In the legendary documentary A NIGHT PORTER?S POINT OF VIEW, filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski wanted to expose the Polish totalitarian state by creating a portrait of a night porter who in former times was a well known icon of social realism. Austrian filmmaker Andreas Horvath, inspired by Kieslowski?s film, tries to get to the core of the true person inside the porter by revisiting him in his follow-up documentary VIEWS OF A RETIRED NIGHT PORTER. Horvath initially sets out to learn more about the night porter?s path in life, but, guided by unerring intuition, he also manages to make important statements about the Polish people and the effects of recent historical developments as well as filmmaking and Kieslowski himself.

"Clearance (1998)

Poroerotus (1999)

The Silence of Green (2002)

This ain?t no Heartland (2004)"

"From second half of the ' 60, the Beat movement and the first National Rock were flag of the young people, protagonists like never until then, of a society in transformation towards modernity. The built of the first bands, the scope for the first concerts, the difficulties of the pioneers to be able to sing in Spanish and the communion of the rockers with artists of other disciplines, speak of new codes until then non-existent. Before the boys of the Cave began to write the History of the Argentine Rock, the young people went up to around the 25-35 years. Suddenly they did not arrive at 20, they occupied his space in the press and in the public opinion, and defied the vision that the adults had of them. While the political class failed in the decade of the ' 60, the ""Military Party"" occupied its place and exerted its repressive power against students and unionists, also persecuting to the young people by carrying of guitars and long hair. Some saw to the Rock like ""Foreigner and colonizing"". Today the connoisseurs of the entire world get at Buenos Aires to buy those first vinyls of the Argentine Rock ""because their music and its poetic are absolutely original"". Also there was who read in his speech ""a romantic and unworkable utopia""... Peace and Love. If today we continued yearning for the same, was about an utopia or an idea that not knew/want to interpret? Defendant of apolitical, represented a true cultural resistance the authoritarianism. It is time to review the history of the ARGENTINA BEAT."

"Hern?n M.L.Gaffet (Buenos Aires, 18/01/1964) is graduated like Cinematographic Producer of the CERC, (today ENERC) collaborated like critic of cinema in the magazines ""Cinema in the Culture"" (85-87) and ""Videol?nea"" (93). Like educational,? coordinated the workshop of cinema for adolescents of National School of Buenos Aires (84) and? gave to particular classes of History of the Cinema and Introduction to the Cinematographic Language. Since writer has published the poetry notebook ""Brief Poems"" (85). Author like scriptwriter and director of seven short films. Its first length was documentary the biographical "" Oscar Aleman - Life with swing"", that obtained the Best Prize to the Documentary in the Festival of Latin American Cinema of Trieste, Italy, in the 2002 and Silver Condor to the Best Videofilm in 2003. ""Argentina Beat"" is his second documentary full length film and today rolls his first fiction, the dramatic comedy ""Affection almost Love"". He is cofounder and member of the Directive Commission of the Association of support to the audio-visual patrimony (APROCINAIN, in spanish)."

As el custodio, it?s Ruben?s duty to keep the Minister of Planning under constant surveillance.

If the Minister gets out of the car, Ruben gets out of the car. If the Minister turns left, Ruben turns left. If the Minister goes to the country club with his family for the weekend, Ruben must follow along. If the Minister decides to rest and have a nap, Ruben must keep watch over the sleeping man.

Although Ruben must always be present, he must also go completely unnoticed. A shadow, Ruben witnesses everything from the sidelines, as if life was passing by some meters away from him. Yet, despite his insider?s view, he never understands clearly what?s going on, what?s being talked about, nor where the characters come from or go to. Single Ruben is hardly even a protagonist of his own life.

A lonely life, involving a mentally unstable sister and a ditzy niece, the sale of illegal arms and cheap prostitutes. Plus the monotonous routine of being a bodyguard and the occasional humiliation from the Minister or his family? Some jobs result in almost replacing a life for another. Such pressure can ultimately explode. This is Ruben?s inevitable outcome.

EL CUSTODIO is Rodrigo Moreno?s first feature film. His original screenplay won the 2005 Sundance/NHK Award for Best Latin American Script.

Moreno collaborated as writer and director with Ulises Rosell and Andr?s Tambornino on the 2002 feature EL DESCANSO (Sweet Repose), an offbeat comedy which won Best Film at Canada?s Images du Monde Festival. Moreno also wrote and directed COMPA?EROS, the last segment of the 1998 episodic feature MALA EPOCA (Bad Times). Moreno had previously made several short films, his first being 1993?s NOSOTROS, which won Best Film at the Bilbao Festival (Spain), and which was also screened in the Berlin Festival Forum.

Moreno was born in Buenos Aires in 1972. He graduated from the directing program of the Argentinian capital?s Universidad del Cine, where he has been teaching screenwriting and directing since 1996.

On the border of Bolivia and Argentina, where stunning scenery contrasts with the hopeless poverty of the inhabitatnts in their remote villages, a plane lands carrying a young man dressed as a priest and bringing luggage apparently stuffed with bibles for the salvation of souls. But in these parts people need a different kind of salvation. To make a living, the villagers produce original ceramic works: the patterns, together with their destiny, are engraved using the bones of dead ancestors. Pedro?s fate, after a dramatic event, is in the hands of these inhabitants. Conversely, the village sees the sudden arrival of a priest as a sign and a chance to change their destiny. They are in disagreement as to how to overcome their poverty: either they continue their potter?s trade, or surrender to the avarice of some of them and destroy their sacred sites and culture. The hopes of both camps lie with Pedro: he is deemed the most qualified judge. Destiny is an adaptation of the novel by H?ctor Tiz?n, The Man Who Came to a Village (El hombre que lleg? a un pueblo).

Miguel Pereira (b. 1957, San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina) studied film in Buenos Aires, at Minnesota University and later in London at the International Film School. In London he made documentaries for the BBC and Channel Four. After returning to Argentina he worked in practically all areas of the film industry. He is currently President and Artistic Director of the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, and he also directs and produces films in his company Capablanca Films. Select documentaries: Jujuy 400 Times (1993 ? Golden Columbus in Huelva), Che... Ernesto (1997). Feature films: The Debt (1988 ? Silver Bear in Berlin, Silver Hugo in Chicago, Silver Makhila in Biarritz), The Last Harvest (1990 ? Best Screenplay at the festival in Huelva, Bronze Sakura in Tokyo).

And what if Ulysses, on his return from his time travel, had only found undecipherable scribbles, broken pieces, sombre and shifting landscapes, memories scratched like splinters (of his world and his life)? His own room has become hardly recognisable to him, with his television still switched on, the cooker, the window and his wife sleeping. A disturbing disorder has established itself all around in which eyes and ears seem in a constant state of waiting, as if they are prisoners of these fragments of a reality so gripping, obtuse, impossible to avoid and yet lying, fleeing, opaque. The spectator of the white she- camel than might have a premonition about what it means to be ?a stranger in the world?, like solitary weight, but also like tension of discovery, like desire to retrieve his past, like a longing to find a viable place. However, only few things will come to his rescue. A truck disappears in the landscape like a ship in the see. A woman in a flowery dress bathes in a see of blood. A child watches us with stunned eyes. The carcass of a torn strange soviet machine lies on the ground. Hereby, Xavier Christiaens has invented a new way of remembering, to turn back time by single jolts, by upheaval, by negative ?apparitions?, declaiming time like a song that is said backwards. And there is something slightly monstrous in his film. It is a part common to all strong works that do not leave the spectator in peace. But what a reward it is when at regular intervals along that road moments of unimaginable grace suddenly appear. There are ?apparitions? in the white she-camel of the kind we rarely get a chance to see in cinema.

Belgian self-made filmmaker born in 1963, former assistant of Bruno Dumont and Benedicte Lienard. His first and foremost poetry film - ?the taste of koumiz? (2003) recalls the aesthetic universe of Alexander Sokourov. It has been selected in more than twenty international festivals and won two prizes. It was broadcasted on the Belgian national Channel RTBF.

The white she-camel is his second film produced with his wife Sandrine Blaise.

This is a documentary film about Halid, who was born in the cinema. Halid did everything for the movie. This is the story about the life of Halid, my best friend.

Damir Nemir Janecek was born in 1982 in Sarajevo. Beafore the war he lived in Sarajevo and during the fucking war he lived in Split in Croatia, in Granada in Spain and Italy. In Split he was actor in Youth Theatre and short play writer. He finished school for the ailors! He finished 2 years of programing on computers. But he excape from that universyti and come to Sarajevo. In 2003 he entered the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts and has made several short film exercises and theatre plays. In 2004. he was invited to workshop on Zagrebdox film festival. In 2004,2005 he attended Motovun Film Festival Summer Film School where he completed a short film A STORY FOR CHILDREN. He just won the scholarship of the renowned Karim Zaimovic Fund helping young upcoming artists. Damir Nemir Janecek is currently attending his third year of directing and preparing his final exam theatre play and future movie. Televison is calling him to work on two very important new documentarys. Firsth Sarajevo Human Rights festival invited him to make a workshop of documentary movies to youth people and artist. He is workin volontary (without paying) in KINOTEKA in Sarajevo (movie archive) and he is very angry on autoryties because they do not take care of that film museum! He have more than 600 pirates dvds of clasic and cult movies at his flat (Wim Wenders movies too :). He have two movie projectors, but only one movie for them (Charlie Chaplin - "The Boxer") and he invites his friends to drink and eat and whatch that silent movie. He is also bed poet. He look like a romantic caracter from trash horror movie from Czech Republic.

