson (born 25 August 1936) is an English film director. His best-known international success is the 1981 multiple Academy Award-winning film, Chariots of Fire.

Early life

Hudson was born in London, the only son of Jacynth (Ellerton), the second wife of Michael Donaldson-Hudson from Cheswardine in rural north Shropshire. His great-grandfather was Charles Donaldson-Hudson, a one-time member of Parliament for Newcastle under Lyme, Staffordshire. His paternal ancestors came from Scotland and Cumberland. He was sent to boarding school at the age of 6, and thereafter was educated at Eton College. He completed his National Service in the Royal Armoured Corps as a second lieutenant from the 28 January 1956, and remained as a lieutenant in the Army Reserve of Officers until he was discharged on January 16, 1960.

1960s

In the 1960s, after three years of editing documentaries in Paris, Hudson headed a documentary film company with partners Robert Brownjohn and David Camell. The company produced, among others, the documentaries A for Apple, which won a Screenwriter’s Guild Award, and The Tortoise and the Hare, which was nominated for a BAFTA award. The company emerged with much success in the 1960s, winning many awards and pioneering a new graphic style for documentary and advertising films.

He then began a career in advertising, producing and directing many advertisements. His first filmmaking job was as a second-unit director on Alan Parker’s Midnight Express.

1970s–1980s

Between 1973-1975 Hudson wrote and directed Fangio, A life at 300 km/h, a documentary film about motor racing seen through the eyes of Juan Manuel Fangio, five times the world Formula 1 Champion.

From 1979-1980 Hudson directed his first and most successful feature film, Chariots of Fire (1981), the story of two British track runners, one a devout Christian and the other an ambitious Jew, in the run-up to the 1924 Olympic Games. The film is said to have revitalized the fading British film industry, and it won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture; Hudson earned a nomination for Best Director. His friend and colleague Vangelis produced an Academy Award-winning score for the film.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote in 1981 “It’s to the credit of both Mr. Hudson and Mr. Welland that Chariots of Fire is simultaneously romantic and commonsensical, lyrical and comic. … It’s an exceptional film, about some exceptional people.”

Hudson had rejected numerous feature film offers before Chariots of Fire’s success. His next production was Greystoke – The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) which received four Oscar nominations, and was Ralph Richardson’s last screen performance, for which he was nominated in the 1984 Oscars as Best Supporting Actor. It was a success at the box office and with critics.

In 1985 Hudson directed Revolution, which depicted the American War of Independence, and which was released before it was a fully completed film. The film was a critical and commercial failure at the box office and earned Hudson a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Director.

Hudson’s next theatrical feature film was Lost Angels (1989), nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. The film was an American based drama starring Donald Sutherland and Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and dealing with disaffected youth in California.

1990s–present

In 1999 Hudson directed My Life So Far. Jean Claude Carriere wrote of it, “Hugh Hudson’s film My Life so Far is a delightful bittersweet film, which covers the start of a boy’s life during the first part of the 20th century — from his last baby’s bottle to his first cigar. A film which sadly is not known as well as it should be. It is a variation on a universal theme which will never end. There will always be men and women, old people and youngsters, horses and dogs.” Hudson next directed I Dreamed of Africa (2000), which was the closing film of the Cannes Film Festival of that year.

In 2006 Hudson was reported to be working, together with producer John Heyman, on an historical epic based on the life of the monotheistic Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. The film centres around their tempestuous relationship.

In 2008 Hudson re-edited Revolution, giving the film a narration by Al Pacino. The London Observer film critic Philip French writing about the new version said, “Revolution was misunderstood and unjustly treated on its first appearance twenty years ago. Seeing it again in the director’s slightly revised version it now strikes me as a masterpiece — profound, poetic and original. Hudson’s film should take its place among the great movies about history and about individual citizens living in times of dramatic social change. One hopes it will finally find the wide audience it deserves.”

Hudson is currently co-producing Chariots of Fire, the 2012 stage adaptation of the film of the same title. The stage adaptation was his idea, for the London Olympic year.

In 2012, Hudson will direct Midnight Sun, a feature film about a child who tries to help a family of polar bears on the shrinking polar ice cap. Hudson co-wrote the script as well.

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In 1988 Hudson directed a 2½-minute advert for British Rail, a parody of the Post Office Film Unit’s 25-minute documentary, Night Mail, made in 1936. Poet W. H. Auden had written verse specifically to fit the original 1936 film’s footage, which showed the enormous scale of BR’s daily operation and the structure of the ‘sectorised’ business. The opening sequence of Hudson’s British Rail advert features the northbound Travelling Post Office with Auden’s original verse, narrated by Sir Tom Courtenay.

Some of the other many acclaimed advertisements created by Hudson include the 1989 British Airways “Face” advert seen in over 80 countries around the world and running for almost a decade; the 1979 Fiat Strada Figaro advert; and the Benson & Hedges “Swimming Pool” advert. In 2007 he created his Silverjet advert, a direct parody of his own 1989 British Airways advert. He also created the Courage Best “Gercha” advert and the Cinzano “Airplane” advert. Hudson also directed Kinnock – The Movie (1987), an election broadcast for the British Labour Party.

In 2003, Hudson was given a special Cannes Lions award on the 50th Anniversary of the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, an award given only to directors who have won the Grand Prix more than once. Hudson has won Grand Prix Cannes Lions awards for his 1972 Levi’s “Walking Behinds” and 1978 Coty L’Aimant “French Lesson” adverts.

Honours

In August 2007, in Nîmes, France, “Un Realisateur dans la Ville”, a festival created by Gerard Depardieu and Jean Claude Carriere to showcase each year the work of one director, featured the work of Hugh Hudson, showing eight films over 5 days. The festival premiered an Al Pacino-narrated version of Revolution called Revolution Revisited.

