To Each His Own Cinema

In the ’90s Olivier Assayas emerged as one of the key figures in the new generation of French filmmakers. As a former critic for Cahiers du Cinema and a die-hard cinephile, he makes his films both personal and referential to the works of directors that he adores. His father was a director/screenwriter in the 1940s who later worked mainly for TV. When it was increasingly difficult for him to work because of a health condition, Olivier started to help him, first merely as a secretary, and then ghostwriting a few screenplays for the Maigret TV series. In the late 1970s he joined the team of influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, that once launched the French New Wave. While working for Cahiers he wrote essays on his favorite European filmmakers, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and published extensive studies on American horror films and Hong Kong Cinema (the latter came out long before Hong Kong cinema became fashionable with Western filmgoers and critics). He collaborated on screenplays of two André Téchiné films, Rendez-Vous and Le Lieu du Crime, and directed a few shorts before making his feature debut in 1986 with Desordre. Though his films enjoyed considerable critical acclaim in France and at international film festivals, his name was virtually unknown in English-speaking countries until the release of his 1996 film Irma Vep, a loving tribute both to Louis Feuillade and Hong Kong cinema. Still faithful to his critical roots, he later directed a documentary on Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=B80105)

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

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

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

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

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

Chen Kaige is one of China’s most prominent and influential directors, and perhaps the central figure in China’s Fifth Generation of filmmakers. Born Chen Aige in Beijing, he was the son of noted director Chen Huaiai, who directed a number of popular films during the 1950s and 1960s. As the chaos of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution was gathering steam, Chen, a 15-year-old member of the notorious Red Guard, publicly denounced his father. He later partially reenacted that day during the heartbreaking climax of Farewell, My Concubine (1989). During the late ‘60s, he was sent to labor in a rubber plantation in southwestern Yunnan province. Later, he served in the army but remained in the area. In 1975, as Mao’s reign was drawing to a close, Chen returned to his hometown to work at the Beijing Film Processing Laboratory. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaopeng, set about undoing much of the destruction of Mao’s bloody final decade, which included opening the nation’s schools and academies. In 1978, Chen entered the Beijing Film Academy. He and such classmates as Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Zhang Junzhao would eventually become the core of the Fifth Generation.

Chen made Farewell to Yesterday (1980) for Fujian television and served as an assistant director under Huang Jianzhong. In 1984, he collaborated with classmates Zhang Yimou and Hu Qun to create the landmark film Yellow Earth (1984), which stunned critics and audiences in its international debut at the Hong Kong Film Festival and brought worldwide attention to the changing face of Chinese cinema. Yellow Earth’s detached tone, measured pace, and gorgeous visuals came as a revelation for a nation previously known for cranking out revolutionary operas that espoused the teachings of Mao. Chen’s second feature, also a collaboration with Zhang, was the military drama The Big Parade (1985) about a group of soldiers who endure rigorous and often brutal training for the National Day parade in Tiananmen Square. Although the film is less stylistically innovative than Yellow Earth, it explored fundamental questions of Chinese patriotism, nationhood, and identity. While finishing The Big Parade, Chen was invited by Xi’an Film Studio head Wu Tianming to make King of the Children (1987), based on a novella written by old Yunnan workmate Ah Cheng, about children growing up during the Cultural Revolution. Here, as in his earlier works, Chen delivered a visually inventive work that delved deep into matters concerning the country. Chen and Wu both hoped that the film could match the international success of Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, but it failed to win any festival awards. In 1987, Chen received a scholarship to study filmmaking at New York University. There, he received funding to make Life on a String (1991), a mysterious and philosophical work about two blind wandering musicians, in which Chen’s striking use of both visual and aural elements approached the avant-garde. For all its innovation, the film was a box-office flop. Moreover, at a time when Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou (1989) won festival prizes and an Academy Award nomination, Chen’s film failed to garner much notice.

His 1992 work, Farewell My Concubine, marked a clear turning point in Chen’s career, away from pure art and toward commercial success. He cast international art house star Gong Li and Hong Kong pop sensation Leslie Cheung in leading roles; although the film does pack an enormous emotional punch, it bears little of the stylistic invention of his previous films. The film eventually won a joint Palme d’Or with The Piano at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination, and it proved a commercial success, raking in millions of dollars in the U.S. alone. Chen made Temptress Moon in 1996, which again starred Leslie Cheung and Gong Li. However, the film received lukewarm reviews and disappointing box office. Chen Kaige’s film The Emperor and The Assassin (1999) was screened at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.

Chen has also acted in several films, including Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987) and his own The Emperor and the Assassin and Together. —allmovie guide

David Cronenberg, also known as the King of Venereal Horror or the Baron of blood, was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 1943. His father was a journalist, and his mother was a piano player. After showing an inclination for literature at an early age (he wrote and published eerie short stories, thus following his father’s path) and for music (playing classical guitar until he was 12), Cronenberg graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in Literature after switching from the science department. He reached the cult status of horror-meister with the gore-filled, modern-vampire variations of Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), following an experimental apprenticeship in independent filmmaking and in Canadian television programs.

Cronenberg gained popularity with the head-exploding, telepathy-based Scanners (1981) after the release of the much underrated, controversial, and autobiographical The Brood (1979). Cronenberg become a sort of a mass media guru with Videodrome (1983), a shocking investigation of the hazards of reality-morphing television and a prophetic critique of contemporary aesthetics. The issues of tech-induced mutation of the human body and topics of the prominent dichotomy between body and mind were back again in The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986), both bright examples of a personal filmmaking identity, even if both films are based on mass-entertainment materials: the first being a rendition of a Stephen King best-seller, the latter a remake of famous American horror movie.

