Director Maciej J. Drygas is a renowned film and radio director, screenwriter, producer, and professor at the Polish National Film School in Łódź. His works have received numerous prestigious awards, including the European Film Academy Award for Best Documentary for “Hear My Cry” (1991), the Prix...

Pierre Schoendoerffer (1928-2012) was a French director and writer, known for Le Crabe-Tambour (1977), The 317th Platoon (1965) and The Anderson Platoon (1967). His colorful life shaped the films he went on to direct—he served as a soldier in Southeast Asia, was taken prisoner during the battle o...

Kelly Reichardt is an award-winning independent filmmaker whose most recent work, First Cow, was screened at the 2019 New York Film Festival. Other films include Certain Women, starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone, which premiered at the 2016 New York Film F...

Honored by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture as the first black women to direct a documentary film, Madeline Anderson’s landmark films ‘Integration Report 1’ (1960) and ‘I Am Somebody’ (1970), both newly scanned and digitized by the museum, bring viewers to t...

"Rouch has remained a cinephile secret for decades... Much of his work has been unavailable in the U.S. — until now." —IndieWire

Jean Rouch's (1917–2004) breakthrough work in cinéma vérité in the 1960's helped inspire the direct cinema movement in the U.S. and the New Wave in France where he was...

Born in Marand, Iran, Shahram Mokri is a graduate of Cinema from Tehran's Soureh College. His repertoire includes editing eight TV dramas, two TV series and more than 20 short and documentary films that brought him national and international recognition. Shahram's debut feature film, Ashkan, The ...

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...

Jonathan Skurnik has produced and directed award–winning, broadcast documentaries for more than 25 years. From exploring poverty and welfare reform in A Day’s Work, A Day’s Pay, to a funny and poignant portrait of a man coming to terms with his stutter in Spit It Out, to gender nonconforming chil...

Kateryna Gornostai was born in Lutsk in 1989. She graduated with a degree in biology and later studied journalism at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In 2012–2013, Kateryna studied documentary filmmaking at Marina Razbezhkina’s School of Documentary Films and Theater. She returned to Kyiv during the Revoluti...

Born in 1945 in Beirut, Heiny Srour studied Sociology at the French University of Beirut (École supérieure des lettres) and went on to study Social Anthropology at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she was a student of both Marxist sociologist Maxime Rodinson and anthropologist Jean Rouch. In 1969, wh...

Eryk Rocha is a filmmaker born in Brazil, in 1978. In 2002, he graduated from the film school of Los Baños, Cuba, where he directed his first feature Stones in the Sky (Rocha Que Voa), which was selected in Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, and other festivals, winning Best Film in Argentina, Brazil, a...

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...

Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a dialogue between...

Amalie R. Rothschild is an award winning filmmaker and photographer noted for her documentaries about social issues as revealed through the lives of people in the arts, and for her music photographs from the Fillmore East, Woodstock and other seminal rock events from 1968 to 1974. She is a co-fou...

“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...

OVID is proud to present two films by Paul Negoescu, a Romanian director, screenwriter and producer. In a review of TWO LOTTERY TICKETS, the New York Times wrote, "He gives the film fresh zest with droll observations and pitifully endearing characters — all while poking meta fun at the austere Ro...

Raoul Peck was educated in Haiti, Zaire (Congo) and France. He studied engineering and economics at Berlin University, worked as a journalist and photographer from 1980 to 1985, and received his film degree from the Berlin Academy of Film and Television in 1988.

Since then he has directed many f...

Ross McElwee grew up in North Carolina. He graduated from Brown University and later from Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a MS in filmmaking in a program headed by documentarians Richard Leacock and Ed Pincus. His career began in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina w...

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...

Anne Fontaine started her career as a dancer and actor. She marked her directorial debut in 1993 with Les Histoires d'Amour finissent mal en général (Love affairs usually end badly) which won France's Prix Jean Vigo Award. She has directed over a dozen feature films and tends to move between seri...

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...

Claude Chabrol was born on June 24, 1930 in Paris, France. He was a director and writer, and worked as a film critic for Cahiers du cinéma before becoming a filmmaker. He was known as France's equivalent to Alfred Hitchcock and was considered the most accessible of the New Wave directors. He died...

Radu Jude (Romania, 1977) graduated from the filmmaking department of Media University in 2003. He directed a series of short films, including The Tube with a Hat (2006) (winner of more than 50 international prizes at Sundance, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Uppsala etc.) and Alexandra (2007).

His ...

Check out the short intro Joel recorded for OVID about his three films!

Joel Fendelman is an award-winning filmmaker dedicated to telling stories that reveal the underlying connections between us all. His documentary Man on Fire received an IDA Documentary Award and premiered nationally on PBS’s...