In October 2008 at the Dinard Festival of British Film, Hudson’s work was honored. As a tribute five of his films were shown, with My Life So Far opening the festival. Revolution Revisited was the subject of a Q&A by the director.

Personal life

Hudson’s first marriage in 1977, was with painter Susan Michie, born circa 1947, with whom he had a son, born in 1978. In November 2003, he married actress Maryam d’Abo. —Wikipedia

Kabore started out as a history student at the Centre d’Etudes Superieures d’Histoire d’Ouagadougou and continued his studies in Paris where he received an MA. During his studies he became interested in how Africa was portrayed abroad, which then led him, in 1974, to study cinematography at the Ecole Superieure d’Etudes Cinematographiques. Further inspiration came upon viewing Ousmane Sembene’s Xala, which he saw as an example of how film could be used to express African culture. After returning to Africa, Kabore was made director of the Centre National du Cinema and taught at the Institut African d’Education Cinematographique. Along with students under his direction there he made his first film, ‘Je Reviens De Bokin’ (I Come From Bokin).

Kabore went on to produce practical documentaries such as 1978’s, ‘Stockez et conservez les grains’ (Store and Conserve the Grain), which focused on agrarian concerns. Another kind of documentary he made in this early period, ‘Regard sur le VI’eme FESPACO’ (A Look at the 6th FESPACO) evidenced his concern for and promotion of African film. Kabore’s first feature, Wend Kuuni (1982) was a breakthrough for African cinema notable for the way it translated African oral tradition to the screen. Next, Kabore returned to address the issues surrounding African cinema with a documentary, ‘Props sur le cinema’ (Reflections on the cinema) (1986). The short film featured two significant African directors, ‘Souleymane Cisse’ from Mali and Mauritania born Med Hondo discussing the problems facing filmmakers on the continent. He followed this with his second feature, Zan Boko (1988) which tells the story of a wealthy businessman who takes away ancestral land from a poor village peasant in order to build a swimming pool. The film focuses not only on the conflict of class struggle but also that of tradition and modernity in postcolonial civilization.

Before his next feature Kabore again returned with a short documentary, Madame Hado (1991), about Mrs. Hado, a celebrated Burkinabe singer and dancer. Kabore was then invited to contribute to the BBC’s ‘Developing Stories’, a series of six films by talented filmmakers from the developing world focusing on environmental and developmental issues. He offered Rabi (1993), which won the first prize for young people’s films at the Okomedia International Ecological Film Festival. Another mark of Kabore’s international recognition was his participation in the film, Lumière and Company (1995) in which 40 directors from around the world were asked to make a short film with the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumiere Brothers. His most recent feature Buud Yam (1997) was the 1997 grand-prize winner of the FESPACO. —IMDb

Cédric Klapisch is one of today’s most popular French Director and his movies have regularly hit the French box office. Born in 1961, he worked on his first short films in the United States from 1983 to 1985. He started out as a DOP to finally become a film director. In 1989, his short film Ce qui me meut wins several prizes, one being the Perspectives of French Cinema Prize at the Cannes International Film Festival. He then directs his first feature in 1992, Little Nothings, which was nominated for the Cesars. His second, Good Old Daze, wins the 1993 Golden FIPA and Grand Prize at the 1994 Chamrousse Humour Film Festival.

In 1996, When the Cat’s Away is released, followed by Family Resemblances, his fourth feature which is awarded numerous prizes including three Cesars and the 1997 Lumière for Best Screenplay and Best Director. Maybe, starring Romain Duris and Jean-Paul Belmondo, is released in French cinemas in 1999. In 2002, Klapisch comes back to social comedy with The Spanish Apartment, another critic and audience hit, nominated three times at the César Awards 2003 (Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Film of the Year). Cédric Klapish follows up with Not for, or Against (Quite the Contrary), a gangster movie released in March 2003 in France. The French and foreign success of The Spanish Apartment drives him to direct a sequel in 2004, The Russian Dolls. Paris, released in 2008, is his latest movie. —frenchcinepanorama.com

The Russian theatre and film director Andrei Konchalovsky is an elder brother of Nikita Mikhalkov, born August, 20, 1937. As a youngster he planned to pursue a career of a musician and learned to play piano but his love for cinema outweighed and he entered VGIK-the major state film school where he studied under Mikhail Romm. At VGIK he met Tarkovsky, they collaborated on Ivan’s childhood and Andrei Rublev. For his length feature debut The First Teacher (1961), he chose the book by Chingis Aitmatov about the post-1917 Revolution period in the southern Russia. His next film, a black and white Asya Klyachina’s Story although made in 1966 was not released until a decade later because it failed to comply with the strict requirements of the Russian censorship of the period. A Nest of Gentry (1969) – a study of the 19 c. aristocracy – was praised for its visual beauty but attacked by critics as mannered. Konchalovsky’s powerful Uncle Vanya (1970) from the play by Chekhov is regarded by many people as one of the best films in the Russian language ever but it was not until he made his next two films that he became a worldwide famous film maker. A larger than life love story Romance for Lovers (1974) won an honor at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival and Sibiriade (1979) – a dramatic and realistic story of the lives of the people of Siberia – was internationally acclaimed and brought Konchalovsky to the attention of American and European producers. From then onwards his career has been international in scope. Pleasing critics and cinema-goers worldwide he made English language artful films Maria’s Lovers (1984), Runaway Train (1985), Duet for One (1986) (praised for Max von Sydow’s brilliant performance), and Homer and Eddie (1989) starring Whoopi Goldberg.