With Dead Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991), the Canadian director, no more a mere genre movie-maker but a fully realized auteur, got the acclaim of international critics. Such profound statements on modern humanity and ever-changing society are prominent in the provocative Crash (1996) and in the virtual reality essay of eXistenZ (1999), both of which well fared at the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals. In the last two filmic projects Spider (2002) and A History of Violence (2005), Cronenberg avoids expressing his teratologic and oniric expressionism in favour of a more psycological exploration of human contradictions and idiosyncrasies. –IMDb

After studying drama in the arts institute, Jean Pierre Dardenne and his brother Luc made some videos about the rough life in blue-collar small towns in the Wallonie. After their meeting with filmmaker Armad Gatti and cinematographer Ned Burgess, they decided to enter in the movie business.

In 1978 they shot their first documentary, Le chant du rossignol, about the resistance against the Nazis during the second world war in Belgium. In 1986 they shot their first fiction movie, Falsch, about a Jewish family massacred by the Nazis. After their second movie, Je pense a vous, they released La Promesse, a movie about inmigration in Belgium. The film was a success worldwide winning awards in many festivals.

In 1999 they had another hit with Rosetta, that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival. The movie tells the story of a blue collar worker with an alcoholic mother who tries to have a better life in a small belgium city.

In 2002, they came back to Cannes with their last movie, Le Fils, that won the ecumenical jury prize and the award for best actor for Olivier Gourmet. —IMDb

Manoel Cândido Pinto de Oliveira, GCSE (Portuguese pronunciation: [mɐnuˈɛɫ doliˈvɐjɾɐ]; born December 11, 1908) is a Portuguese film director born in Cedofeita, Porto. He is currently the oldest active film director in the world.

Manoel de Oliveira was born in Porto, Portugal on December 11, 1908, to Francisco José de Oliveira and Cândida Ferreira Pinto. His family were wealthy industrialists.

Oliveira attended school in Galicia, Spain and his goal as a teenager was to become an actor. He enrolled in Italian film-maker Rino Lupo’s acting school at age 20, but later changed his mind when he saw Walther Ruttmann’s documentary Berlin: Symphony of a City. This prompted him to direct his first film, also a documentary, titled Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931).

He also has the distinction of having acted in the second Portuguese sound film, A Canção de Lisboa (1933).

His first feature film came much later, in 1942. Aniki-Bóbó, a portrait of Oporto’s street children, was a commercial failure when it opened, and its merit only came to be recognised over time[citation needed]. This drawback forced Oliveira to abandon other film projects he was involved in, and to dedicate himself to running his family vineyard. He re-emerged onto the film scene in 1956 with The Artist and the City, a work that marked a turning point in Oliveira’s conception of the cinema.

In 1963, O Acto de Primavera (The Rite of Spring), a documentary depicting an annual passion play, marked a turning point for his career. This was shortly followed by A caça (The Hunt), a grim feature film that contrasted with the happy tones of his previous documentary. Despite the widespread acclaim garnered by both films, he would not return to the director’s seat until the 1970s. Since 1990 (when he turned 82), he has made at least one film each year. His most recent film, Christopher Columbus – the Enigma, was shot partly in New York and completed in 2007; it is currently touring the United States.

Oliveira has said that he direct movies for the sheer pleasure of doing it, regardless of critical reaction. He maintains a quiet life away from the spotlights, despite multiple honours such as those of the Cannes, Venice and Montréal film festivals. He has been awarded two Career Golden Lions in 1985 and 2004 and a golden palm for his lifetime achievements in 2008.

Oliveira married Maria Isabel Brandão de Meneses de Almeida Carvalhais in Porto on December 4, 1940. They have two children: Manuel Casimiro Brandão Carvalhais de Oliveira (born 1941) and Adelaide Maria Brandão Carvalhais de Oliveira (born 1948). He has several grandchildren via his daughter Adelaide. —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

Atom Egoyan’s parents were painters and he studied International Relations and music at the University of Toronto where he began making short films: “Howard in Particular” 1979, “After Grad with Dad” 1980, “Peep Show” 1981 and “Open House” 1982.

While he has several distinguished Television and Opera works on his resume and such pictures as his debut “Next of Kin” 1984, Berlin and Moscow International Film Festival-winning “Family Viewing” 1987 and “The Adjuster” 1991 – his most critically acclaimed creation is The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and his most famous work is the astonishingly clever film-in-film Ararat (2002)

4 time Cannes Film Festival winner and the most famous Armenian filmmaker since Sergei Parajanov, the Egypt-born, Canada-bred, Oscar-nominated master of indie cinema, has collected an impressive 4 awards from the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival.

A 7 time recipient of Canada’s top Genie Awards, he is a remarkable figure in contemporary independent filmmaking. —IMDb

Born in Haifa in 1950, as the second son of architect Munio Weinraub and former Sionist activist Efratia Margalit. On the year of his birth, his parents changed the family name to “Gitai”, which is the Hebrew translation of the German name “Weinraub”. While he was a student in architecture, Amos Gitai joined the Yom Kippur war in 1973 as a reserve duty officer, and served as part of a helicopter rescue team. While serving during the war, he started filming with a 8mm camera his mother gave him as his birthday present. On his 23rd birthday, October 11th 1973, his helicopter was shot down by a Syrian missile. Among the 7 crews on board, 6 of them survived, including Gitai himself, who was inspired by this traumatic experience to quit architecture and move to filmmaking. He made a documentary on this incident and his fellow survivors, “Kippur: War Memories” in 1993, then a fictional recreation of it “Kippur” in 2000.

in 1979, Gitai directed his first feature-length documentary “House”, commissioned by Israel’s public television. The television rejected the film, and the film (originally shot in 16mm) only exists today copied from a VHS tape he managed to secure. The tape traveled on few international festivals and quickly earned a reputation for him. His third documentary, “Field Diary” shot in 1983 was also rejected by the Israeli Television who originally commissioned it. This time, Gitai moved to France with the negative of the film and completed it in France. For the next 10 years, he based himself in Europe.

