Peter Friedman's documentaries were about diverse subjects including: portraits of extraordinary people, LGBTQ and AIDS related issues, contemporary biology, and subjective essays on matters such as humanity's relationship to nature, mortality, and existential questions.

Friedman's films were di...

Mohamed Jabaly is a Palestinian filmmaker and artist from Gaza City. He won numerous awards for his films, including Best Directing at IDFA for his latest film "Life is Beautiful – Al Haya Helwa", the Best Nordic Documentary Award at the Nordic Panorama, the Grand Prix Award at FIFDH, the Interna...

Pablo Larrain, the director of Jackie (starring Natalie Portman), was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1976. He is a founding member of Fabula, a company dedicated to producing film, television, and commercials, as well as providing production services.

In 2005, he directed his first feature-length f...

Signe Baumane is a Latvian born, Brooklyn-based independent filmmaker, artist, writer, and animator. She has made 17 award-winning animated shorts. Her first animated feature Rocks In My Pockets premiered at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2014 where it received a FIPRESCI Prize. The ...

Nathan Silver graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2005. Since then, the filmmaker has written and directed five short films and eight feature films. His films have played festivals and venues around the world, including New York Film Festival, Tribeca, Locarno, Rotterdam, Viennale, ...

Born in Kinshasa, Alain Kassanda left the DRC for France at the age of 11.

He has programmed several film festivals such as Ghett’Out Film Festival at the Brattle Theatre in Boston and BAM in New York. Kassanda has also been the film programmer for the movie-theater Les 39 marches in Sevran, nea...

Besides being a director and screenwriter, Thomas Lilti is also a doctor. After his short films caught the attention of French producers, he went on to direct the feature film, Les yeux bandés, starring Jonathan Zaccaï, best known for his work in THE BUREAU. After this, Lilti directed a trilogy f...

“If you’ve never heard of Marlon Riggs, you’ll wonder why the hell not. How could an artist this smart, this prescient, this frank, transparent, curious, ruminative and courageous — this funny — escape your notice? Why haven’t these trenchant, masterful video essays, with insinuatingly tangy name...

Jem Cohen (born 1962) is an Afghan-born American filmmaker based in New York City. Cohen is especially known for his observational portraits of urban landscapes, blending of media formats and collaborations with musicians.

Cohen’s feature-length films include Museum Hours, Counting, Chain, Be...

Aleksandr Ptushko (1900-1973) was a pioneering Soviet animation and fantasy film director who began his film career as a director and animator of stop motion short films, and became a director of feature-length films combining live action, stop motion, remarkable special effects, and Russian myth...

Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) - best-known as the author of The Lover and for the screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour (the classic 1960 New Wave film directed by Alain Resnais) - was one of the most prolific, controversial, and renowned cultural figures in post-war France. Between 1943 (when she p...

Peter Watkins was born in Surrey, England in 1935. After education at Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, he became an amateur documentary filmmaker, gaining some notoriety for shorts like The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959) and The Forgotten Faces (1961). In these films...

Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1950, Chantal Akerman was a filmmaker whose work gave new meaning to the term "independent film." An Akerman film is an exercise in independence, creativity and art. Her viewers must give themselves over completely to the experience of her films and watch with open m...

Sophia Takal is an American actress, writer and director, known for her work in independent features such Gabi on the Roof in July. Filmmaker magazine named Takal one of the "25 New Faces of Film" in 2011. She directed Green (2011), Always Shine (2016) and co-wrote and directed the 2019 remake of...

Tyler Taormina is a film director based in Los Angeles whose debut film, HAM ON RYE, premiered at Locarno Film Festival and went on to receive critical acclaim, including Best Films of the Year lists from The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Slant Magazine, and more. His work explores vast ensemble cas...

With a career spanning five decades, Ann HUI (1947, China) is considered one of the most renowned filmmakers from Hong Kong. She studied English and Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong, before studying at the London Film School for two years. Like many other Hong Kong filmmakers...

Filmmaker Mosco Boucault was born in Bulgaria in 1946 and emigrated to France as a child in 1957. As an adult, he completed a Bachelor's degree in Literature in Nanterre in 1970, and went on to train with Pierre Goupil and Pierre-William Glenn at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques ...

After studying at the Institute of Industrial Arts and the Marionette Faculty of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950s, Jan Švankmajer started working as a theatre director, chiefly in association with the Theatre of Masks and the Black Theatre. He first experimented with filmmaking after ...

Born in 1931, Alain Cavalier is a French filmmaker who has notably received three Césars and the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987.

His journey as a director can be summed up by the title of one of his most radical films, Libera Me (1993): "Deliver me". By moving from fiction to doc...

Dominga Sotomayor studied Audiovisual Directing at Universidad Católica de Chile and received a master’s in Directing at ESCAC in Barcelona. She developed her first feature Thursday Till Sunday at the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence. The film won the Tiger Award in Rotterdam in 2012 and screened a...

Patricio Guzmán was born in 1941 in Santiago, Chile. As an adolescent in the late 1950's he became drawn to documentary filmmaking when he had the opportunity to see some of the films of Chris Marker, Frederic Rossif and Louis Malle. He studied filmmaking at the Film Institute at the Catholic Uni...

“Widely celebrated in Latin America, the films of Ignacio Aguero are marked by his inventive approach to the history of Chile” (Cahiers du Cinema). He has been honored with many awards, and retrospectives of his films have been held around the world, including in Argentina (at BAFICI), Bolivia, F...

Pema Tseden (1969-2023) was a Tibetan director and writer. He started his career by doing several short films, before directing in 2005 his first feature, The Silent Holy Stones, the first film in Tibetan shot in Tibet with a Tibetan cast and crew. His films The Search (2008), Old Dog (2010), The...

Recipient of the 2012 MacArthur “Genius” Award, Natalia Almada combines artistic expression with social inquiry to make films that are both personal reflections and critical social commentaries. Her previous directing credits include – Al Otro Lado (Tribeca 2005), El General (2009 Sundance docume...