Much to his fans disappointment Konchalovsky moved to the mainstream territory with the action packed Tango and Cash (1989). Charasteristically he still insists that this work is no less laudable than any of his others. He also directed plays and operas in a number of European cities. In the early 1990s he returned to Russia and directed several theatre productions most notably The Seagull by Chekhov and Miss Julie by August Strindberg. Currently residing in Moscow Konchalovsky sometimes makes short excursions to Hollywood to make mainstream TV productions The Odyssey (1997) and The Lion in Winter (2003) in which Glenn Close gave an award-winning performance. His Russian-French co-production House of Fools (2002) – a story set in an asylum that stands on the border between Russia and Chechenya during the war in Chechenya – was warmly received in Europe and won an honor at the 2002 Venice Film Festival. However the film antagonized the critics in Russia who accused Konchalovsky of being a war-monger. In the very beginning of his career he used a double surname and was credited in his early films as Mikhalkov- Konchalovsky. Later he adopted his mother’s maiden name to distinguish himself from his younger brother, Nikita Mikhalkov, who was rapidly becoming a well known film maker. —IMDb

Born in the 9th arrondissement of Paris to a Jewish family of Algerian origin, Lelouch won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966 for Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman), as well as two oscars including best foreign language film. The 1981 musical epic Les Uns et les Autres is widely considered as his masterpiece, and his credits now add up to 50 or so films. His father gave him a camera to give him a fresh start after his failure in the baccalaureat. He started his career with reportage – one of the first to film daily life in the U.S.S.R., the camera hidden under his coat as he made his personal journey. He also filmed sporting events like the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Tour de France. His first full length film as director, Le Propre de l’homme, was decried by the critics – ‘Claude Lelouch, remember this name well, because you will not hear it again’ – Cahiers du Cinema said. La Femme Spectacle (1963), following prostitutes, women shopping, going for nose-jobs, was censored for its misogynist tendency. Un homme et une femme changed his fortunes and was met with favour even by the Cahiers group. Legend has it that Lelouch found himself one morning on the beach at Deauville when he caught sight of a young woman and her child on the sand. He thought about her story, tried to put together the story of how she had arrived at that moment. The scenario for the film was born. Lelouch set in place here some of the techniques of his filming he will use all his career. He used the locations for decor (here, the Grand Hotel at Deauville), recycled images from his old films (here, the 24 Hours of Le Mans), and used product placement as a means of financing his work (here, Jean-Louis Trintignant and his Ford Mustang.)

Lelouch is known for making movies based heavily on improvised dialogue.

He was arrested after his 1976 film, C’était un rendez-vous, reportedly at the time featuring a Ferrari 275 GTB being illegally driven at speeds approaching 140 km/h through the streets of Paris by a Formula 1 driver, was first shown publicly.

Recent claims made by the director himself, however, suggest he drove his own Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 in the film and dubbed the sound effects of a Ferrari 275GTB.

In recent years the public and the critics have seemed less interested in the director. The first part of his intended trilogy ’ Le Genre Humain’, ‘Les Parisiens’ was described in Paris Match as one of the most resounding flops of French cinema. Perhaps a director like Cedric Klapisch had replaced him in the hearts of the younger generation? Lelouch responded, ’It’s true no doubt, my public has grown old. It stays home and watches television.’

He has collaborated on no fewer than 28 occasions with the composer Francis Lai. They scored a great hit with the piece ‘chabadabada’ for the film Un homme et une femme sung by Nicole Croisille and Pierre Barouh, and more than 300 versions of the song exist.

He is the father of 7 children and is currently married to Alessandra Martines. —IMDb

Juan José Bigas Luna (19 March 1946 – 6 April 2013) was a Spanish film director.

He began his professional career in the design world, creating the Estudio Gris with Carlos Riart in 1969. In his earlier exhibitions, at the beginning of the 1960s, he showed a great interest in conceptual art and the emerging visual technologies. Esteemed as an atypical director in the Spanish cinema, in 1986 he retired to Tarragona in order to devote his time to painting. In 1990 the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez persuaded him to return to cinema and entrusted to him the direction of Las edades de Lulú, a film which reached the general public. Without abandoning his dedication to painting and photography, reflected in numerous exhibitions, he began the well-known Trilogía Ibérica with Jamón Jamón (1992), Huevos de Oro (1993) and La teta y la luna (1994). Subsequently, with the short film for internet Collar de Moscas (2001), he revived his interest in avant-garde experimentation and audiovisual formats and at the same time he discovered a vocation for the investigation of digital cinema after the creation of the Taller Bigas Luna project with Catalina Pons in 1999. The experience in the Taller introduced them to the world of new technologies and in 2002 they promoted PLATAFORM BL, dedicated to the creation and promotion of innovative projects and new talents.

Bigas Luna’s varied career as a filmmaker, painter and designer made him a very singular and interdisciplinary artist. An example of that is his project called “Microcosmos”, an evolution of the earlier Cares de l’Ànima which was exhibited in the Galería Metropolitana de Barcelona in 1990. It can now be found on a web site (see external links below), where the visitor can modify and select the works and become, in this way, the creator.

Bigas Luna directed and produced a large-scale multimedia installation for the Spain Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010, named Origins, as the first part of the Pavilion’s trilogy on exhibition. The installation fused live Flamenco dance, sculpture and videos on more than 20 projectors.

From 2008 to 2012, Bigas took on the art direction of the oldest musical café in Europe, El Plata, in Zaragoza (Spain). There, he created a cabaret show classified as “Cabaret Ibérico” based on parodies, eroticism, the old burlesque, etc., accompanied by the typical dishes from Spain, such as paella, ham or Spanish omelette.