1n 1986, he directed his first feature fictional film “Esther”, based on the Biblical story of the book of Esther.

In 1993, following prime minister Ytzhak Rabin starting the peace process with Palestine, Gitai and his family moved back to live in his native town of Haifa. —IMDb

Born in México City, Mexico, in 1963, Alejandro González Iñárritu started his show-business career in 1984 as a DJ at top-rated Mexican radio station WFM. At the same time he studied filmmaking and theater. From 1988 to 1990 he composed music for six Mexican features, including Garra de tigre (1989). In the 1990s he became one of the youngest producers in Mexican TV: looking for good stories, he read a lot of scripts and one day was introduced to Guillermo Arriaga, a screenwriter, and they planned to make 11 shorts to show the contradictory nature of Mexico City. After three years and 36 drafts, they ended up settling on only three stories and expanding them. That movie, Amores Perros, became a major hit at its release at the Festival de Cannes 2000, where it received the award of the best film by the Semaine de la Critique, and went on to huge worldwide success. It also earned an Oscar nomination for best foreign movie. His second feature, 21 Grams (2003), was also written by Arriaga. —World Cinema Foundation

Director Hou Hsiao Hsien, in a 1988 New York Film Festival World Critics Poll, was voted one of three directors who would most likely shape cinema in the coming decades. He has since become one of the most respected, influential directors working in cinema today. In spite of his international renown, his films have focused exclusively on his native Taiwan, offering finely textured human dramas that deal with the subtleties of family relationships against the backdrop of the island’s turbulent, often bloody history. All of his movies deal in some manner with questions of personal and national identity, particularly, “What does it mean to be Taiwanese?” In a country that has been colonized first by the Japanese and then by Chiang Kai-Shek’s repressive Nationalist Government, this question is pregnant with political connotations.

Hou was born to a member of the Hakka ethnic minority in southern Guangdong province in mainland China, but his parents emigrated to Kaohsiung, Taiwan, in 1949, to escape the bloodshed of the Chinese civil war. After serving in the military, Hou entered the film program at the National Taiwan College of the Arts. He graduated in 1972 and worked as a salesman until he landed a job as an assistant director and a screenwriter. In 1980, he made his directorial debut with Cute Girl, but he did not attract critical attention until The Son’s Big Doll appeared as an episode of the omnibus film Sandwich Man (1983). This film, along with another portmanteau movie, In Our Time(1982), is considered one of the first films of the New Taiwan Cinema movement, which injected a new level of sophistication and vitality into a moribund film industry previously known for martial arts spectaculars; it arose from the Foundation for the Development of Motion Picture Industry and the loosening of censorship laws in the late ’70s and was led by such young filmmakers as Hou and Edward Yang.

Hou’s work centers on two recurring themes, the social upheaval and erosion of traditional family ties resulting from Taiwan’s rapid urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s and the representation of Taiwan as a multicultural, multilingual society, a view that intentionally differed from the government’s enforcement of Mandarin as the official tongue. For example, Dust in the Wind (1986) follows the lives of two country innocents who move to Taipei, and Daughter of the Nile (1987) tells of a displaced family torn apart by the pressures of the city. Characters in Hou’s films, more often than not, speak Taiwanese, Hakka, Fukienese, or even Japanese, as opposed to the state-sanctioned language, as seen in his autobiographical A Time to Live, a Time to Die (1985) and in City of Sadness (1989). Stylistically, Hou has been compared to Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. Both directors favor a minimalist approach that downplays overt melodrama, focusing instead on the quiet nuances of human emotion. Both employ long static shots and low camera angles. But unlike Ozu, Hou’s films challenge the viewer in their use of episodic plot lines, complex juxtapositions, and off-scene space.

In 1989, Hou overcame government censors to create his masterpiece, City of Sadness, the first film to confront the so-called Incident of February 28, 1947, a Tianamen Square-style massacre of native Taiwanese committed by government troops. Well-received domestically, the film was acclaimed by international critics and won the first Golden Lion awarded to a Chinese film at the Venice Film Festival. For his next film, the second in his Taiwan trilogy, Hou continued to investigate Taiwanese history in the semi-documentary Puppet Master (1993), which focused on Japan’s occupation of Taiwan as seen through the eyes of puppet artist Li Tien-Lu. The final film in the trilogy, Good Men, Good Women (1995), about a political prisoner released in 1987 who finds modern Taiwan cold and alienating, has often been cited as one of the finest films of the 1990s. Such subsequent films as Goodbye, South, Goodbye (1996) and Flowers of Shanghai (1998) have also been critically lauded but have failed to find an audience at home. Apart from directing, Hou also served as production manager for the landmark mainland Chinese film Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and acted in Edward Yang’s Taipei Story (1985). In 1997, French director Olivier Assayas directed a documentary about Hou entitled HHH: Portrait of Hou Hsiao Hsien.

(Source: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:95029~T1)

“Beat” Takeshi Kitano is widely considered to be Japan’s foremost media personality. In addition to his work in the film industry he is an active newspaper columnist, an author and poet, and a ubiquitous presence on Japanese television where he can be seen in up to eight prime time shows per week.Kitano first found fame, as well as his “Beat” nickname, in the early ‘70s as one-half of the manzai comedy duo The Two Beats, a fast-paced, cross-talk act that thrilled audiences with their off-color humor and satirical bite. Throughout the early ’80s, Kitano acted in a number of films, most memorably in Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983).