2002 HIPERPOLIEGOIST / HYPERPOLYEGOIST - personal movie

2004 PRICA ZA DJECU/STORY FOR CHILDREN - short

2005 KJ7U / CLUB OF LOVERS OF 7th ART - documentary music video for the bar of Club

2005 HALID BUNIC ? VJECNI / HALID BUNIC - THE ETERNAL - documentary

2006 DOGODILO SE NA GROBLJU / IT HAPPEND ON A GRAWEYARD - short erotic movie

?Battles of Troy? is a study on the internal economy of today?s globalized cinema production, seen through the eyes of the lowest unit in the hierarchy of movie making - the extras. On focus here is the making of the Warner Bros Motion Picture ?Troy? (2004), and more specifically - the secret life of the extras in the movie. Starting in 2003 with a budget of 185 million dollars. Troy is one of the most expensive productions ever made. It interprets on screen Homer's Iliad. The project is based on the fact that 300 men from the ?specialized? extras in ?Troy? are Bulgarians. The Warner Bros project, executed by the British branch of the company, shot in UK, Malta and Mexico suddenly appeared to be in need of an elite group of extras that not only possessed the physical prowess necessary to convincingly stage the battle scenes, but also had a believably Mediterranean look. The perfect soldiers were recruited from the Sports Academy in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria and flown to the Mexican coast to spend 3 months in training and shooting massive battle scenes as background of the feats of arms of Eric Bana and Brad Pitt. This background is the subject of ?Battles of Troy?.

Krassimir Terziev (*1969) is an artist and organizer on contemporary arts and media culture. Lives and works in Sofia, BG, where he had graduated MA in Arts Academy in Sofia (1997). In 1998-2004 he has been chair (founding member) of interSpace Media Art Center.

This film presents the last working year of the old prison of Valparaiso (Chile), which closed in 1999. It?s a homage to the prison and to the values and customs of the men who have lived within it during its 150 year history.

"Cristobal Vicente Cruz. Chile. 20/06/1975X1994-2001: Degree in architecture, Catholic University of Valparaiso, Chile. Thesis develops the concept of an archetectural perspective of cinematography. Also involved in organising artistic events, study trips around South America and exhibitions.

1997: Studied cinematography under the established Chilean director Hector Rios.

1998: Work begins on Arcana, a documentary film concerning the last days of the old prison of Valparaiso.

1999: Undertakes audio-visual workshops with a group of inmates of the new prison.

2005: The Arcana project is completed, consisting of a documentary film, a book and a website.

2006: Initiates international distribution and exhibition of the project."

"For the first time public and political lives of Chinese villages are captured through the lens of the people who belong there. Villages can never be so real if filmed by an outsider.

This video is a collection of ten short documentary films, each of ten minutes in length, made by ten villagers (ages ranging from 24 to 59 at the time of filming) from around China. The ten filmmakers were the successful candidates selected among villagers who sent in their proposals for the competition. Each of them was awarded a DV camera (which ?is worth something like at least an equivalent of the costs of raising 15 handsome pigs back home?) by the EU project. They are eager to rediscover their home villages through the DV lens and to tell stories and be heard, for the first time in their lives.

It is the first time that Chinese villagers took up a DV camera to shoot a documentary of their own on the changing rural public lives and the changing countryside dynamics in their home villages within the developing democratic system known as ?village selfgovernance.? The interaction between the villagers in front of the DV camera and the one who is holding it from behind can never be the same if the film were to be shot by a ?professional? from outside the village."

The selected villager filmmakers are diverse in their background: their ages range from 24 to 59; two of them are women; the eldest man in the group is an ethnic Zhuang from Guangxi and the youngest filmmaker is an ethnic Tibetan girl from Yunnan; eight of the ten filmmakers live and work in their home village, while the other two are currently making a living in the city; the villagers come from nine different provinces, ranging from the impoverished Northwestern province of Shaanxi to the prosperous coastal province of Zhejiang.

None but two of the ten villagers had ever touched a video camera before they received the awarded digital video (DV) camera from the project. One of the two who did have some previous experience is the 24-year-old Tibetan girl and the 26-year-old man who left his home village a few years ago to earn a living doing camerawork for a wedding company in a nearby town.

Xiao-Yun is a 16-year-old high school student in a small riverside town in China?s South-Western Sichuan province in the repressive social climate of 1983. When her teacher discovers that she is pregnant, she and her boyfriend Wang Feng are expelled from school. Wang Feng leaves her after convincing his sister Wang Zheng-Yue, a nurse, to help Xiao-Yun give birth to her baby, then give it up for adoption. Ten years later, Xiao-Yun is reduced to being the lead singer in a humiliatingly crass local song and dance troupe. She manages to sustain a furtive relationship with a married man, but her only real companion is Xiao-Yong, a preternaturally curious and impish young boy from across the dam. He craftily begins to insinuate himself into her life, becoming her devoted friend, servant, ?little brother?, and even, in an innocent and playful way, a kind of preadolescent substitute ?boyfriend?. But Xiao-Yun still has to forge a future from her unresolved past. Even soul-mate Xiao-Yong is unable to help her take the fateful, agonising decision that will make this possible.

?I always maintain that this is a film full of hope. I say this because it tells a story about searching for a way out. Metaphorically speaking, Xiao-Yun is like a thirsty person suddenly finding a cup of water. I use a method quite close to traditional narrative to relate a contemporary story about a woman subject to the overwhelming pressure of an unchanging tradition.?

LI Yu was born in China's Shangdong province in 1973. At the age of 16, on her mother's urging, she started to work as television programme guest presenter. After graduating from university, she satisfied her mother's expectations and became a professional presenter at a local television station.. After some time working on documentaries as an off-screen narrator, she began making documentaries. Consequently, she joined the CCTV (China Central Television) feature programme ?Life Space? and became a documentary director. Apart from working as a documentary director, she has written a number of novels and screenplays. In 2000, she shot her first feature film, Fish and Elephant.

"Rahi has seen it all: 36 countries on three continents - on his bicycle from India! Now, 89 years of age and a self-appointed Professor of the World, he sets out in a rented taxi on an intellectual tour de force across India. He plans to gatecrash universities all over India to give lectures to young people and sell his mystical books on the origins of language. Although inhibited by very limited funds Rahi finds himself experiencing the joyful life on the road once again. However, he soon realizes that the world has changed: people are not buying his books, and his theories are frowned upon. Suddenly his journey turns into a real struggle for survival. Beg, Borrow or Steal is a road movie about a man turning old in a world turned modern. It is an intimate study of old age and a universal story about the basic human need for recognition."

Andreas Koefoed (1979) was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. Andreas received a BA in sociology from Copenhagen University. Since 2000, he has worked as director and cinematographer of documentary films and television programmes. At present, he studies at the documentary department at The National Film School of Denmark.

Tim, 26, suffers from a childhood trauma. His father tried to kill the whole family when Tim was a little baby but he miraculously survived with a bullett in his head. Tim is behind in his development. His life has a peculiar, slow rhythm to it and he cannot distinguish between real life and his fantasy world. He imagines his father to be Captain on a big ship. When he meets Claudia they immediately connect. They are both living in the shadow of their fathers. But when Tim cannot protect Claudia from a violent attack by two men the trusting bond is broken. Tim must confront his childhood trauma to learn to live in reality.

"Thomas Stiller finished school in 1981.

Education as an actor and director in New York at the Actors - Studio und HB ? Studio.

Acted in many theatre plays and TV productions."

""A murder disguised as suicide? - Rainer, 21, is going on an annual trip with Georg, 43. Since father and son are strangers to each other, a long and smouldering conflict arouses in the isolation of the mountains. Rainer uses an accident on the glacier to make it look like he lost his life due to Georg's fault. Instead, he frees himself and thereby connects his disappearance to his revenge on his father."

Born in 1972 in Hilden (Rheinland). Read Photography at the International Center of Photography in New York under Nan Goldin and David Armstrong. Worked as photo editor, photographer and visual researcher for films like R.S.A. (Ridley Scott & Associates) and Columbia Tristar. Studies directing at dffb since 1997 .

"1997 ?Naked Pavement?

documentary, 45 mins

1998 ?WAXANDWANE? , short film, 15 mins

*Cannes Cinefondation,1999

2000 ?Lamsfeld?, feature, 60 mins"

In the past 70 years, Interdom, an elite boarding school in the former Soviet Union, educated children from all five continents in the communist ideology. They were children from conflict areas or children of political leaders. They all have one experience in common: the collapse of communism has altered the direction of their predetermined fates. After 14 years they meet again in Russia for the school?s 70th anniversary. The film reflects the events of world politics from a very personal perspective.

Nasir Al-Jezairi was born in 1971 in Iraq. In 1979 his family escapes Saddam Hussein to Lebanon. The war in Beirut in 1981 forces his parents to send him to a boarding school in the Soviet Union. In 1989 Gorbatchov?s Perestroika puts an end to his time there. Since then, Nasir lived, studied and worked in Munich, London and Berlin. Interdom is his first independent film after working on various TV and Film productions.

"Kristall creates a melodrama inside seemingly claustrophobic mirrored cabinets.

Like an anonymous viewer, the mirror observes scenes of intimacy. It creates an image within an image, providing a frame for the characters. At the same time it makes them appear disjointed and fragmented. This instrument for self-assurance and narcissistic presentation becomes a powerful opponent that increases the sense of fragility, doubt, and loss twofold."