He died of leukemia on 5 April 2013, while working on the film adaptation of Manuel de Pedrolo’s novel Mecanoscrit del segon origen. —Wikipedia

Born in 1933 in Southern Bessarabia (part of Ukraine since the 1940s), Lucian Pintilie studied film and theatre in Bucharest. He began his directing career in theatre before turning to film. Although his films were internationally praised—Sunday at Six won The Grand Prize of the International Youth Jury in the 1966 Cannes Festival; Reenactment was presented in the official selection of Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, 1969 Cannes; Ward Six won Un Certain Regard at the 1979 Cannes Festival—Pintilie was in a continuous fight with the Romanian communist authorities. After Reenactment was banned in 1969, and his theatre production of The Inspector was banned in 1972, Pintilie was forbidden to work in theatres and had only two more films produced, the last of which—Carnival Scenes—was also banned for 10 years, to be officially released only in 1991. Pintilie was ultimately pressured by the authorities to leave Romania in 1982. For twenty years he lived and worked in France and the United States, directing plays, television films and operas. He served as artistic director of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, MN, and of the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. In 1990 Pintilie returned to Romania and released in 1992 The Oak—the first post-revolutionary Romanian film to get international recognition: official selection of 1992 Cannes Festival, the 1993 Felix for Best European Actress (Maia Morgenstern), among others. Too Late won him another nomination for the Golden Palm Award in Cannes, while Last Stop Paradise was nominated for the Golden Lion in Venice. He has been both a prolific auteur and a supporter of a new generation of filmmakers as head of the public film studio Studioul de Creaţie Cinematografică.

Born In the Bronx, New York. He attended the University of Miami, worked as assistant to Bill Helburn (1954-1956); then started his career as a freelance photographer. His Fashion photography has been published in magazines such as Vogue, McCalls, Esquire, Glamour, Town and Country, And Life. After directing some TV commercials, he made his debut as a film director in 1970 with “Puzzle of a Downfall Child”, the story of a fashion model. Schatzberg scored with his second directorial effort, the gripping, finely acted “The Panic in Needle Park”(1971), a bleak study of heroin addiction starring Al Pacino. Pacino costarred with Gene hackman in his next film, “scarecrow” (1973), a moody tale of two drifters which in many ways is an apotheosis of 70’s alienation and confusion. Perhaps significantly, Schatzberg’s critical following in the United States rose and fell with the 70’s; after 1979’s “Seduction of Joe Tynan”, the trend in Hollywood shifted from small introspective films to the Spielberg/Lucas blockbuster mentality. But Jerry Schatzberg never lost his European devotees, as witness the international success of 1989’s “Reunion”. Schatzberg won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival with “Scarecrow”.

Jerry Schatzberg was one of the leading protagonists in the Hollywood Renaissance that struck critics and film-goers alike at the beginning of the 70’s. He did not belong to any group, not the Italian-Americans (coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Cimino) nor the wonder kids of technological efficiency (Spielberg, Lucas). In fact he is very much of a loner, comparable in his fierce independence to a Terrance Malick. This does not help to get wide recognition, the media being more attracted by groups, schools, clubs with cozy tags attached to them. Schatzberg is also very much a New Yorker and his home-base has always remained Manhattan, far away from the circle of Hollywood. Though very American in spirit and culture he is much attracted to international cinema and it’s often more daring stylistic approach. Nothing shows this more than his first feature “Puzzle of a Downfall Child” with it’s fractured narration, its complex sound-track and its mixture of present, flashbacks and fantasy shots. The film centers on the world he knew best, fashion photography and the woman who at the time was closest to him, Faye Dunaway, who plays the lead. Based on a complex script by Adrian Joyce (Carol Eastman) it is the study of a top model who has had her glory days but is now progressively shunned. The story comes from a confession made to him by his favorite model Anne Saint Marie. His detractors thought that the choice of subject lacked imagination but the film was the reflection of his personal commitment and the expression of the true authorial voice. His twenty years working as a photographer is reflected in the dazzling visual flair of the movie, and the cinematic control of frame, light and editing is exceptional for a beginner. “Puzzle of a Downfall Child”, with its portrayal of a cover Girl in the midst of a mental breakdown also shows Schatzberg’s sensitivity to deeply wounded characters. This is also evident in his second film with the drug addicts in “The Panic in Needle Park” and the drifters in “Scarecrow”, his third . His subsequent films demonstrated a breadth of interest and a capacity to alternate very different moods from the car thief in “Dandy, the All American Girl”, the Politician of “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” to the country singers of “Honeysuckle Rose”, and the hooker and pimp of “Street Smart”

“Reunion” written by Harold Pinter from Fred Ulman’s autobiographical Novella is set in Stuttgart in 1932. It tells of the friendship of two sixteen year old boys: Hans, the son of a jewish doctor and Konradin, a member of an old German aristocratic family. Years later, after the war the older Hans (Jason Robards) on a trip back home remembers his youth and Konradin who betrayed his friend and chose to enter the Nazi party while Hans took the road of exile.

In many ways, the cinematic world of Schatzberg shows a striking continuity with his photography which leads, as we have seen, to “Puzzle of a Downfall Child” but also his landscapes, which are to be found in “Scarecrow” and “Honeysuckle Rose”, his Street Scenes which lead up to “The Panic in Needle Park” and “Street Smart”.

It was his portrait photography that taught him how to deal with actors. He realized that most people feared the photographer’s lens. To relax them he would spend as much time with them as possible. Not only to know them better but to see beyond the surface and discover their true self, the one they hid from the outside world. Most of his great portraits of the sixties – Bob Dylan, Francis Coppola, Andy Warhol, Arlo Guthrie, Roman Polanski, Fidel Castro, Milos Forman, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, The Rolling Stones and many more – reveal these moments of truth.