In 1989 Kitano added another facet to his career — serious film director. He was set to star in a police thriller that was to be directed by gangster film veteran Kinji Fukasaku. When Fukasaku had to leave the film, the film’s producers offered Kitano the directing chores. He reworked the script and the result was Violent Cop, a deliriously violent masterpiece that brought him recognition in the international film community. With this film Kitano would introduce his lean directorial style, punctuated by long takes, minimal dialogue, and stark compositions. He would also develop what has become the archetype Kitano persona, the taciturn but oddly likable antihero who is just as likely to speak with his fists as with his voice. This uneasy mix of playful comedy and savage violence would become a trademark in his later crime epics, Boiling Point (1990), Sonatine (1993), and Hana-bi ( winner of the 1997 Venice Film Festival Golden Lion). Kitano isn’t only known for his crime films. In between, he’s found the time to make a light drama about a deaf-mute garbage collector who learns to surf (Scene By the Sea ¹⁹⁹¹), a slapstick comedy that mercilessly satirizes Japanese culture (Getting Any? ¹⁹⁹⁵), and a coming-of-age tale about two high school dropouts (Kids Return ¹⁹⁹⁶).

Though international release of his previous films found positive critical notice but lukewarm response from mainstream American audiences, the year 2000 found Kitano on the verge of Hollywood success with the release of Brother, Kitano’s first international co-production teaming the Japanese auteur with an English speaking cast. The tale of an exiled Japanese yakuza who stakes his claim in the unfamiliar world of Los Angeles, Brother attempted to bring Kitano’s trademarked stark violence and subtle humor to a new audience in pairing Kitano with popular American actor Omar Epps. —AllMovie guide

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

Unlike virtually all his contemporaries, Ken Loach has never succumbed to the siren call of Hollywood, and it’s virtually impossible to imagine his particular brand of British socialist realism translating well to that context. After studying law at St. Peter’s College, Oxford, he branched out into the theater, performing with a touring repertory company. This led to television, where in alliance with producer ‘Tony Garnett’ he produced a series of docudramas, most notably the devastating “Cathy Come Home” episode of “The Wednesday Play” (1964), whose impact was so massive that it led directly to a change in the homeless laws. He made his feature debut Poor Cow (1967) the following year, and with “Kes”, he produced what is now acclaimed as one of the finest films ever made in Britain. However, the following two decades saw his career in the doldrums with his films poorly distributed (despite the obvious quality of work such as The Gamekeeper (1968) (TV) and Looks and Smiles (1981)) and his TV work in some cases never broadcast (most notoriously, his documentaries on the 1984 miners’ strike). But he made a spectacular comeback in the 1990s, with a series of award-winning films firmly establishing him in the pantheon of great European directors – his films have always been more popular in mainland Europe than in his native country or the US (where Riff-Raff (1991) was shown with subtitles because of the wide range of dialects) Hidden Agenda (1990) won the Special Jury Prize at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival; Riff-Raff (1991) won the Felix award for Best European Film of 1992; Raining Stones (1993) won the Cannes Special Jury Prize for 1993, and ‘Land and Freedom’ won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival -and was a substantial box-office hit in Spain where it sparked intense debate about its subject matter. This needless to say, was one of the reasons that Loach made the film! —IMDb

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

Giovanni (Nanni) Moretti was born in 1953 in Bolzano. Both his parents are teachers and researchers. His first passions, cinema, water-polo and political commitment mark his works and his biography. After having graduated, Moretti tries to find work as assistant-director before shooting his first Super-8 shorts. He is also an actor for the Taviani Brothers (Padre padrone). His first feature-length film Io sono un autarchico brings him success both with the critics and the public. His second (Ecce Bombo) is selected by Cannes Film Festival. The success of the film makes Moretti one of the main European new authors.

Sogni d’oro wins the Jury Prize in Venice, and after Bianca (1983), La messa è finita wins the Silver Bear at the 1985 Berlinale.
In 1987, toghether with his long-time friend Angela barbagallo, Moretti establishes his production and distribution company, Sacher Film. They will then purchase and run a theater in Rom, called Nuovo Sacher.

Some dialogs and characters of Palombella rossa (1989, Venice Critics’ Week) are known to a whole generation of Italian filmgoers. The film, with Moretti once more as his fictionary “double” Michele Apicella, is a bitter reflection about Italian politics and about a generation, in a year of major changes in Europe.

At the beginning of the 90s, Sacher Film produces Daniele Lucchetti’s Il Portaborse, in which Moretti plays a corrupted and unscrupulous cabinet member. Italian television refuses to co-finance the project.

Always close to the political situation in his country, Moretti shoots La Cosa (The Thing), a documentary about the end of the Italian Comunist Party which becomes the Democratic Party of the Left in 1989.

Moretti 7th film Caro Diario is a huge public success and is awarded in the major international film festivals.

In 1995 Moretti and other filmmakers produce the short L’unico paese al mondo in order to awaken audiences’ conscience about the possible consequences of Berlusconi’s election. That same year, Moreti produces La seconda volta cortometraggio che si propone di far riflettere sulla situazione che si verrebbe a creare nel caso l’Italia decidesse di mandare al governo Silvio Berlusconi; lo stesso anno produce Mimmo Calopresti’s La seconda volta in which he also plays together with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi.

In 1998 Nanni dedicates his Aprile to his son Pietro. In 2001, his austere and dramatic La stanza del figlio is awarded the Palme d’Or in Cannes.

Il caimano (2006), in which the filmmaker plays himself the part of Silvio Berlusconi is an enormous success which sparks off great polemics in Italy and abroad.

After 3 years dedicated to the direction of Torino Film Festival, Moretti is now preparing a new film…

The son of a Polish Jew and a Russian immigrant, Polanski was born in Paris on August 18, 1933. When he was three, his family moved to the Polish town of Krakow, an unfortunate decision given that the Germans invaded the city in 1940. Things went from bad to worse with the formation of Krakow’s Jewish ghetto, and Polanski’s family was the target of further persecution when his parents were deported to a concentration camp. Just before he was to be taken away, however, Polanski’s father helped his son escape, and the boy managed to survive with help from kindly Catholic families, although he was at times forced to fend for himself. (At one point, the Germans decided to use Polanski for idle target practice.) It was during this period that Polanski became a devoted cinephile, seeking refuge in movie houses whenever possible. Shortly after sustaining serious injuries in an explosion, Polanski learned of his mother’s death at Auschwitz. His father survived the camps, and moved back to Krakow with his son. Following his father’s remarriage, the adolescent Polanski left home. Following a near-fatal incident at the age of 16, which involved Polanski nearly becoming the next victim of a man who had just killed three people, his father enrolled him in a technical school. He left in 1950 to attend film school, concurrently becoming an actor with the Krakow Theater and made his onscreen acting debut in Andrzej Wajda’s 1954 Pokolenie/A Generation.