"Christoph Girardet was born in 1966 in Langenhagen and studied in Braunschweig. Between Hanover and Rome, he has been working as a video, film and installation artist since 1987. A selection of his works includes: Schwertkampf (1991), Release (1997), Scratch (2001), Delay (2001), 7:48 (2001), Absence (2002), and Fiction Artists (with Volker Schreiner, 2004), among others.

Matthias M?ller was born in 1961 in Bielefeld and studied in Bielefeld and Braunschweig. He has been working as a filmmaker, video artist, photographer and independent curator since 1981. He is currently teaching at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne. A selection of his works include: Aus der Ferne ? The Memo Book (1989), Home Stories (1990), Sleepy Haven (1993), Alpsee (1994), Vacancy (1998), nebel (2000), and Album (2004), among others."

"Summer, sun, sandy beaches and sex ? everything you need to feel just like in paradise. And that's exactly what Elisa, Richie and Florian are looking for. They've left the cold and grey North behind them to have fun on a sunny island. Elisa: rich, spoiled and escaping her father's conservative concepts of morality. Richie: a loafer who knows that behind every woman there is a warm meal. Florian: sensitive, nice and helpful, the sort of men not only women feel attracted to.

But even in paradise there are dark places where the sun does not shine, where you can lose your bearings or fall in love without wanting to admit it... Places where you realise that you haven't left the cold and grey North because it is inside you...

Things get worse on the island for Elisa when her wealthy father cuts off her money supply and even sends out her younger sister Clara to take her home. She stubbornly decides to take charge of her life herself. But she already fails in finding a job. When she meets Richie, the tide turns at first. She falls in love with the charming barkeeper dreaming of making easy money with beach parties...

After a couple of painful attempts to do the right thing Elisa gets lost an emotional downward spiral turning endlessly. Florian and his village buddy Daniel get to the island with only little more than an old Audi 100 and without further ado they start seeking contact with the opposite sex. The reach their goal suprisingly quickly. But for Florian the sexual encounters take a catastrophical course. Only when he falls in love with the islander Marcel against his will he begins to understand... He takes his chance to flee from his old life to make a fresh start with Marcel."

Rolf S. Wolkenstein studied at the Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie from 1982 ? 1986. He lives and works in Berlin. Selections from his last films are ? Fernsehzauber? (documentary, 1999), Max Herre (documentary, 2004) and his feature debut ?Lauf der Dinge?, 2006.

"Bollywood goes Europe ? im Ma?anzug !

Isaar, the unique Indian tailor, sets off on an adventurous trip across Europe to his once faithful customers, in hope of new orders, the reunion with old friends and in hope of love.

Marco Wilms accompanies Issar on his trip through European cities, living rooms and mentalities.

This final journey is also Issar?s last chance to fulfill a secret wish: his first role as Bollywood star ? in Europe?s first Bollywood documentary!"

"This is how I met Issar 4 years ago:

It was in Thailand during the rainy season. I had a job interview, I was running late and had to take a motorbike taxi. On the highway it was raining the proverbial cats and dogs. When I eventually reached the address of where the interview was I was soaked to the skin. Right next to the place was a tailor?s shop. Issar, the Indian tailor, offered me tea and lent me one of the suits still waiting for collection for the interview. With this ? my first ever ? tailor-made suit I got the job. I found a new friend and have loved tailormade suits ever since.

Issar was leading a double life. The name on his business card said Mike. Supposedly because that made it easier for foreign customers to remember his name. In actual fact he had named himself after a rich, snobbish gangster from the film China Town. This criminal called Mike has a much more respectable twin brother ? a typical slightly nerdy Bollywood crooner. Both parts were played by Indian superstar Shammi Kapoor ? Issar?s idol. The film was a fable about the dark and light sides of the human soul. Or about how fate can mercilessly push people in one or the other direction. And why would the hardworking little tailor Issar choose to name himself after the gangster and womaniser Mike?? In Issar?s chest, too, there are two hearts beating.

When Issar, aka Mike, first told me about his unlived film star dream, this immediately made me think of the mythological Writers Journey by Christopher Vogler. The hero leaves his normal environment and sets out for strange and distant lands to try and find a special elixir which changes his life. Issar?s journey to distant Europe ultimately also becomes a journey to himself.

As we wanted to bring Issar?s Bollywood dreams to life in the best possible way ? creating scenes like the one in the film Sangam which was shot in the permanent snow of the Swiss mountains ? financing took slightly longer. During this period Issar had to undergo serious bypass surgery and at times it looked like he might not be able to realise his dream. Nonetheless, we set out on our big adventure in the summer of 2005. At times it felt like I had adopted the role of the son looking after his father. But maybe this is only because Issar reminded me of my own father, of the impermanence of the human body and of the fact that one has to live one?s dream while there is still time.

Marco Wilms"

"Born in 1966 in former East Berlin, German Democratic Republic (GDR)

Completed apprenticeships as toolmaker, graphic designer and model

1990 Student in STAGE DESIGN at the Academy of Fine Arts, East Berlin, GDR

1991 Student in PRODUCTION DESIGN at the Film and Television Academy,

Potsdam-Babelsberg, Germany

1993 Scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)

at Michigan State University, USA

1998-99 Scholarship as FILM DIRECTOR from the German Academic Exchange Service

(DAAD) at Film Department, Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand

ACTING WORKSHOP by John Costopulus from Actors Studio New York, USA

2000 CREATIVE DIRECTOR, DIRECTOR Music Clips, Shorts Production Berlin

Germany

Scholarship for Young Journalists in Bangkok, Story ?Angel on the Highway to

Death?

2001 Masterdegree as FILM DIRECTOR at the Hochschule fuer Film und Fernsehen

?Konrad Wolf? Potsdam Babelsberg, Germany

2002 Scholarship as FILM DIRECTOR from Stiftung Kulturfonds, Berlin Germany

2003 Scholarship as FILM DIRECTOR in Thailand from the German Academic

Exchange Service (DAAD); LECTURER at Filmdepartment

Thammasat University

TEACHER Documentary Workshop for DAAD in Saigon, Vietnam

2004 DISCOVERY CAMPUS MASTERSCHOOL

2005 Scholarship as FILM DIRECTOR from DEFA, Berlin, Germany"

"2000 NAAM DJAI ? THE RIVER OF THE HEART (61min)

documentary

2003 BERLIN VORTEX (82min) (German title: MITTENDRIN)

theatrical documentary for ZDF, Das Kleine Fernsehspiel

2005 TAILOR-MADE DREAMS (52 / 87min, 35mm)

(German title: MASSGESCHNEIDERTE TR?UME)

theatrical Bollywood documentary about a singing Indian made-to-order tailor who travels to Europe the first time and meet his old customers"

"Bernhard Kimmel, head of the infamous Al Capone gang, did not choose which place to burglarize next. He had to figure out which places he had not yet hit. Cracking up to three safes at different locations in the course of one night, Kimmel and his colleagues made fools out of the authorities in post-war Rhineland-Palatinate for years ? living nearly perfect double-lives as god-fearing citizens and productive weavers during the day. When they were finally arrested, it was not for their unparalleled prowess as burglars, but because of an unfortunate, drunken accident that left one innocent man dead.

Director Peter Fleischmann met Bernhard Kimmel just after his release from prison in 1970. He interviewed the newly reformed criminal and struck up a friendship that would be put to the test in 1982, when Kimmel was again arrested: this time for killing a police officer while fleeing the scene of another crime. Fleischmann, who had started out his conversations with Kimmel wanting to know the man behind the local legend, saw his friend sentenced to life-imprisonment.

When Kimmel was paroled after 22 years in prison, the director was finally able to finish the intimate portrait of a man who had spent most of his life behind bars ? clinging to the legend of who he once was and trying to find out how to fit into a world that passed him by.

The result is ?My friend the murderer? ? an astounding and astute meditation on guilt, punishment and friendship."

"They'll smack your face if they don't like it. Tomorrow is a bad day: Yvonne is

going to prison...

The story takes place during the doldrums between Christmas and New Year?s Eve in a typical West German suburb. Christmas lights still adorn the dull apartment blocks, cheap motels and discount markets as premature fireworks echo throughout the industrial wasteland. Eighteen-year-old Katharina, who has resettled from Russia to Germany, spends her time with Yvonne and the rest of the gang. The girls roam through their territory in search of something. They don?t know what for. But it must be something that will change their lives irrevocably."

?The place is some West German suburb: everything is clean and monotone. It is a place to escape from. But where to? My protagonists look for ways by rebelling with force against the desolation and despair that surrounds them. At heart they are romantics; as little girls they knew they wanted to grow up to be a princess. But they are no longer little girls.? Birgit Grosskopf

Born 1972 in Cologne, Germany. A-levels in 1990. While studying archeology for one year, she also performed at the college theatre. From 1993-96 film and drama studies at Reading University, England. Graduation in 1996: BA (Hons). Work as German teacher at a language school in London. From 1996 on, as a graduate student of film directing and screenwriting at the German Film- and Television Academy Berlin, she shot her first shorts. Work as reader and translator for some prestigious German film companies. ?Princess? is her first feature film.

"Babies in Pockets

(10 min., 16mm, 1998)

The Pilot

(10 min., 16mm, 2000)

Live Boys

(12 min., 35mm, 2001)

Tabula Rasa

(15 min., super 16mmm, 2003,

script with Martina Klein)

Princess

(81 min., 35mm, 2006,

script with Daniela Hilchenbach)"

"Slow Space takes the viewer on a visual trip through places of glass architecture in Chicago. Filmed entirely within the urban constructed environment that makes up this contemporary North American city, Slow Space is a visually arresting investigation into how space is described, defined and ultimately experienced. Berlin filmmaker Klaus W. Eisenlohr commutes this relationship with the outside ?world? via an array of constructed transparencies in the glass domes and atriums that formed so much of architecture?s modernist preoccupation for a constructed inside/outside dialectic. Descriptions and ultimately opinions on the status of public space in Chicago form part of the film?s identity via a series of interviews conducted from the participant?s private domains. Street scenes with performers complement this film essay.