By not giving specific directions to his photographic models Schatzberg gave them rein to find the moment. It is the same way he gets actors to reach inside. In many ways his photographic style is much closer to that of Andre Kertesz or Henri Cartier-Bresson, then to the contemporary Irving Penn or Richard Avedon. Instead of the self-contained space of the frame he looks for the space beyond. His Photographs are narrative; they tell a story. In an instant they recognize an action, a gesture, an emotion while at the same time they have a rigorous formal pattern that expresses their meaning. The style however, never manifests itself ostentatiously and never encroaches the fluidity of life.

All these Qualities may be found in Schatzberg’s films. His focus has always remained on human relationships which made it more difficult for him to work in an industry devoted in the late seventies, the eighties and the ninties to special effects, car chases and adolescent comedies. His accute sense of people and places lend authenticity to the background in his films, as his actors work to create characters you think you know. Alan Alda has never been as good as in “The Seduction of Joe Tynan”, near-beginners like Stockard Channing in “Dandy, the All American Girl” and Kitty Winn In “The Panic in Needle Park” did not find roles again of the same dimension. Faye Dunaway, Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Morgan Freeman have been at the top of their form in his films. Asked about his favorite performance Gene Hackman answered in Film Comment: “Scarecrow, it’s the only film I’ve ever made in absolute continuity and I was allowed me to take all kinds of chances and really build my character”.

In more than forty years of photography and cinema, Schatzberg has achieved a delicate balance between refined form of mise-en-scene and the rendering of true moments. He has a particular gift to restrain the emotions only to make their release more powerful and to avoid the obvious by suggesting rather than by underlining. He makes us feel, something that is too often missing in contemporary American cinema: an adult and mature artist, dealing with adult and mature themes and characters. —Michel Ciment

Spanish director of light, frolicsome comedies with classical characters and story structures. Trueba had directed features and penned screenplays for a number years, starting with “Opera Prima/First Effort” (1980) unbeknownst to Americans save film festival attendees. This changed with the release of “Belle Epoque” (1993) which snagged a 1993 Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. A story of a young soldier who stays with a painter and his four beautiful daughters, the film illustrated Trueba’s desire to entertain through well-scripted comedies. His signature films include “El Ano de las Luces/The Year of Awakening” (1986) and “The Mad Monkey” (1989), his English-language debut, starring Jeff Goldblum.

According to Trueba, his influences include such diverse auteurs as Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir and Woody Allen. Trueba started out as a film critic for a Spanish daily before founding his own film magazine, “Casablanca”, in 1980. He has also produced several films including “Lulu de Noche/Lulu By Night” (1985) and an English-language series entitled “Magicians of the Earth” (1989). —tcm

Jaco Van Dormael (born 1957, Ixelles, Belgium) is a Belgian film director, screenwriter and playwright. His complex and critically acclaimed films are especially noted for their respectful and sympathetic portrayal of people with mental and physical disabilities.

In the 1980s, he became interested in filmmaking and produced a number of short films that aroused considerable critical interest.

Van Dormael made his feature-length debut in 1991 with Toto le Héros (Toto the hero), a tale about a man who believes his life was “stolen” from him when he was switched at birth, told in a complex mosaic of flashbacks and dream sequences, sometimes with almost a stream of consciousness effect. Toto le Héros gained wide critical acclaim, winning both the César Award for best foreign film and the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, making Van Dormael something of an overnight celebrity.

His brother Pierre Van Dormael was a jazz guitarist and composer, and had scored his feature films.

Van Dormael’s films, while few, have strong common themes between them. They make distinctive use of naive voiceover and examine the world from an innocent perspective (the young Thomas in Toto, the mentally handicapped protagonist of Huitième Jour, and the unborn child of Sur la Terre comme au Ciel). These characters views are often colorful, imaginative, and somewhat removed from reality, with slight elements of surreal imagery used to illustrate their active imaginations.

His movies also typically end with a death, which is portrayed not as a tragedy, but as a happy moving on where the deceased looks down happily at the world below. Sur la Terre ends with a birth, but it is similarly handled the passing of a character into a new world. This pattern is continued in Mr. Nobody which screened recently at the Toronto International Film Festival, where two deaths open the movie and a unique twist on death at the end of the film conveys a wistful sense of happiness.

Van Dormael makes prominent use of nostalgic standards music, as well, featuring “Boum!” by Charles Trenet in Toto and “Mexico” by Luis Mariano in Huitième Jour as recurring themes. Mr. Nobody used “Mr. Sandman” as its recurring musical theme.

All of Van Dormael’s films contain surreal elements. In his first two films, these moments were few, like dancing flowers in Toto or Georges flying around the room in Le Huitième Jour. Mr. Nobody makes much more extensive use of surreal imagery throughout the film.

Both Toto and Huitième Jour prominently featured characters with Down Syndrome, and portrayed these characters lovingly, emphasizing their child-like characteristics. —Wikipedia

After graduating with a degree in classical letters, Régis Wargnier started out as a freelance photographer before working with Claude Chabrol, as assistant director and assistant operator. During the 70s and 80s, he worked as an assistant director and first unit director on films by Volker Schlöndorff, Valerio Zurlini, Margarethe Von Trotta, Elie Chouraqui, Francis Girod, Patrice Leconte, among others. He got his break thanks to Yannick Bernard, who produced his first two feature films, La Femme de ma vie (Woman of My Life) (1986), which won him the César for Best New Director of a Feature Film, and Je suis le seigneur du château (I’m the King of the Castle) (1989). In 1991, Régis Wargnier directed Indochine, which earned him the Oscar, the Golden Globe and the Goya for Best Foreign Film, as well as five Césars. He went on to make Une femme française (A French Woman) in 1995, a three-time award-winning film at the Moscow International Film Festival, and Est-Ouest (East-West) in 1999, nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes. It was also nominated four times at the Césars. He is currently working with William Boyd on the English adaptation of Man to Man – screenplay by Frédéric Fougea and Michel Fessler. —Cannes film festival

A legendary figure of the postwar Japanese cinema, Yoshishige Yoshida (b. 1933) is one of Japan’s most artistically ambitious, politically astute and influential filmmakers. Yoshida is best known for his work with the spellbinding Mariko Okada (b. 1934), one of the most beloved and celebrated actresses of her generation, and one of the great stars of the Japanese New Wave. Working together with Okada, Yoshida created an incredible body of films unparalleled for their formal sophistication, philosophical depth and sheer beauty. Underappreciated in this country, Yoshida is rightly considered in Japan and Europe, and especially France, among the preeminent masters of the modern Japanese art film.