That same year, Polanski was one of six applicants accepted into the rigorous director’s course at Lodz’s prestigious State Film School. Polanski’s second student film, Dwaj Ludzie z Szafa/Two Men and a Wardrobe, proved to be one of his most famous, winning him five international awards. This and subsequent shorts such as Le Gros et le Maigre/The Fat and the Lean (made in 1961 after his graduation) all featured the black humor that would characterize his later features. Polanski made his feature film debut in 1962 with Noz w Wodzie/Knife in the Water; as with most of his subsequent features, he also worked on the screenplay, in this case collaborating with Jerzy Skolimowski and Jakub Goldberg. A suspenseful, symbolic psychological drama set aboard a sailboat, the film told the story of a husband’s misbegotten attempts to impress his wife and a potential rival, a young hitchhiker they bring aboard on a whim. It is considered the first Polish film not to deal with World War II, and was applauded for its visual precision.It was also the only full-length feature the director made in Poland.

Polanski moved to England to make his next two films, the first of which, Repulsion, became a cornerstone of contemporary psychological thrillers and, despite poor box-office returns, is said to be the director’s favorite film. Polanski made his Hollywood debut in 1968 with the horror classic Rosemary’s Baby. As with his earlier works, the film was more concerned with psychological terror than cheap shocks, creating a sense of foreboding terror that many directors have since tried to emulate with limited success. Polanski’s next film, Macbeth, was a faithful but controversial adaptation of Shakespeare. Made shortly after his wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered by the Manson Family, its graphic violence was said to reflect the director’s grief and outrage. Polanski then shifted gears, making a sex comedy (What?)in Italy before returning to Hollywood to direct one of his finest efforts, Chinatown (1974), a film that revitalized the nearly dead film noir movement and earned Polanski an Oscar nomination and a British Academy Award. He followed up this success in 1976 with the suspenseful and surrealistic Le Locataire/The Tenant; a sinister, paranoid tale of madness, manipulation, and vengeance.

The next year, the director made the news for a disastrous reason: While in Hollywood working on a project, he was charged of having sex with a 13-year-old girl. Barred from working in Hollywood, Polanski fled the country and resettled in Paris and did not make another film until 1979. An adaptation of a Thomas Hardy novel, the three-hour long Tess, starring 17-year-old Nastassja Kinski, was the most expensive film made in France at the time. But despite its cost, it proved to be a success, netting Polanski an Oscar nomination and a César award for Best Direction. Polanski’s next film, Pirates (1986), was an all-out spoof, which was not a success. Frantic, his 1988 thriller with Harrison Ford, failed to garner either critical or commercial favor, and his next effort, the perversely erotic thriller Bitter Moon (1992) received notice mainly because it starred a then-unknown Hugh Grant. Polanski found greater critical success in 1994 with Death and the Maiden, his adaptation of Ariel Dorfman’s play, starring Ben Kingsley and Sigourney Weaver. Two years later, he branched out with the experimental Gli Angeli, and, in 1999, returned to mystery-thriller territory with The Ninth Gate, starring his third wife Emmanuelle Seigner. His next film, based upon the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman and admittedly inspired by his own shattering childhood experiences, Polanski’s The Pianist told the heart-wrenching tale of a brilliant pianist who eludes his Nazi captors by hiding out in the ruins of Warzaw. The film began collecting accolades from its premiere at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, where it received the top prize, the Palme d’Or, to the Academy Awards, where it snagged seven nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. Although the latter prize went unclaimed, as Polanski was still a fugitive from Los Angeles County and therefore unable to enter the country. Over the years, Polanski also continued to nurture an interest in the theater. In 1981, he directed and starred in the Warsaw production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, which he re-staged successfully in Paris in 1982. In 1988, he played the leading role in Stephen Berkoff’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (again on the Paris stage). He’s also contributed some occasional film acting, playing opposite Gerard Depardieu in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Una Pura Formalità/A Pure Formality in 1994, as well as appearing in his own films.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:106743~T1)