With his project in Chicago, the artist Klaus W. Eisenlohr has investigated the relationship between the body and the urban architectural environment over the time period of three years."

Klaus W. Eisenlohr was born in Tuttlingen and has been living in Berlin since 1989. He studied in Berlin and Chicago. The main focus of his works, many of which have received prizes at exhibitions in Germany, France and the USA, is with photography, experimental film and media art.

"Stadtrandzone Mitte ? Center of Urban Periphery 43min 2005

Slow Space 72min 2006

lesson one Die Allm?hliche Verfertigung des Bildes beim Malen ? The Continuous Process of Image Making through Painting 38min 2002 (collaboration with Johann Zeitler)

Slow Space - The Interviews 27min 2001"

"Young rent boy Sebastian is one of Georg's little opportunities left to break out of his solitary life and exchange it for a brief coexistence ? at least for a couple of hours. Georg loves Sebastian's easyness and playfulness. He loves the absurd stories the boy sponateously comes up with even though he never really knows if he can believe them or not.

And today a long cherished wish seems to come true for Georg. This time the boy asks him if he could stay the night ? on his own free will. Georg does everything to entirely savour the rare and valuable moments. He hopes for more. But the more Georg dares to approach the boy the more Sebastian withdraws. In just a short time the boys seems to advance in quite a few years. Georgs hopes break into pieces.

In the light of a pocket torch the last remaining night becomes a declaration of love to the times spent and to all people who've brushed life for just a short and brief moment ? it becomes a moving protest against transitoriness."

Stefan Westerwelle. Born in 1980 in Detmold. 1998 ? 2000: Graphic and web designer in various agencies. Studies film/television at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne since 2001 . 2002: Half-year animation project in London. ?Solange Du hier bist? is his graduate film from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

"""What is public space today?"" Filmmaker and artist Klaus W. Eisenlohr poses this question at the beginning of his research with reference to the city of Hannover. The resulting film takes the viewer on a trip through a number of public spaces in Hannover's metropolitan area. Devised as a series of portraits with varying urban qualities, the film dwells not only on the visible urban attributes but also on the activities and connectedness that 'make-up' a public space.

Undertaking an array of spatial explorations, the film seeks to find out as to what kinds of interference or interventions can activate public place(s). Eisenlohr proposes that to entice or provoke responses, one such activation can be drawn 'out of' art performances. Interviews with city planers interwoven with scenes of everyday occurrences with young people, together, form a complement to Eisenlohr's photographic vision - a film essay of the everyday and its places inherent in Europe's modern cities."

Klaus W. Eisenlohr was born in Tuttlingen and has been living in Berlin since 1989. He studied in Berlin and Chicago. The main focus of his works, many of which have received prizes at exhibitions in Germany, France and the USA, is with photography, experimental film and media art.

"?The whole knowledge of the human soul passes through a football field?

Albert Camus

?The Art of Football? by Hermann Vaske is an exciting and irreverent rollercoaster ride through the crazy and creative world of football. It kick starts the inevitable frenzy in a run up to the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Offering a view of a game that attracts more viewers than the Olympics, more money than Hollywood, more media than any politician.

The legendary John Cleese (?Monty Python?, ?James Bond?, ?Harry Potter?) as host will guide the audience through the diverse football landscape. Following the introduction, the format revolves around Mr. Cleese introducing the letters of the alphabet, from A to Z, with each letter representing one particular word or catch phrase relevant to football.

In the documentary sequences both football geniuses and artists, musicians, politicians express their thoughts on the game and prove it is a part of the great global zeitgeist Hermann Vaske talked to legends like Pel?, Franz Beckenbauer and Michel Platini and today?s super stars like Thierry Henry, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Kak?, Michael Ballack, as well as world soccer players Birgit Prinz and Mia Hamm. From the field of managers and referees Vaske interviewed Ars?ne Wenger, Giovanni Trapattoni and Pierluigi Collina.

From the field of music he talked to Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics. From the field of film he interviewed directors like Wim Wenders (?Buena Vista Social Club?) and Tony Kaye (?American History X?) as well as producer Nick Powell (?Fever Pitch?). From the field of acting Dennis Hopper (?Easy Rider?) und Keith Allen (?Trainspotting?) share their views on the beautiful game with us. And last but by no means least Nobel laureate Dr. Henry Kissinger, archbishop Desmond Tutu and painter Markus L?pertz are part of the film.

In the final sequence of ?The Art of Football? Cleese compares football with other art forms, and concludes that football fulfils the definition of art better than many so-called art forms: it has the power to move people. As Ars?ne Wenger once said, ?football is a branch of creativity, a branch of the arts.?

?The Art of Football? was shot in Brazil, the United States, Italy, Great Britain and Germany. Hermann Vaske shot on Digital Betacam, High Definition and Super8 in order to mix the different formats. The authenticity of the Super8 offers an exiting contrast to high definition.

?The Art of Football? is an official project of the artistic and cultural programme of the Federal Government for the FIFA World Cup 2006. It is a co-production of Hermann Vaske?s Emotional Network, Studio Hamburg, ARTE and ZDF. Director, author and producer is Hermann Vaske.

"

Hermann Vaske (director, author, producer)

Hermann Vaske is a director, author and producer. As a director he worked with actors such as Dennis Hopper, Harvey Keitel, Sir Peter Ustinov and John Cleese.

He is the winner of the Grimme Award (Germany's TV Oscar) and more than 100 creative awards.

After studying at the University of the Arts in Berlin and at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles Hermann worked as Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi in London and at FCB. With it?s numerous creative Awards Hermann Vaske?s Emotional Network is one of Germany?s most awarded Advertising Agencies and Production Companies. Clients include ARTE, Deutsche Bahn, Audi, ZDF, BMW, VW,

Bayern 4 Klassik and Hornbach.

Hermann's previous television films include features on David Bowie and Yohji Yamamoto, as well as the feature length documentaries "The Fine Art of Separating People From Their Money", ?The A ? Z of Separating People From Their Money? and "The Ten Commandments of Creativity" starring Dennis Hopper and Sir Peter Ustinov, for which he won the Special Award of the Jury of the International Television Festival of Venice.

His recent books include "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants ? Conversations with the Masters of Advertising" and ?Why Are You Creative?? Which has also been presented as a TV-Series on ARTE and as an exhibition in Cannes at the International Film Festival and at the Frankfurt Book Fair..

In 2003, Hermann directed the short film "Who Killed the Idea?" starring Harvey Keitel, Debi Mazar and supermodel Nadja Auermann.

An apathetic young boy is honored at a festival. In the meantime, his sister wallows in ecstasy with her fianc?e and decides to start an entirely new life against her family?s wishes. But then both siblings receive a gift that bears sinister consequences for the rest of their lives? ?Tradition? is a gripping nine-minute film about courage and convention.

"August 1984. The Summer is maddening hot. The 23rd Olympic Summer Games are taking place in Los Angeles. On a radio show, Ronald Reagan makes a joke about bombing Russia. A catastrophic drought causes a bad harvest in over twenty African countries; every month over 20.000 children are dying in Ethiopia. None of this really matters to a young boy named VIKTOR, who is wrapped up in his own world.

During the summer vacation, Victor is sent for the weekend to his aunt and his cousin?s. This shouldn?t be that special, if it wasn?t for his infatuation with his 15-year-old cousin Denise or the terrible neighbor?s dog he was attacked by years ago. Perhaps the incident at the bridge would have never happened?"

Baran bo Odar studied at the Munich Academy of Film and Television and participated in the 2003 Berlinale Talent Campus. He also completed the Masterclass of Commercial and Image Films. In addition to numerous video clips and commercials, his other films include: 216 (short, 1998), UND IWR SUCHEN NACH DEM GL?CK (documentary short, 2002), MR. SMITH & MRS: KOWACEK (short, 2002), KILL YOUR STEREO (short, 2003) SQUEAK (QUIETSCH, short, 2005), and UNTER THE SUN (UNTER DER SONNE, 2006)

Right before Christmas the once successful model VALERIE ends up in Berlin. She still has a room in the exclusive Hotel Hyatt, but actually the 29 years old girl is completely broke and without any prospects. She covers the gravity of her situation in front of friends and collegues. When Valerie has to leave her hotel room, she doesn?t even have enough money to pay the fee for the parking lot. From that point on, she spends the nights in her car and lives like a stowaway in the world of the rich and beautiful.

The idea was inspired by an article on an american phanomena, the so called ?shadow women?. Beautiful women between glamourous catwalks, parties and champaign. But then also without a home, sleeping in their cars or even in the parcs. The film is about the high and the low, the opposition between outside and inside, between shine and truth and what happens to a soul under this condition. Valerie swings between the different worlds. The story takes place on four days at christmas time. A tale about modern homelessness, about beauty and honesty.