Yoshida’s first passion, and the focus of his studies at Tokyo University, was French existential philosophy and literature, a training which deeply informs the intellectual rigor of his subsequent film work and later writing on film and art. By chance, or destiny, Yoshida was drawn into a film career by Shochiku’s major recruitment drive in the late 1950s, and entered the studio’s famously hierarchical apprentice system together with a number of young university-educated intellectuals, including Yoshida’s close colleagues and contemporaries Nagisa Oshima and Masahiro Shinoda. Like them, Yoshida’s first films, Good for Nothing (1960) and Blood Thirsty (1960), were astonishingly accomplished and conceptually brilliant works that deliberately played against the taiyozoku (youth film) cycle to which the young directors were assigned, rejecting the promise of romance and sex to instead deliver trenchant and unrepentant critiques of the corporatization of Japan as a betrayal of the postwar generation.

In 1962 Yoshida turned in a new direction when he accepted the invitation of Mariko Okada – one of Shochiku’s great young female stars, acting now as a producer – to adapt a popular melodramatic novel about unrequited love and postwar disillusionment, The Affair at Akitsu. Following the film’s critical success Yoshida and Okada married and left the studio to work independently, launching a remarkable collaboration that has extended thus far across thirteen films and over forty years. Between 1963 and 1968 the couple made a series of important and incredible “anti-melodramas,” as they have been called, gripping and highly stylized dramas starring Okada as a woman in various states of emotional and romantic distress and offering a forcible critique of women’s traditional role as victim and object of desire within Japanese melodrama. In 1969 the couple worked together on their most ambitious project, and one of the most important examples of Japanese counter-cinema, Eros + Massacre_, a soaring and inspired exploration of the history of radical art and politics in modern Japan. Yoshida’s subsequent films have each bravely tackled critical and politically charged topics – Japan’s militarist history (Coup d’état_, 1973), the atomic bomb (Women in the Mirror, 2002) and euthanasia (The Human Promise, 1986) – while continuing to explore the limits and rich ambiguities of the cinema as an artistic and narrative medium. —Harvard Film Archive

Born in Algiers, Merzak Allouache grew up during the Algerian struggle for independence. He studied filmmaking at Paris’s celebrated IDHEC, and quickly moved on to directing feature films, documentaries, and television programs. Omar Gatlato (1976), his first feature film, set in the neighborhood of Bab el-Oued in Algiers, was such a success that it changed the course of Algerian cinema. The popularity of Omar Gatlato with Algerian audiences demonstrated to the Algerian film industry that its public had an appetite for complex films that dealt with the realities of Algerian contemporary society, opening the door to other films of the same ilk. In 1994 Merzak returned to this same neighborhood to film Bab el-Oued City. The film captured the beginnings of the civil war that was then spreading across Algeria. Bab el-Oued City garnered the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes in 1994, as well as the grand prize at the Arab Film Festival in Paris. During a career that has spanned thirty years, Merzak Allouache’s films continue to examine the complex history that ties France to its former North African colonies, giving us characters full of intelligence and dignity, caught between their French and Algerian identities. Merzak’s other films include Adventures of a Hero/Aventures d’un heros (1978), The Man Who Watched Windows/L’Homme qui regardait les fenêtres (1982), and A Love in Paris/Un amour à Paris (1988). In 1989 he made Following October/L’après-octobre, a documentary about the riots that took place in the suburbs of Paris in 1988.— Harvard Film Archive

Gabriel Axel (born 18 April 1918) is an Oscar winning Danish film director, actor, writer and producer, best known for the Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast (1987), which he wrote and directed.

Born in Århus, Denmark, on April 18, 1918, Axel spent most of his childhood in France, and returned to Denmark to train as an actor at the Royal Danish Theatre. After spending some years in Paris, working with the Louis Jouvet theatre ensemble, Axel concentrated his efforts on directing for the theatre, television and cinema in Denmark.

With some 16 feature films to his credits Axel returned to France where he directed several large projects for television, which brought him a number of distinguished honours.

In 1988, Gabriel Axel won an Academy Award for his Danish feature film Babette’s Feast, an adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s novel of the same name.

His other notable films include the popular comedy Familien Gyldenkål (1975) and its sequel; a series of sexually oriented features including the pro-porn propaganda film Det kære legetøj (1968); as well as a series of Shakespearean Viking dramas, including Den røde kappe (1967), which received the Grand Prix de la Technique at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival.

In 2003, Gabriel Axel received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Copenhagen International Film Festival. —Wikipedia

Cheerfully wishing his audience a “disturbing evening” at a London retrospective of his films, director Michael Haneke insists that he is an optimist at heart, despite all of the relentlessly bleak carnage and deeply disturbing imagery so vividly painted and seared into the mind of anyone who has had the uncomfortable experience of viewing his work.