Raúl Ruiz: Blind Man’s Bluff

Chilean filmmaker Raúl, or Raoul, Ruiz (1941-2011) was one of the most exciting and innovative filmmakers to emerge from 1960s World Cinema, providing more intellectual fun and artistic experimentation, shot for shot, than any filmmaker since Jean-Luc Godard. A guerrilla who uncompromisingly assaulted the preconceptions of film art, this frightfully prolific figure – he made over 100 films in 40 years – did not adhere to any one style of filmmaking. He worked in 35mm, 16mm and video, for theatrical release and for European TV, and on documentary and fiction features and shorts. His career began in avant-garde theatre where, between 1956 and 1962, he wrote over 100 plays. Although he never directed any of these productions, he did dabble in TV and filmmaking in the early 1960s. In 1968, with the release of his first completed feature, the Cassavetes-like Tres tristes tigres (1968), Ruiz became one of the key Chilean directors of New Latin American Cinema. A committed though critical supporter of the Marxist government of Salvador Allende, Ruiz was forced to flee his country after the fascist coup of 1973. Living in exile in Paris from that time onwards, he found a forum for his ideas in European TV and was championed by the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, several of whom appeared in his first European successes, The Suspended Vocation (1978) and The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1979), two enigmatic Pierre Klossowski adaptations. Between 1980 and his death in 2011, Ruiz was one of the world’s most productive but least known auteurs, in part through a long-term working relationship with Portuguese producer Paulo Branco. Other regular collaborators included Ruiz’s wife and editor Valeria Sarmiento, composer Jorge Arriagada, cinematographers Sacha Vierny, Henri Alekan and Ricardo Aronovich, writers Gilbert Adair and Pascal Bonitzer, and actor Melvil Poupaud. Key early works from this period included the surrealistic masterpieces Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983), City of Pirates (1983) and Manoel on the Island of Wonders (1984), three of his many French-Portuguese co-productions perversely yet charmingly addressing the recurring Ruizian themes of childhood, exile, and maritime and rural folklore. In the 1990s, Ruiz embarked on larger projects with prominent actors such as John Hurt, Marcello Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert and John Malkovich, alternating this sporadic mainstream art-house endeavour with his usual low-budget experimental productions and the teaching of his Poetics of Cinema (two volumes of which he published in 1995 and 2007). In the 1990s and 2000s, he also shot several films and TV series’ in Chile, though usually without Chilean funding. Ruiz is beloved among cinephiles as a poet of oneiric imagery and a fabulist of labyrinthine stories-within-stories whose films slip effortlessly from reality to imagination and back again. A manipulator of wild intellectual games in which the rules are forever changing, Ruiz’s techniques were as varied as film itself; a collection of bizarre angles, close-ups and deep-focus compositions, bewildering POV shots, dazzling colours, and labyrinthine narratives which weave and dodge the viewer’s grasp with every shot. As original as Ruiz was, one can tell much about him by the diversity of his influences; he was clearly inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Louis Stevenson, Orson Welles, “Left Bank” New Wave directors such as Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, and baroque low-budget Hollywood B-movie directors like Edgar G. Ulmer, Ford Beebe and Reginald Le Borg. His erudition also extended to medieval theology, Renaissance theatre and quantum physics. Ruiz remains a much-admired auteur on the European continent, having won prestigious prizes at Cannes, Berlin, San Sebastián, Locarno, Rome and Rotterdam. He is little-known in his native Chile, however, despite having made the widely seen Palomita blanca (1973), receiving several major arts prizes and having a National Day of Mourning dedicated to him on the day of his burial there. In the English-speaking world, only a handful of Ruiz’s films have been distributed and it is on these few films that his reputation there is built: most notably, major art-house fare such as the Ophüls- and Visconti-inspired Time Regained (1999) but also Comedy of Innocence (2000), Klimt (2006) and Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) and straight-to-video thriller pastiches like Shattered Image (1998) and A Closed Book (2010). Little of his huge oeuvre is available on DVD. The works that are, however, bear witness to the unique genius that informs his entire body of work. —IMDb

Director/writer Walter Salles Jr. spearheaded the return of Brazilian cinema to international prominence in the latter half of the 1990s, particularly with his esteemed hit Central Station (1998). Born in Rio de Janeiro, the son of a well-heeled banker, Salles was raised in France and the United States before Brazil became his permanent home during his teens. Salles entered the Brazilian film industry as an award-winning documentary filmmaker during the industry’s 1980s/early-‘90s decline. After he moved to fiction with the thriller Exposure (1991), Salles’ feature career was stalled by Brazil’s disastrous economic freeze in the first half of the 1990s. Though he remained active by making documentaries for European television, Salles opted to stay in Brazil and made one of the first key films in the industry’s resurgence, Foreign Land (1995). Co-directed by Daniela Thomas, the internationally acclaimed Foreign Land addressed the fallout from Brazil’s economy through a mystery yarn set in Brazil and Portugal, as one man’s financial desperation sets the plot in motion. Salles’ next film, Central Station, helped seal Brazilian cinema’s revival. Inspired by his documentary Life Somewhere Else (1995), partly funded by a Sundance Film Institute award and shot by a neophyte film crew, Central Station’s metaphorical road story unstintingly revealed the harsh effects of Brazil’s poverty while mining profound emotion from the reluctant relationship between Fernanda Montenegro’s cynical letter writer Dora and motherless innocent Vinicius de Oliviera. A festival smash and international hit, Central Station won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival and received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, while stage star Montenegro earned several critics’ and festival awards and a Best Actress Oscar nod for her restrained performance. Collaborating again with Thomas, Salles followed up his breakthrough success with the millennial tale Midnight (1998), part of the 2000 Seen By… series for the French-German television station Arte that also included films by film festival favorites Hal Hartley and Alain Berliner.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:109635~T1)

Along with Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang became one of Taiwan’s most prominent directors during the 1990s. His films regularly appeared in festivals around the globe and he received lavish praise from film critics worldwide. Born in Malaysia in 1957, Tsai moved to Taiwan and graduated from the Chinese Cultural University in 1982. For the next ten years, he worked in theater and writing screenplays for films and television. He directed his first feature in 1992, Rebels of the Neon God, which, with its tough but tender depictions of disaffected youth, earned him comparisons to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In addition to Fassbinder, Tsai was also influenced by François Truffaut, to whom he was exposed as a student. His style differed from his idol Truffaut’s, however, like his countrymen Yang and Hou, Tsai preferred long takes, few close-ups, and sparse dialogue. And like another of his influences, Michelangelo Antonioni, he displayed a genius for placing the camera at exactly the right spot and letting the action unfold before it.