Born 1972 in Osnabr?ck, Germany. Since 1994 works as materialassistant and cameraassistant. 1994-96 studies at the staatliche Fachschule f?r Optik und Film (SFOF) in Berlin. 2003 feature film-jury membership at Sehs?chte Babelsberg. Since 1997 studies at German Film- and Television Academy (dffb) camera and director. Since 2003 director for TV and cinema among other things Pall Mall, Twix, FCB, Musicload, Huyndai, Monster, T-Com

"? 8 - Shortfilm by Catharina Deus, 16mm, 2000

Fl?gge - Kleines Fernsehspiel ZDF, by Elke Hauck, 16mm, 82min., 2001

Der Freund der Friseuse - Shortfilm by Catharina Deus, S-16mm, 2001

Risking my Soul - Musicvideo for the group Deadline, 2002

Gombas, Slogans - 2x Kino-Socialspots, Director: Albert Heiser, 2002

Liebe Wurst Europa - Coproduction SFB ?DFFB, DV-Cam, 30 min, 2002 Director: Volkmar Umlauft

F?r immer f?r dich - Debut im Dritten, SWR/ARTE, by Lih Jannowitz, S-16mm, 2002

Marina - Shortfilm by Tereza Curzio, S-16mm, 2003

Die Boxerin (about a girl) - credofilm / ZDF Das kleine Fernsehspiel, Director: Catharina Deus, 105 min, 2005

Souvenir from Berlin - Shortfilm, Talentcampus Berlinale 2005"

Sebastian F?rber is a successful architect with a foible for poetry but he is constantly under pressure. His daughter Himalaya only knows him crouched in the dark behind his laptop and drawing board maniacally cracking nuts while he draws up utopian buildings which no one is going to pay for anymore. Despite suffering from the teensiest bit of a heart attack F?rber relentlessly starts a new project: a top-secret high-security futuristic townscape on the island of Vineta, which cannot be found on any map. In a remote villa F?rber and a team of experts are to finish the project under the leadership of mysterious Dr. Leonhard. In the middle of his hectic schedule F?rber realises that his office is monitored by strange videocameras and he starts to question his loyalties and his daughter as well. Franziska St?nkel?s debut is a moving and frightening chamber piece carried by a splendid cast and a truly claustrophobic atmosphere.

Franziska St?nkel finished her studies as a scriptwriter and director under Prof. Uwe Schrader at the University of Applied Sciences Hannover. She was given various scholarships, among other things a two-year vgf production scholarship for young filmmakers in the Bavarian film metropolis Munich, a promotional film scholarship of Niedersachsen and a one-year script scholarshop under Wojciech Marczewski. She futhermore was chosen to participate in the international programme for futher education ?Talents 2003? lectured by Mogens Rukov and in the ?Berlinale Talent Campus 2003?. Franziska St?nkel's short films are shown at international fim festivals in 19 countries and have repeatedly received awards such as the ?Premio Nuovo Talent Award? in New York. Within the framework of the ?Next Generation 2001? her short ?W?nsch Dir Was? is presented at the international film festival in Cannes. VINETA is the director and scriptwriter's first full-lenght film for the cinema.

"2005/ 2006 ?Vineta?, Kinospielfilm, Regie und Drehbuch

2004 ?It?s a small world and things like this?, Kurzspielfilm, Regie und Drehbuch

2001 ?W?nsch dir was?, Kurzspielfilm, Regie und Drehbuch

1999 ?Bonbon?, Kurzspielfilm, Regie und Drehbuch"

"United we stand. ? Divided we fall. The battle cry at American Football. The battle cry of a world about unconditional team spirit and victory. About honour and respect. And about standing one's ground. In American Football applies an old and traditional value system that is popluar again today.

American Footbal is the number one sport in the USA: But there is also a surprisingly high amount of Germans going totally crazy about the wrangling on grass. The documentary ?Weekend Warriors? accompanies four amateurs of the First Division team of the ?Berlin Adler? in their fight for the most important title in Germany ? the GERMAN BOWL. The camera is everywhere: on the football field and in the cubicles, at home on the sofa and in the office, in cheering and in tears. And follows the question: Why do the Germans actually play American Football?"

"Alexa Oona Schulz is director and scriptwriter. ?Weekend Warriors? is her first full-length documentary. Further documentaries she did are films for the TV stations arte and Vox. She has written scripts for the German TV station ZDF: Her short films were shown at festivals and repertory cinemas all over the world and were awarded several prizes.

Alexa Oona Schulz studied directing at the film school CECC in Barcelona and at the Tisch School of the Arts. A further study visit to Cuba at the EICTV was promoted by a scholarship of the Carl Duisburg Gesellschaft. After longer stays abroad in Spain an the USA, Alexa Oona Schulz now lives in Berlin."

He's an apple on a tree, happily hanging among other apples, enjoying the sun and letting the wind caress his body. But there is one thing intriguing him: he wants to find out what it?s like to be a man.

"Astrid Rieger

1979 born in Kronstadt- Romania

1990 immigration to Germany

since 1999 studies of ?Visual Communication? at Academy of Art and Design Offenbach

Zeljko Vidovic

1975 born in Livno

since 1999 studies of ?Visual Communication? at Academy of Art and Design Offenbach"

Astrid Rieger

(2001) Maudi

(2002) Die Expedition zum S?dpol

(2002) Luftl?cher

(2003) Scharlach

(2004) Rimbaud

(2006) Apple On A Tree

(2006) Mammal

"D Dear Miss Mistress, Dear Dear Miss Distress ? T turn me on and drag me underground?

A Song dedicated to the London Underground. A Video made of photographs and textanimations."

"Claire Walka

1997 - 1998 Art School P.ART, Stuttgart, Germany

1998 Studies at the Hochschule f?r Gestaltung Offenbach/Main Germany

since 2001 different practicals at advertising agencies, publisher, television (editorial department)

since 2003 Freelancer for Graphics and AV (Photography, Editing, Compositing?)

since 2001 Different Exhibitions of Graphic Works, Photographs and Installations

Sept. 2003 Foundationmember of ""Ex.For- Institute for Existance Research"" and the ""Zuchtfilmkollektiv"""

In the world of her dreams it's all about love, happiness and a guy named Tomek. But in reality Hanne is rather shy, yet she is a pickpocket. Tomek however seems unapproachable to her. In the course of a heist in a bar she runs into him - that?s her shot! But as it turns out Tomek is found suspicious of thievery.

Arne Ahrens was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1975. After school-graduation he worked as an editor in Hamburg, D?sseldorf and Mainz. Since 2001 he is a student of dramatics in the field of media at the university of Mainz.

Arne Ahrens has shot several short-films since 1998, which were shown at filmfestivals throughout Germany, America and Japan. His filmography includes projects that were produced in the USA while he was studying at Balll Tate University, Indiana.

Bernd's car breaks down. The road is deserted. Frighteningly so. He contacts a towing service. He waits. He sleeps. Suddenly there?s a knock on his window. It?s Klytaemnestra on crutches, asking for a lift. But obviously he can?t help her. Quite annoyed, she limps away. On the spur of the moment Bernd follows her, trying to gain her trust. Very unexpectedly she kisses him.

Together they move on, but Klytaemnestra?s husband appears, trying to bar their way. But Bernd knocks him down to save her. They get into the husband?s Jeep and drive into the night, when a tractor, with a trailer full of pigs, blocks the road. It?s Klytaemnestra?s son, he came to stop her. The animals panic, when a shot goes off. Bernd looses consciousness. He wakes up and looks around. Klytaemnestra is gone. He is alone ? except from some pigs romping about in the grass.....

Florian Schoenherr

Born 29th of October 1965 in Basel (Switzerland)

1996 Stipend of ?Evangelische Medienakademie? (Protestant Media Academy)

Move to Athens and establishment of the videoproduction company OFZOE

till 2000 author for different newspapers

2001 Move to Frankfurt

2002 Work experience for direction (Miguel Alexandre, ?Weil ich gut bin?)

Cooperation for Annette Ernst ( Kiss and Run)

Documentary - Treatment

(Der olympische Kampf der Griechen gegen ihre Natur)

Stipend ?Drehbuchwerkstatt M?nchen? (Screenplay Workshop Munich)

2003 Klyt?mnestra Pocket, screenplay for shortfilm

Bonanza, screenplay for shortfilm (Screenplay Workshop Munich)

Schmerzgrenzen, screenplay (Screenplay Workshop Munich)

Black Man White, Movie - Treatment

DoP, Tabaluga TiVi ? Reihe Verschenktes Gl?ck Sch?lerhilfe Bosnien,

BSB-Film Mediaproduction for ZDF (Public Channel of German Television)

Director, Klyt?mnestra Pocket, Shortfilm, 20min

In their close relationship mother and son are affiliated to an inseparable entity, where inside and outside, imagination and reality, self and other no longer differ.

The mother tries hard, to maintain this state, but she cannot stop an evolution, that makes her son let loose.

Astrid Rieger

1979 born in Kronstadt- Romania

1990 immigration to Germany

since 1999 studies of ?Visual Communication? at Academy of Art and Design Offenbach

Astrid Rieger

(2001) Maudi

(2002) Die Expedition zum S?dpol (The Expedition To The South Pole)

(2002) Luftl?cher (Holes in the air)

(2003) Scharlach (Scarlet)

(2004) Rimbaud

(2006) Apple On A Tree

(2006) Mammal

During the Nazi period in Germany, young Marie meets the Jewish clown Jakob who gives away balloons for the price of a smile. But Marie cannot satisfy Jakob?s wish. Through a tragic misunderstanding the situation escalates and for a while it seems as if Marie will have to owe him her smile forever.

But decades later, fate brings the two of them back together again.

An umbrella, a young woman and her shoes get whirled around on a windy afternoon.