Practically born into show business, to an actress mother and director father, in Munich in March 1942, Haneke spent his early years in a working class suburb of Vienna before an early attempt at fame as an actor and pianist. Failing to achieve early success, Haneke attended the University of Vienna to study philosophy and psychology, and became a film critic and stage director before making his eventual debut as a television director with After Liverpool in 1973. Setting in motion a television career specializing in literary adaptations and small screen films, Haneke would work successfully in that medium until his feature debut with The Seventh Continent in 1989.
Laced with the theme of muted emotions resulting in stark violence that would become his calling card, The Seventh Continent’s bleak and austere portrayal of a family deadened and ultimately destroyed by modern convenience served as a deeply disturbing cautionary tale, made all the more effective by the final revelation that it was based in reality. The first of an agonizing trilogy on the same theme, including Benny’s Video (1992) and 71 Fragments of a Chronology Chance (1994), it offered a telling contrast to the Hollywood-manufactured attempts at shock in the form of slimy aliens and supernatural chills. These films were horrific and they were all too real in their implications and actions, the distortion of reality so common among typical horror films was abandoned in Haneke’s works in favor of the infinitely more terrifying affects of urban alienation.

Haneke took the modern obsession with cinematic violence to a level rarely attempted in 1997, with the tale of a happy family relentlessly tortured in Funny Games. Violence is not fun in Haneke’s world and this is where his optimism comes into play. Though shocking and repulsive on a number of levels, Haneke’s goal to shatter the numbness instilled by countless depictions of inconsequential violence in modern media is something the director views as positive and uplifting, even if the means to that end induce shock and anger. Haneke took home the Grand Prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival for The Piano Teacher, a compelling tale of sexual repression that also won that film’s stars, Benoit Magimel and Isabelle Huppert, the Best Actor and Actress awards at the festival.

(Source: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:93329)

French filmmaker Patrice Leconte is as notable for his refusal to be easily categorized as he is for his long and productive career. Since making his major directorial debut in 1975 with Les Vécés Étaient Fermés de L’Intérieur, Leconte has established himself as one of France’s most respected directors, at ease tackling subjects ranging from mental illness to sexuality to canny deconstructions of wit and society. He received particular acclaim for his 1996 film Ridicule, winning the admiration of an international audience while furthering his reputation as one of the French cinema’s most treasured figures.

A native Parisian, Leconte was born on November 12, 1947. He decided to be a filmmaker at a very young age, and went on to attend France’s most prestigious film school, I.D.H.E.C. During his education, constant visits to the Paris Cinémathèque aided in his understanding of cinematography culture. After graduating from I.D.H.E.C. in 1969, Leconte went against the cinematic grain, becoming a cartoonist for the French magazine Pilote. He made his living from cartooning until 1975, all the while shooting comic-fantasy shorts. The brand of humor he developed while making these shorts would later become the trademark of his most personal comedies.

In 1975, Leconte collaborated with Pilote colleague Marcel Gotlib to write Les Vécés Étaient Fermés de L’Intérieur (The Toilets Were Locked From the Inside). His first major directorial effort, the film was inspired by films like The Mystery of the Yellow Room and the French whodunits of the 1950s. Unfortunately, despite the presence of the well-known Jean Rochefort (with whom Leconte was to collaborate on a number of projects), the film flopped, its bizarre and sometimes surreal brand of comedy failing to find favor with the French public.

However, Leconte found greater success with his next feature, Les Bronzés (or French Fried Vacation). The 1978 film was the result of his involvement with the famed theater company, Le Splendid, where he wrote comedy and worked with actors like Michel Blanc, Josiane Balasko, and Thierry Lhermitte (who would all go on to star in his films). A blissful satire of Club Med holidays, the film, which featured Serge Gainsbourg’s singing “Sea, Sex and Sun,” proved to be enormously popular; a sequel featuring the same Splendid actors duly followed with the 1979 Les Bronzés Font du Ski (The Bronzés Go Skiing).

Leconte’s next project, an adaptation of the play Viens Chez Moi, J’habite Chez Une Copine (Come to My Place, I’m Staying at My Girlfriend’s), marked the beginning of his long collaboration with Michel Blanc, who wrote and starred in the film. The comedy gave Leconte another smash hit; his next two comedies, the 1981 Ma Femme S’Appelle Reviens (My Wife’s Name is “Come Back”) and 1983’s Circulez Y’a Rien a Voir (Move Along, There’s Nothing to See) — both of which starred Blanc — were not as successful, although they did produce strong ticket sales.

Now established as a director of a certain kind of comedy, Leconte felt the urge to shift gears. So he directed an action comedy, 1985’s Les Specialistes. Although the film was not Leconte’s most impressive, it proved to be his biggest hit, selling more than four million tickets. Its commercial success freed Leconte to do the type of film he had long wanted to do, a road movie about two quarreling friends. The result, 1987’s Tandem, was a study of male friendship (a popular theme in Leconte’s films) whose comedic overtones were shadowed by an increasingly nightmarish quality; the madness exhibited by one of the film’s protagonists was something that Leconte would explore time and again in his future films.
His next two films, in fact, proved to be compelling explorations of different types of madness, whether this madness assumed the form of murder and obsession or was irrevocably linked to sexual desire. The first of these films, 1989’s Monsieur Hire, was a complex examination of the relationship between its titular protagonist (played by Michel Blanc) and the attractive young neighbor (Sandrine Bonnaire) he watches night after night. Leconte used the backdrop of a murder as a context for his examination and the result was a dark study in obsession, desire, and deviant sexuality. It was widely hailed by the critics and was shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Leconte’s subsequent effort, Le Mari de la Coiffeuse (The Hairdresser’s Husband) (1990), was also a critical success. The story of a man, Jean Rochefort, whose childhood dreams are fulfilled when he marries hairdresser Anna Galiena, it was, like Monsieur Hire, another study of the link between desire and mental illness, albeit one with a lighter tone.