Rebels of the Neon God would become a template for the rest of his films, all of which, in some way, were about loneliness and walked a tightrope between deep sadness and deadpan humor. In his second film, Vive L’Amour, three isolated Taipei dwellers connect in odd ways via a vacant apartment. In the much more unsettling The River, a young man develops a debilitating neck ailment that may or may not be psychosomatic after he is discovered by a movie director and asked to play a corpse floating face down in the dirty Tamsui River. The Hole concerns a mysterious epidemic sweeping Taipei as the new millennium approaches, and features a number of surreal musical numbers. Perhaps his most humorous film, What Time is it There? features Lee as a man on the street selling watches and who becomes obsessed with the idea that Paris exists in a completely different time. In addition to his features, Tsai also made a number of videos and short films, the latest of which, The Skywalk Is Gone, was set near where a skywalk (that served as an important location in What Time is it There?) was demolished. The film both commemorated the skywalk and served as a bridge to the director’s next feature. Tsai’s honors include the FIPRESCI award at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival for The Hole, the Silver Bear at the 1996 Berlin Film Festival for The River, and the Golden Lion at the 1994 Venice Film Festival for Vive L’Amour.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:194191~T1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Born in Shanghai, he moved to Hong Kong with his parents at the age of five. Coming from the Mainland and speaking only Mandarin and Shanghainese, he had a difficult period of adjustment to Cantonese speaking Hong Kong, spending hours in movie theatres with his mother. He made his directing debut in 1988 with As Tears Go By, produced by Alan Tang. It was a crime melodrama of the kind then hugely popular, and with heavy borrowings from Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1974), but already displayed one of his principal trademarks in its atmospheric and sometimes expressionistic color palette. It is his only box office hit to date. Wong went on to direct several more feature films in the 1990s, among these were Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Ashes of Time (1994). His first major international recognition was at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival where he won the Best Director prize for Happy Together (1997). The filming of In the Mood for Love (2000) had to be shifted from Beijing to Macau after the China Film Bureau demanded to see the completed script. Wong’s 2046 (2004) was the third chapter of a shared story that began with Days of Being Wild and continued with In the Mood for Love. In 2006, he became the first Chinese director to preside the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Wong Kar-Wai’s first full English-language film, My Blueberry Nights opened the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as one of 22 films in competition.

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)

Characterizing themselves as “one person with four eyes,” Belgian filmmaker Luc Dardenne and his older brother Jean-Pierre rose to the forefront of international art cinema in the 1990s with such uncompromising, socially aware dramas as La Promesse (1996) and Rosetta (1999), depicting life in Belgium’s depressed industrial region near Liège on the Meuse River.

Born in Awirs, Dardenne grew up in a middle-class family in the working-class steel town Seraing. With schools closed during strikes, Dardenne was exposed to the upheavals of the 1960s labor movement during his formative years. While still in school, Dardenne frequently visited his older sibling in Brussels, where Jean-Pierre was studying acting under playwright Armand Gatti. Gatti, who often used nonprofessional actors, invited Luc to join his acting troupe. Though he got his degree in philosophy in the early ’70s, Luc was inspired by his time with Gatti to explore the creative and political possibilities of film and video with his brother. Aiming to chronicle the social changes happening around them, Luc and Jean-Pierre returned to their home region and worked for several months in a cement factory to earn money for video equipment.

Filming such events as strikes and union meetings over a period of several years beginning in 1974, the Dardennes’ first videos d’intervention documented the effects of Liège’s severe recession in the early ‘70s. Intent on preserving Belgium’s history of social activism and exposing that history to a new generation, the Dardennes formed the production company Dérives in 1975 to make documentaries for Belgian television. Using such “theatrical” techniques as filming their historical witnesses in dramatic settings, the Dardennes essayed such topics as the Nazi resistance in Belgium’s southern Walloon region in Le Chant du Rossignol (1978) and the history of emigrations from Poland in Leçons d’une Université Volante (1981).

Despite their success with documentaries, the Dardennes decided to move beyond the limits of nonfiction into the narrative freedom of fiction films in the mid-‘80s with their first feature, Falsch (1986). Though Falsch and the Dardennes’ subsequent dramatic feature, Je Pense à Vous (1992), garnered some positive response at such esteemed film festivals as the Berlin Film Festival and Cannes Film Festival, they did not succeed in gaining a wider release beyond Europe and the festival circuit. While his brother remained in Liège, Luc relocated to Brussels, where he began teaching classes on aesthetics and screenwriting at the Université Libre in 1990.

Undeterred by the results of their initial efforts, and keeping their artistic base of operations in Liège even after Luc moved away, the Dardennes formed another production company, Les Films du Fleuve, in 1994 to make fiction features. Their persistence paid off with their internationally acclaimed third drama, La Promesse. Shot on-location, La Promesse’s intimate, hand-held visual style revealed the punishing conditions for immigrants forced to work illegally through the searing personal story of a son forced to choose between his morally corrupt father and keeping the eponymous vow he made to one of his father’s dying employees. Garnering accolades on the film-festival circuit, La Promesse earned more raves and awards as an international art-house release, including the Best Foreign Film prizes from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics.

Maintaining their unstinting focus on the perils of unemployment, the Dardennes followed La Promesse with the equally tough drama Rosetta (1999). Described by the Dardennes as a “war film,” Rosetta depicted the title girl’s intense personal fight to find a sense of normal life through getting a job at all costs. Shot in hand-held, claustrophobic long takes relentlessly detailing the rituals and failures shaping Rosetta’s existence, the Dardennes reveal the psychic pain and numbness that become exacerbated in Rosetta’s battle against a world that wants nothing to do with its outcasts. Anchored by newcomer Emilie Dequenne’s brave, unsympathetic performance as the tormented, near-feral Rosetta, Rosetta won Cannes’ Palme d’Or and Best Actress prizes.