1997 - 1998 Art School P.ART, Stuttgart, Germany

1998 Studies at the Hochschule f?r Gestaltung Offenbach/Main Germany

since 2001 different practicals at advertising agencies, publisher, television (editorial department)

since 2003 Freelancer for Graphics and AV (Photography, Editing, Compositing?)

since 2001 Different Exhibitions of Graphic Works, Photographs and Installations

Sept. 2003 Foundationmember of "Ex.For- Institute for Existance Research" and the "Zuchtfilmkollektiv"

Elisabeth Hartnagel, now eighty-five, is the last surviving sister of Hans and Sofie Scholl, the German teenagers who were executed by the Nazis for openly defying the criminal regime. In this gripping film project, Hanna Laura tells the story of Sofie?s twin sister, who was unlike her in so many ways. The film also illuminates the social and cultural background of the Scholl family for the first time and shows how strongly Hans and Sophie Scholl were motivated by their family context.

?THE DEAD BROTHERS ? Death Is Not The End?, is the intimate portrait of three musicians that couldn?t be any more different.

Alain Croubalian, son of an Armenian Immigrant and a Swiss nurse,

Pierre Omer, son of an Indian Historian and a Genevan mother, as well as Delaney Davidson, a New Zealand native Troubadour and world traveller are the core of one of the most idiosyncratic and unique bands of our time ? THE DEAD BROTHERS.

This film however is not merely a music documentary; it?s rather an exploration of their individual personalities and how their unique biographies have shaped their music.

Alain Croubalian explains what impact the Armenian genocide and the resulting Diaspora had on his family and ultimately on his personal development. He also describes how his life as an immigrant in N. American resulted in his die hard nonconformist stance.

Pierre Omer offers a melancholic and at times ironic insight into his creative process and his personal battle between irony and tragedy.

Delaney Davidson openly discusses his own mortality and which role humour plays in dealing with it.

The bands? music reflects their Babylonian biographies;

Blues meets Chanson, Gypsy Swing meets Vaudeville and Brecht & Weil go for a drink with Hank Williams somewhere in St. Pauli, New York or Marseille.

The bands? provocative yet cheerful performances have meanwhile achieved world wide cult status.

The film shows the band not only on stage at large clubs but also joins them at spontaneous street concerts and jam sessions.

To wrap it all up, we?d like to say we believe to have made a paradoxal film, a balancing act between melancholy and exuberance, as well as existential questions and black slapstick humour.

M.A. Littler

1979: Born in Frankfurt, Germany.

1980 - 1999 several mid- and long-term stays in N. America and Southern Africa.

1985 - 1997: Education.

1999: Mandatory service, followed by honourable discharge.

2000- 2002: Film school in Vancouver, Canada.

2002: Move to Berlin and beginning of "SLOWBOAT FILMS".

2003: Move to Frankfurt, Germany.

2005: Full time dedication to ?SLOWBOAT FILMS?.

In the style of silent films, but accompanied by narration, young lovers discover the conflict between ideals and reality in the light of an autumn forest. The man compares his love to the ideal of an Italian novella, but must conclude that such ideals are unattainable and therefore his love is in vain. Ultimately, however, the lovers retreat from ideals and focus once again on themselves, which allows the story to come to a happy ending.

In a world with so many stories Nathlie el-Jorr, Anna Myung-Sook Kim and Karoline Schwikal, betook theirselves to a countr, nestled between the improbable borders of Syria and Israel, to show the lives of young people caught up by the tide of its development. Lebanon. In view of their final project they decided an a creative cinematic piece of work, that ought to be challenging and influential at the same time.

Inspired by Stanislav Lem?s short story about the cosmonaut Ijon Tichy, ?X? is a bizarre space adventure about an astronaut who loses his own individuality and must prevail against near endless copies of himself. Loss of identity and individuality is the theme of this humorous animated film.

Everybody should do the things they love. Why should being blind change that? Milos Devise has been blind since having an eye operation when he was four-years-old. Milos loves rock music and fast machines ? and riding around on the bus without paying his fare. In just nine minutes, Nadja Elabbadi?s film presents a young man?s unconventional and inspiring outlook on life.

Nadja Elabbadi,

born 1979 in Wetzlar. Studies Design and Film at the Hochschule f?r Gestaltung Offenbach since 2001.

Twelve-year old Daniel and his seventeen-year-old brother live in a run-down German tenement building. Patrick occasionally earns a bit of money by secretly kidnapping people?s pets to collect the reward money later. In spite of his harsh environment, Daniel is able to escape into small flights of fancy. But his situation becomes more drastic the more dependent he becomes on his older brother. For a while, Daniel seems to find a friend in Bernd, a neighborhood junkie. Crude, harsh, but also poetic, ?Hochhaus? tells the story of a boy forced to grow up too soon and labor through a world that seems to have no place for him.

In just 25 minutes, Director Matthias Stockl?w manages to hilariously answer the question of why a man would bury his car in the yard and some of life?s other more important questions. Julia, a teacher, is suffocating under the stress of her job and personal life. Her chaotic husband, Walter, has not told her what he did last night. The car is missing, and the mail arrives in shreds. Her co-worker, Wesenberger, finds her attractive. In the meantime, Sarah and Tim would be having a wonderful day on the boat ? if it weren?t for the evil Easter bunny and the polar bear.

"Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker" is an animated short-film about different inhabitants of an appartment-house. Because of someone claiming too much noise a policeman is called and everything turns into chaos. Technic: hand-drawn animation & 3D

1974 born in Limburg/ Germany ? 1994 Abitur ? 1994 apprenticeship as a sign-painter ? 1997 University of applied Sciences Wiesbaden ? 2002-2004 Universidad Complutense Madrid

The film deals with the pain felt at the death of one?s mother. A young woman?s voice-over talks about the impossibility of coming to terms with this pain through various therapies. She does this with the same laconic humour which marks the images of the film. They are images of absurd moments which reveal the faultline running through the world, when everything in life seems somehow wrong. It makes us laugh, but this laughter is always a way to recognise a pain that won?t go away. Anna Berger uses simple means to find strong images and words for a form of mourning based on humour.

anna berger

born: frankfurt/main 1975

1997-2005 studied at the academy of art and design offenbach, diploma

studied film (prof. helmut herbst and prof. rotraut pape)

and experimental spatial concepts (prof. heiner blum)

films (selection)

2000 dish, 4min, 16mm farbe/beta, dokumentarfilm

2001 where the rabbit sleeps/sensorama, zus. mit michel kl?fkorn, 4min, dv, musikvideo

2002 hose, 2min, dv

2004 ballet, zus. mit michel kl?fkorn, 3min, dv

2005 untitled, 12min, dv

Michael Kl?fkorn?s exciting six-minute film deals with the surprising amount of power wielded by cars in contemporary society. The film shows how much we already depend on automobiles to shape our societies.

The train station area in Frankfurt am Main. Between the con artists, brothels and junkies, Walter has found his niche for survival though; he cleans cars for the pimps and prostitutes. He has a background however. ?Walter? is the portrait of a person who copes with everyday life against all adversity.

This forty-minute documentary deals with the thoughts and feelings of teenage Albanian girls who live and go to school in Offenbach, Germany, but regularly return to their homeland, Kosovo, during vacations. The camera follows three sisters - Nagjije (15), Nazmije (16) und Bege (17) ? on one such summer vacation trip. Bege has reached marrying age, and although she?s not sure she?s ready yet, any future husband would have to be Albanian. But none of the girls would want to live in Kosovo permanently. The film masterfully illustrates the conflicts between maintaining one?s cultural roots and the pressure of conforming to the modern world.

?Die unertr?gliche Seichtigkeit? (?Unbearable Shallowness?) is a ?melan-comic? film about men and women, the amount of things and of course... CHER! Director Eva Becker?s five-minute short film successfully combines humor and depth.

Harald Bergmann?s film ?Brinkmanns Zorn? portraits the poet Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, who demands everything at once ? love, death, pop, hate, art. Based on Brinkmann?s original tape recordings and Super8 clippings, Harold Bergmann has made a fascinating film about the literary icon. A film that ? just like Brinkmann himself ? uses different media and cinematic devices to depict modern reality. Here documentary and biography merge and become an outstanding work of art; one that in regards to authenticity and fascination is nearly unsurpassable.

24 hours: One day ? one night. One fight. At Mark?s farewell party everything collides: aspirations, fears, desperation, sex, intoxication and reality. The film depicts a group of teenagers in a desolate American suburb striving for acknowledgment, love and security. Each day they have to struggle for their future in a world that doesn?t grant them a chance. In the course of the next 24 hours everything is going to change for some of them. An up-and-coming film by two-time German Film Prize nominee Holger Ernst.

A man meets a woman who straightens out his chaotic life. The woman looses her memory and her commemoration of him. He fights for her, but is at risk of reverting into the patterns of his past. And other mothers have got pretty daughters, too. So far so good?.

Fabo is a marauding emotion fen fire, such as flutter by the thousands through nocturnal cities: he has problems without women and alcohol, and with them his problems even seem to multiply. But the painful acquaintance with his dream woman Tami also reveals the solid sides of the hardcore romantic: wife, house, tree, children welcome. And because Fabo is able to enjoy this new life, fate hits him the harder in the hour of his largest bliss?

A film about bereavement and the fight for love, about male bonding, alcohol and crashes from different heights.

Windows, bath tubs and cars are used for other purposes than the intended and every ?dirty? word is just an expression of love and closeness. Dirty and hokey?

It is like Bukowski in an Edward Hopper painting, that has been fallen off the wall years ago?.

And the best: it is not a comedy!