Leconte’s next major project was 1993’s Tango, a black comedy about a man who thinks life would be a lot happier if he could just off his wife. Like the director’s previous films, it addressed themes of madness, sexuality, and male bonding, and featured jarring performances from Thierry Lhermitte, Richard Bohringer, and Philippe Noiret. The film was a considerable success, unlike Leconte’s next two major features, Le Parfum d’Yvonne (1994) and Les Grands Ducs (1996). The relative critical and commercial disappointments of these films, however, were to be more than made up for by his 1996 Ridicule, which was filmed while Les Grands Ducs was being edited.

A comedic dissection of the symbiotic relationship between power and social appearances, Ridicule takes place in the 18th century court of Versailles. However, the social games and acerbic verbal wars it portrays made more than one observer note it was similar in content to a Western, where, as Jean Rochefort remarked, “witticisms have replaced six-shooters.” The film was tremendously popular, chosen as the opening film at the 1996 Cannes Festival. It went on to win four Césars, including Best Film and Best Director.

Leconte then switched gears again, helming 1 Chance sur 2 (Half a Chance) (1998), a humorous action film starring Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Vanessa Paradis. In 1999, he worked with Paradis again in La fille sur le Pont (The Girl on the Bridge) (1999), which also starred Daniel Auteuil. Another road movie/love story/look at mental imbalance, the film was a sensual, light-hearted affair, demonstrating again that Leconte was a director who knew his element, regardless of the period, style, or content of the films he made. —allmovie guide

A student at Paris’ IDHEC film school from 1962 through 1963, Miller had his first practical cinematic experience while he was in uniform, serving with Le Service Cinema de L’Armee. From 1965 until 1974, Miller worked in assistant and supervisory capacities for many of France’s major New Wave directors, including Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard. His principal mentor was François Truffaut, under whose tutelage Miller directed a trio of shorts and his first theatrical feature, 1976’s La Meilleure façon de marcher (The Best Way to Walk), a coming-of-age drama which bore traces of Truffaut’s Les Mistons (1957) and The 400 Blows (1959). Miller received César nominations for best director and writing for this film. Subsequent Miller-directed films can also be perceived as homages to Truffaut, many even using the same production personnel. The following year he made Dites-lui que je l’aime, for which he received a second César nomination for Best Director. He won a César Award for Best Writing in 1981 for Garde à vue, and the Louis Delluc Prize in 1985 for L’Effrontée, for which he received another César nomination for Best Director. In 1983 he directed Mortelle randonnée. When Truffaut died in 1984 during the preparation of another confused adolescent feature, Le Petite Voleuse (The Little Thief), Miller took over the project, completing the film in 1988. On French television, Miller directed dozens of commercials and the six-part miniseries Traits de Memoire (1976). After a four-year absence, Claude Miller returned to active filmmaking with The Accompanist (1992), The Smile (1994) and La Classe de Neige, for which he won the Jury Prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. In 2001 he directed Betty Fisher et autres histoires, and in 2003 La Petite Lili. In 2007 he directed “A Secret”.—wikipedia

Idrissa Ouedraogo is one of Africa’s most prolific filmmakers. His early films are remakable in their ability to communicate through imagery. Poko, Les Ecuelles (The Wooden Bowls), Les Funerailles du Larle Naba (The Funeral of Larle Narba), Ouagadougou, Ouga deux roues (Ouagadougou, Ouga Two Wheels), and Issa le tisserand (Issa the Weaver) appeal to a multi-lingual audience without using dialogue or voice-over narration. Although his subsequent films incorporate dialogue, Ouedraogo’s talent for creating meaning with images remains a hallmark of his work.

Ouedraogo’s first commercial success, Yaaba (Grandmother), narrates the story of two young children who befriend an old woman wrongly accused of malevolent sorcery. This film exemplifies Ouedraogo’s interest in the multiple ramifications of individual choices. It also demonstrates Ouedraogo’s skill at adapting the poetics of African oral tales to contemporary cinema. Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike notes that Ouedraogo “fuses the neorealist penchant for eliciting polished performance from nonprofessionals with the African narrative tradition of the griot… as in the oral tradition, a story’s interest and attraction for an audience depend upon how creatively a storyteller embellishes what he has heard or taken from his own experience.” Ouedraogo’s humor, wit, and keen sense of drama in Yaaba earned him international acclaim as an exceptional storyteller and filmmaker.

Ouedraogo’s second big success was Tilai (The Law). At the film’s beginning, the protagonist, Saga, leaves his village. His life away from home is left out of the narrative, which speaks to Ouedraogo’s commitment to rural life. Saga returns to find that his father has married the woman he loves, Nogma. Nogma and Saga decide to disobey the law and escape to another village. Saga’s brother, Kougri, also refuses to follow his father’s order to punish Saga with death. Ouedraogo sympathizes with young villagers’ desires for change, but treats his elder characters with sensitivity. The film depicts the injustices of certain traditional laws in addition to the difficulties involved in defying them. At the same time, Ouedraogo deeply respects his country’s cultures, and sides with their battles for self-preservation.

Although Ouedraogo often critiques strict traditional laws, his love for his African heritage is clear in his films. His appreciation for African traditional life is expressed poignantly in Un cri du coeur (A Cry from the Heart). Here, a young boy named Moctar moves from his village in order to live with his middle-class parents, who have immigrated to France. Pained by his nostalgia for his village, and especially for his grandfather, Moctar has difficulty adjusting. When he has visions of a hyena on the streets, he alarms his parents, who hoped that France would provide Moctar with better opportunities. Un cri du coeur, like numerous African literary works, examines the affection shared between the older African generation and their grandchildren. When Moctar’s hyena, a strong figure in African folklore, appears for the last time, it takes the form of his dear grandfather.

In the context of African cinema, Ouedraogo’s films have been especially successful. He is committed to filming the specific realities of his home country, yet his themes of fidelity, resistance, transformation, and the recovery of traditions have touched diverse, world-wide audiences. —Film Reference