Refusing such blandishments as bigger budgets and star casts after their international success, the Dardennes preferred to keep the freedom to make their harsh stories about working-class lives by sticking with their low-cost creative endeavors in Liège. In their next film, The Son (2002), the Dardennes turned their gaze on a man forced to come to terms with the sin committed by one of his carpentry students. Often shooting star Olivier Gourmet from the rear, the Dardennes keep the reasons for Gourmet’s inchoate hostility toward his new charge a mystery, before revealing a past murder that intensifies the suspense about how this relationship will be resolved. Another critical and art-house favorite, The Son continued the Dardennes’ winning streak at Cannes with the Best Actor prize for Dardenne regular Gourmet. —allmovie guide

Combining thoughtful eccentricity, wry humor, arch irony, and often brutal violence, the films of the Coen brothers have become synonymous with a style of filmmaking that pays tribute to classic American movie genres, especially film noir, while sustaining a firmly postmodern feel. Born in St. Louis Park, MN, in 1954, Joel Coen studied at New York University before moving into filmmaking in the early ‘80s. He and his younger brother began writing screenplays while Joel worked as an assistant editor on good friend Sam Raimi’s 1983 film The Evil Dead. In 1984, they made their debut with Blood Simple. Both of them wrote and edited the film (using the name Roderick Jaynes for the latter duty), while Joel took the directing credit and Ethan billed himself as the producer. It earned considerable critical acclaim and established the brothers as fresh, original talent. Their next major effort (after Crimewave, a 1985 film they wrote that was directed by Raimi), 1987’s Raising Arizona was a screwball comedy miles removed from the dark, violent content of their previous movie, and it won over critics and audiences alike. Their fan base growing, the Coens went on to make Miller’s Crossing (1990), a stark gangster epic with a strong performance from John Turturro, whom the brothers also used to great effect in their next film, Barton Fink (1991). Fink earned Joel a Best Director award and a Golden Palm at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, as well as the festival’s Best Actor award for Turturro.

Their 1994 follow-up to Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, was a relative critical and commercial disappointment. Whatever failings The Hudsucker Proxy exhibited, however, were more than atoned for by the unquestionable success of the Coens’ next film, Fargo (1996). A black, violent crime comedy with a surprisingly warm heart. The brothers shared a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for their work, and another Oscar, for Best Actress, went to Frances McDormand, to whom Joel had been married since 1984. Following Fargo, the Coens went on to make The Big Lebowski in 1998. A blend of bungled crime and warped comedy, Lebowski was a laid-back, irreverent revision of the hardboiled L.A. detective genre. It met with mixed critical reception, though it did receive a Golden Bear nomination for Joel Coen at the Berlin Film Festival. The year 2000 brought the Coens into the depression-era with O Brother, Where art Thou? An admittedly loose adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, O Brother starred George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson as escaped convicts on a surreal journey through 1930s Mississippi. Wasting no time in production of their next feature, the following year found Joel the recipient of his third Best Director award at Cannes for the darkly comic, monochromatic post-noir The Man Who Wasn’t There. Starring Billy Bob Thornton as a humble, small-town barber who gets mixed up in a tangled web of blackmail and deceit. Two years later, Joel and Ethan re-teamed with Clooney for Intolerable Cruelty, a film that represented their version of a ‘30s screwball comedy. The film was noteworthy in that it was the first movie made by the brothers that did not originate with them; they rewrote a script that was already in existence. Joel and Ethan were also listed as executive producers on the 2003 Terry Zwigoff film Bad Santa, a story that came from one of their original ideas. 2004 saw the release of the Coens’ first remake, The Ladykillers starring Tom Hanks. That film also marked the first time Joel shared directorial credit with Ethan. After a three year layoff from movies, the brothers returned with an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. The taut but philosophically minded thriller opened to nearly universal praise and became one of the two films to dominate year end critics and industry awards. Joel and Ethan won the best Director award from the Director’s Guild of America, and found themselves nominated as directors, writers, and producers at that year’s Oscar telecast.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:85375~T1)

Born in St. Louis Park, MN, in 1957, Ethan Coen studied philosophy at Princeton University. Soon after he graduated, he and his brother began writing their first screenplays, and, in 1984, they made their debut with Blood Simple. Both of them wrote and edited the film, while Joel took the directing credit and Ethan billed himself as the producer. It earned considerable critical acclaim and established the brothers as fresh, original talent. Their next major effort (after Crimewave, a 1985 film they wrote that was directed by Sam Raimi), 1987’s Raising Arizona was a screwball comedy miles removed from the dark, violent content of their previous movie, and it won over critics and audiences alike. Their fan base growing, the Coens went on to make Miller’s Crossing (1990), a stark gangster epic with a strong performance from John Turturro, whom the brothers also used to great effect in their next film, Barton Fink (1991). Fink earned Joel a Best Director award and a Golden Palm at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, as well as the festival’s Best Actor award for Turturro. A surreal, nightmarish movie revolving around a writer’s creative block, it was a heavily stylized, atmospheric triumph that further established the Coens as visionary arbiters of the bizarre.

Their 1994 follow-up to Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, was a relative critical and commercial disappointment. Whatever failings The Hudsucker Proxy exhibited, however, were more than atoned for by the unquestionable success of the Coens’ next film, Fargo (1996). A black, violent crime comedy that recalled Blood Simple in its themes of greed, corruption, and murder, but provided more redemptive sentiment than was afforded to the characters of the previous film. The brothers shared a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for their work, and another Oscar, for Best Actress, went to Frances McDormand. Following Fargo, the Coens went on to make The Big Lebowski in 1998. In 1999, Ethan closed out the decade by publishing Gates of Eden, a collection of his short stories.

The Coens next served up the depression-era comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), which turned out to be their biggest box-office. 2001 saw the release of The Man Who Wasn’t There, yet another ode to film noir and another award winner at Cannes. In 2003, Ethan and Joel were credited as executive producers on Terry Zwigoff’s hit comedy Bad Santa largely due to the fact that the origin of the film’s story came from the Coens. That same year, the brothers re-teamed with George Clooney for the screwball comedy Intolerable Cruelty. In 2004, the duo released The Ladykillers starring Tom Hanks, a remake of the classic British comedy. The film marked the first time Ethan Coen officially shared the directing credit with Joel, as well as the first time they shared producer credit. After a three year layoff from movies, the brothers returned with an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. The taut but philosophically minded thriller, which brought universal praise and several award nominations to the brothers, including the Oscars.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:85372)