Freelance photographer since 1993, focus puller and still photographer for several film productions (e.g. TATORT, JULIETTA, SCHERBENTANZ).

1997-2004 studied at the Filmakademie Baden-W?rttemberg film direction and works as a film director since then.

2005 KAHLSCHLAG

2003 DER TYP

2000 RILLENFIEBER

VALLEY OF FlOWERS is a Himalayan legend of a love struggling against the inevitability of death, an astonishing tale spanning from the early 19th century mountain existence, to hectic, bustling modern day Tokyo.

Kinofilme als Autor & Regisseur:

2006: VALLEY OF FLOWERS

(Dreh Sommer 2004)

SATORI (Sudden Enlightenment)

(in development, geplanter Dreh 2007)

2002: SAMSARA

35mm/CinemaScope/Dolby Digital/OV Ladakhi/138minutes

Dokumentarfilme als Autor & Regisseur:

2003: MYSTIC REVELATION of RASTAFARAI

(in research & development)

2000/1: AYURVEDA: ART OF BEING

35mm/Dolby Stereo/110minutes

1999: AMAZING WORLD: INDIA

50minutes/Stereo ?Indien/Frankreich/USA

1997: DEVADASI: THE SACRED COURTISANE

55minutes/S16mm/Stereo ?Frankreich/UK/Belgien/D?nemark/Indien

1995: THE NAGAS

50minutes/16mm/Stereo ?France/USA/India

1993: TULKUS

56minutes/S16mm/Stereo ?France/India

Kurzfilme als Autor & Regisseur:

1996: DOUBT

1995: EIFFEL TOWER TRILOGY: Height, Weight & Gravity

1992: KHAJURAHO

"The Monks waren f?nf amerikanische GIs in Deutschland w?hrend des Kalten Krieges, die sich selbst als Anti-Beatles ank?ndigten. Sie sparten nicht mit Feedback, Nihilismus oder dem elektrischen Banjo. Sie hatten komische Frisuren, waren schwarz gekleidet, machten sich ?ber das Milit?r lustig und rockten h?rter als jeder ihrer Vorg?nger Mitte der Sechziger w?hrend sie quasi Industrial Music, Heavy Metal, Punk und Techno erfanden.

Der genre-?bergreifende Dokumentarfilm zeigt nicht nur das Popmusik-Ph?nomen in einem politischen, sozialen und kulturell-historischen Kontext, sondern enth?llt auch das Monks-Projekt als die erste Verbindung von Kunst und Popmusik, die Monate vor Andy Warhol und The Velvet Underground.

Die f?nf Protagonisten des Films kamen 1961 w?hrend des Kalten Krieges als Soldaten nach Deutschland und verlie?en das Land 1967 als Avantgarde-Monks. Mehr als 30 Jahre konnten sie nicht ?ber ihre seltsame Erfahrung sprechen. In diesem Film erz?hlen die f?nf Original-Bandmitglieder zum ersten Mal ?ber ihr Abenteuer. "

"Dietmar Post films as director/producer:

Bowl of Oatmeal (short, USA, 1996, 16mm, 10 min)

Cloven Hoofed (short, USA/Germany/Spain, 1998, 16mm, 12 min)

Reverend Billy (documentary, USA/Germany/Spain, 2002, digital video/16:9, 60 min)

Luc?a Palacios as producer and production manager include:

Reverend Billy & The Church of Stop Shopping, documentary by Dietmar Post.

The Nomi Song, documentary by Andrew Horn for WDR (Germany).

La Espalda del mundo, documentary by Javier Corcuera for El?as Querejeta P.C (Spain).

Cloven Hoofed, short by Dietmar Post (Germany/USA)."

they were heavy on feedback, nihilism and electrical banjo. They had strange haircuts, dressed in black, mocked the military and rocked harder than any of their mid-sixties counterparts while managing to basically invent industrial, heavy metal, punk and techno music.

The genre-overlapping documentary film not only illustrates the pop music phenomenon in its political, social and cultural-historic contexts, but also reveals the monks project as the first marriage of art and popular music and this months before Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground.

The five protagonists of the film came to cold war Germany in 1961 as soldiers and left the country in 1967 as avant-garde monks. For more than thirty years they were not able to talk about their strange experience. In the film the five original band members recount for the first time their adventure."

"Dietmar Post was born in Germany in 1962. He studied Television, Theatre & Cinema Studies and Spanish Language at the Free University of Berlin, New York University and at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). He received a Master?s degree in 1995. After living for many years in New York Post currently resides in Berlin.

Luc?a Palacios was born in Spain in 1972. She studied Cinema Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 1996 she obtained a scholarship at New York University through the Spanish government. While in New York she worked as production manager for several films and as TV news reporter for Canal+Televisi?n Espa?ola and SAT. Currently she resides in Berlin (Germany)."

Based on an English academic's memoir on stalking and being stalked, Unrequited Love is a film essay on cinema and absence (a story told without reverse angles), on Hitchcock and Antonioni, on cinema and cities. A story of waiting, self-delusion, panic, fear of violence, of a modern technology which defines the urban stalker as it does the new terrorist. The methods duplicate: irrational and targeted -- a black valentine.

"Chris Petit is a prolific filmmaker and writer of international standing.

His feature films include Radio On (1979) and Chinese Boxes (1984). More recent experimental work includes Negative Space (2000)-- an essay on the legendary American painter and film critic, Manny Farber - and film collaborations with his fellow writer Iain Sinclair, among them The Falconer (1997), Asylum (2000) and London Orbital (2002). As a novelist he has specialised in revealing secret political histories: The Psalm Killer (1996), The Human Pool (2002) and The Passenger (2006). He is the only man alive who appears in the Pocket Essential guides to both Agatha Christie (as director of Miss Marple: A Caribbean Mystery; 1989) and London Writing (as author of Robinson; 1993)."

September 1, 2001.

Elliot, an American spy decides to go into hiding as he has received a crucial information. At the same time he wants to see his daughter Orlando again whom he has left ten years ago. Ir?ne, an old friend of his, is to organise their meeting in Venice together with Elliot's adopted son David. She doesn't expect William Pound, though, an unscrupulous killer and occasional poet...

Santiago Amigorena was born in Buenos Aires some 40 years ago. After having written the scripts for about 20 films (LES GENS NORMAUX N?ONT RIEN D?EXCEPTIONNEL, LE FILS DU REQUIN, LE P?RIL JEUNE, SAMBA TRAOR?, POST CO?TUM ANIMAL TRISTE, RIEN ? FAIRE, TOKYO EYES among others), she published four books (UNE ENFANCE LACONIQUE, UNE JEUNESSE APHONE, UNE ADOLESCENCE TACITURNE, LE PREMIER AMOUR). She then decided to make her first film: QUELQUES JOURS EN SEPTEMBRE.

Little time after the shock of September 2001, appear on the roofs of Paris, Cats. By a simple and perfectly controlled graphic, which slices on the sometimes muddled by tags virtuosity, they post a broad smile. Thus somebody, during the night is likely to break the neck to make float a message of benevolence on this city which needs some so much. It is while following the track of the Smiling Cats that this film was built, active of surprised in surprise.

"Chris Marker, born in 1921

Filmmaker, part-time photographer, computer geek, traveller, catlover

Selected movies:

La Jet?e (1962)

A Grin without a Cat (1977)

Sans Soleil (1982)

The Last Bolshevik (1993)

One day in the life of Andrey Arsenevich (1999)

The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004)"

"Founded in the Philippines in 1904 by the american colonial administration , Iwahig is a penal farm almost completely self-sufficient and self-managed by its inmates serving long sentences who have become farmers, fishermen, watchmen?

After being tested for several months, they can move freely within the 38,000 hectares of jungle, mountains and wild prison coastline and bring their families to live with them. No fences separate them from the neighbouring villages where they are used to going for a walk.

Their hierarchical organization, based on promotion by merit and seniority, allows for minimum intervention by the penitentiary staff.

Alejandro, chief of the inmates, plunges us into this universe through the portraits of a few fellow prisoners :

Toting who goes fishing on the open sea without a guard tells us about his past.

Denelyn and Jenelyn, two adolescents whose father is serving a life sentence and are trying to help the family survive.

Rodrigo, a young inmate beaten by a prison employee.

A prison system unique to this world, Iwahig opens up new horizons."

"Alexandre Leborgne: Born in 1973, France ? Anthropologist specialized in Philippines? languages and cultures.

He discovered the Iwahig prison when crossing it by bus to reach an ethnic group where he was studying chamanism.

First Film

Pierre Barougier: Born in 1971, France ? Cinematographer ? graduated from ENS Louis Lumi?re.

2001: Radio la Colifata, 52 mn. , DV cam

A radio made by patients from a psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires (Documentary).

2004: D?sirs d?Ecole, 52 mn. , DV cam

A year in an alternative school following the Freinet pedagogy in France (Documentary)."

Zingarina arrives in Transylvania, in the heart of Romania, looking for the man she loves. She had met him in France, but one day he left without a word of explanation. With her friend Marie, who jealously watches over her, Zingarina throws her body and soul into a romantic quest and gets caught up in a fascinating land. But when she finds her former lover in the midst of a pagan festival, he brutally rejects her. Mad with anguish, she then flees Marie, who reminds her too much of her past, to fully merge into this new land, Transylvania, where she meets Tchangalo, a loner, a man like her, without borders, without ties.

Born in 1948, French film-maker, born in Algiers, Algeria. Of Gypsy and Algerian descent, his films are concerned with the situation of both these groups and their relations with mainstream society, such as Les Princes (1982) and Gadjo Dilo (1998), portrayed with unflinching honesty and without sentimentality.

