Vitaly Mansky was born in 1963 in Lviv, Ukraine.

Mansky graduated from the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) and began his career as a cinematographer. These films were presented at more than 500 international film festivals, including Cannes, Berlin and the Toronto Internati...

Mila Turajlic is a documentary filmmaker born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

Her most recent film, a documentary diptych Scenes from the Labudović Reels: Non-Aligned and Ciné-Guerrillas premiered at the Toronto IFF and IDFA in 2022. Her previous film, The Other Side of Everything premiered at the Toro...

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...

Director, producer, writer and cinematographer, Nikolaus Geyrhalter was born in Vienna, Austria in 1972. Geyrhalter's static-camera, well-paced observational films tackle their subjects head-on, whether it's exploring the terrain in Chernobyl, Ukraine (Pripyat), tracing the route of the Dakar Ral...

Leyla Bouzid was born in 1984 and grew up in Tunisia. In 2003, she went to Paris to study French literature at the Sorbonne before graduating from la Fémis in Directing. In 2015, she directed Soubresauts (Mkhobbi Fi Kobba), her thesis film, in Tunisia a few months before the revolution. As I Open...

OVID is proud to present this retrospective of the films of Eugenio Polgovsky (1977-2017). He studied film directing and cinematography at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico City and his first documentary, Tropic of Cancer, screened during the International Critics’ Week at Cann...

Pirjo Honkasalo was born in Helsinki in 1947. She entered film school at the age of 17 and completed her cinematographic thesis at the age of 21. Her first major directing role, the historical drama film Tulipää (Flame Top), was chosen for the Cannes Official Selection series in 1980. As a docume...

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...

"An original filmmaker of exquisite sensibility; one of the foremost filmmakers of creative nonfiction working right now." —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

"Her three remarkable features cement Mbakam as a powerful director exploring intimacy, womanhood, and African identity in her work." —True/Fa...

Born in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, to radical political activist parents, John Akomfrah was widely recognized as one of the most influential figures of black British culture in the 1980s. An artist, lecturer, and writer as well as a filmmaker, his twenty-year body of work is among the most distinctiv...

Philippe Garrel was born in 1948 and made numerous short films as an adolescent. In 1967 he made his feature debut with Marie pour mémoire. Three years later he directed legendary icon, Nico, in the cult film, The Inner Scar (La Cicatrice intérieure). Garrel has directed more than twenty-five fea...

Born in Suffolk on 19 August 1907, Humphrey Jennings is widely considered one of Britain’s greatest documentary filmmakers, directing films which beautifully evoke everyday heroism in times of war and peace. He created WWII propaganda films that were also art, and his best films were done between...

In 1976, after making a six-month trip through North and West Africa, Su Friedrich moved to New York to pursue her work in photography, both as a photojournalist and an art photographer. In 1977, she attended a super 8 filmmaking course taught by David Lee at the Millennium Film Workshop. It only...

Jim Finn’s movies have been called ‘Utopian comedies’ and ‘trompe l’oeil films’. His Communist Trilogy is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. “Steeped in the obsolete language of revolutionary art," The New York Times wrote that "Mr. Finn’s meticulous, deadpan mocku...

A natural extension of his discursive criticism, poetry, and painting, Wayne Koestenbaum's filmic forays are poetic and mesmeric, and sometimes deliriously farcical. His luxuriously lo-fi monologues drip with spontaneous wit and slippery eroticism. His stop-motion animations with improvised piano...

Roberta Cantow is a filmmaker and storyteller. She received a N.Y. area Emmy for her film Clotheslines about the symbolic and artistic role of laundry in women’s lives. Her films and videos have garnered several Best of Category citations in film festivals around the country as well as an Award o...

Terence Davies was an English screenwriter and film director. He was the sole screenwriter of all his films, and his films were often at least partially autobiographical.

After the success of his short- to medium-length film series The Terence Davies Trilogy, Terence wrote and directed his criti...

Wang Bing is a leading light of contemporary international documentary filmmaking. Acclaimed by critics and recognized as one of the most important Chinese artists and filmmakers of his time, his work has garnered awards and international praise at film festivals including the Berlin and Cannes F...

Mark Cousins is a Northern Irish-Scottish filmmaker and writer. At the start of his career he directed TV documentaries on childhood, neo-Nazism and military training. His first book was Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary (“Indispensible” -Times Literary Supplement). His 2004 book T...

Born in 1941, Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz was one of the most innovative and versatile filmmakers in international cinema. The free-spirited Ruiz was unafraid to experiment in a variety of genres, including documentaries; he was also prolific and during his twenty year career has made over 50 fil...

Born in Weehawken, New Jersey in 1948, Arthur MacCaig directed and produced documentary films starting in 1978.

He produced numerous reports for the television service of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, and was the founder of DATHANNA, an independent productio...

Heddy Honigmann (1951-2022), a child of Holocaust survivors, was born in Peru, where she studied biology and literature at the University of Lima. She left in 1973, traveled throughout Mexico, Israel, Spain and France, and later studied film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. S...

Oliver Laxe is a filmmaker and actor. Born in France in 1982, he studied film at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. His first feature film You All Are Captains (2010) won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes. His second feature Mimosas (2016) won the Nespresso Grand Prize at Cannes. Fire Will Come...

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...