2006 TRANSYLVANIA

2004 EXILS

VISIONS D?EUROPE ? Paris by night ? (S?rie Arte)

2002 SWING

2000 VENGO

1999 JE SUIS N? D?UNE CIGOGNE

1998 GADJO DILO

1996 MONDO

1995 LUCUMI, L?ENFANT RUMBEIRO DE CUBA

1993 LATCHO DROM

1990 GASPARD ET ROBINSON

1989 PLEURE PAS MY LOVE

1985 RUE DU D?PART

1983 LES PRINCES

CANTA GITANO (c.m.)

1982 CORRE GITANO (in?dit)

1978 LA TERRE AU VENTRE

1975 LA T?TE EN RUINES

1973 MAX L?INDIEN (c.m.)

Dans Paris follows the romantic adventures of two brothers. It?s also the portrait of a family whose motto could be: Take time to ignore the sadness of the closest to you.

2006 DANS PARIS

2003 MA M?RE

2002 17 FOIS C?CILE CASSARD

2001 NOUS DEUX (Court M?trage)

Paris, La Chapelle. Pablo, 11 years old, indifferently endures the loose relationship to his mother. When she abandons him for the hundredth time he decides to look for his Spanish father. So he enganges Louis, poker player on the run, to whom he feels a mysterious connection. But his father is nothing but a delusion...

as director - producer

2003 ? 50/50 ?

Com?die musicale 18min DV num.

Production ARTWORX, la DDPJJ de Nancy et I.D. Jeunes

2002 ? VIRAGE ?

Fiction 20 min, DV num.

Production ARTWORX, la DDPJJ de Nancy et I.D. Jeunes

2001 ?The Streets are Hungry Baby?

Fiction 16 min, DV num.

Production ARTWORX

2000 ? LE PROBL?ME DE LA NUDITE ?

Fiction 10 min, 35 mm

Production : ARTWORX - Les Films du Garage ? Le Festival Cine-F?te Contis

Avec : Noelie Giraud, Gilles Gaston Dreyfus, Stephane Roger

2000 ? LES MOTS DE L?AMOUR ?

Remake de Court-M?trage de Fiction de Vincent Ravalec 10 min DV num.

Production ARTWORX

2000 ? Le MASSEUR ?

Remake de Court-M?trage de Fiction de Vincent Ravalec 10 min DV num.

Production ARTWORX

2000 CR?ATION D?ARTWORX

Association pour favoriser et promouvoir la formation professionnelle, les rencontres et les

collaborations sur des projets audio-visuels et multim?dia.

1993 ? HAPPY NEW YEAR ? (R?alisation et Production)

Fiction 40 min, Super 16. Sc?nario Kim Massee

Avec : Laurent Petitgand, Katia Medici, Clothilde de Bayser, Jean-Claude Adelin, Carole Jacobson,

Sophie Perez?

1990-92 Pr?paration de ? WESTERN LOVE DRIVE ?

Long-M?trage 35mm Scope. Ecriture, Casting, Montage financier pour le long M?trage Western Love

Drive. Une Coproduction Films du Dauphin (LUC BESSON), Road Movies (WIM WENDERS) et

Sattelite Prod. Film suspendu.

199O THE THERESA STERN STORY (PRODUCTION)

Kim Massee Production. NY. USA. Un film de Richard Hell. 26min, 16mm

Avec : Richard Hell, Kate Walk, Will Patton

1990 ? BOUQUET D?AMOR ?

Production Molly Bradford. N.Y. USA. 36min, 16mm

Avec : Melora Griffis, Michael Massee, Lucius Wyatt, Sean Bohary, Iris Hoffman

Selectionn? : Festival de Nouveau Cinema (Montr?al), Berlin Film Festival (rfa), Anthology of Film

Archives (NYC) Prix du meilleur R?alisateur 1991 Festival de Montecatini (Italie). Achet? en 1991 par

Les Films du Dauphin (Luc Besson).

The most stigmatized people in Calcutta's red light district are not the prostitutes, but their children. In the face of abject poverty, abuse, and despair, these kids have little possibility of escaping their mother's fate or for creating another type of life.

In Born into Brothels, directors Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman chronicle the amazing transformation of the children they come to know in the red light district. Briski, a professional photographer, gives them lessons and cameras, igniting latent sparks of artistic genius that reside in these children who live in the most sordid and seemingly hopeless world.

The photographs taken by the children are not merely examples of remarkable observation and talent; they reflect something much larger, morally encouraging, and even politically volatile: art as an immensely liberating and empowering force.

Devoid of sentimentality, Born into Brothels defies the typical tear-stained tourist snapshot of the global underbelly. Briski spends years with these kids and becomes part of their lives. Their photographs are prisms into their souls, rather than anthropological curiosities or primitive imagery, and a true testimony of the power of the indelible creative spirit.

Ross Kauffman is the director, producer, cinematographer and co-editor of Born into Brothels, winner of the 2005 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

Kauffman worked as a documentary film editor from 1992 - 2000. He spent three years at Valkhn Film and Video Inc., a post-production company where he worked on a wide variety of films for producers such as Jim Lipscomb, Kevin Bachar and Melvin Van Peebles.

In 2001, Kauffman teamed up with award winning photojournalist Zana Briski to direct and produce Born into Brothels, a feature documentary about the children of Calcutta's prostitutes. In 2002, Kauffman formed Red Light Films and along with Briski was awarded grants from the Sundance Institute, the Jerome Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts to complete the film. Prior to the Academy Awards, Born into Brothels was accepted into over 30 film festivals and has since received over 40 awards, including National Board of Review Best Documentary 2004, LA Film Critics Best Documentary 2004, and the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award in 2004.

Kauffman is currently working on Project Kashmir, a documentary that takes viewers into the war-zone of Kashmir and examines the conflict from an emotional and social point of view.

Zana Briski was born in London, England. After earning a master's degree in theology and religious studies at the University of Cambridge, she studied documentary photography at International Center of Photography in New York. In 1995 she made her first trip to India, producing a story on female infanticide. In 1997 she returned to India and began her project on the prostitutes of Calcutta's red light district. Since 2000 she has conducted a series of photographic workshops with children of prostitutes in Calcutta.. In 2002 Zana created Kids with Cameras, a non-profit organization to empower marginalized children through learning the art of photography.

In Iran, capital punishment is carried out according to Islamic law, which gives the family of the victim ownership of the offender?s life. DAY BREAK - based on a compilation of true stories and shot inside Tehran's century-old prison - revolves around the imminent execution of Mansour, a man found guilty of murder. When the family of the victim does not show up on the appointed day of the sentencing, Mansour?s execution is postponed again and again. Stuck inside the purgatory of his own mind, he waits as time passes on without him, caught between life and death, retribution and forgiveness.

Hamid Rahmanian is a filmmaker and graphic designer. He holds a B.F.A. from the university of Tehran in Graphic Design and earned a M.F.A. in Computer Animation in 1997 from Pratt Institute in New York City. His 19 minute experimental short, AN I WITHIN, received Kodak?s ?Best Cinematography Award? and ?Best American Short? from the LA Int?l short film festival. Mr. Rahmanian has made three documentaries BREAKING BREAD (2000), SIR ALFRED OF CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT (2001) and SHAHRBANOO (2002). In 2003, Mr.Rahmanian co-established ARTEEAST. He works as the adviser of film programs for Cinema East, which is now in its 5th Season. DAY BREAK is his first feature film.

"The Seventh Day (6 min), Beta SP, Animation, 1996

An I Within (19 min), 35 mm, Live action/animation, 1999

Breaking Bread (54 min), vd, Documentary, 2000

Sir Alfred of Charles de Gaulle Airport (29 min), dv, Documentary, 2001

Shahrbanoo (57 min), dv, Documentary, 2002"

"Nobody sees and nobody is aware, a tremendous man is living in our midst.

""Remembering the past is also a dream"" ? Grandfather

""My grandfather Abraham, my mother's father, has been part of my life since infancy. I rediscovered my grandfather three years ago when making a film about my mother. He was 90. Since then I want to be close to him, part of him. I see my grandfather as a universal human character, ""aged and old"" to use his words, far removed from all definitions of time and place, while at the same time well grounded in the reality of present day life, living it and feeling its pain.

His face is like an engraved stone, with an eternal smile that never falters or is never eroded by the negativities of life in this world. My grandfather is big on blessings. He's always making some kind of blessing, even for those for whom he feels no love. Everyone is holy, even if we cannot see it, even if they themselves are unaware.

My grandfather is a man of words, and that's why he speaks very little. He knows and understands the value of words, be they written and signed or spoken, which may detract from their power. But when my grandfather says something, it really resonates. His words come from entirely different places, that are unknown, so content with themselves, precise and accurate, that it is hard to believe that human lips have uttered them.

For over three years now, I have been following my grandfather Abraham. I have been documenting my journey and our common journey out into the world in writing, photography, and most importantly, thirstily gulping it down into my soul.

The film is a journal in which I see my grandfather, my grandfather's journal, through which I let his voice be heard.

His voice has almost never been heard. His story has almost never been told. "

"""Reminding the forgotten, arousing the dormant""

3 years ago, Grandfather and I departed on a journey of revealing his forgotten self.

A journey of a man to his own self, to a part which even he, is unaware of its existence.

Grandfather, who was born in Iraq and had experienced countless transitions, had completely assimilated in Israeli western secular society.

?It is not the same man, it is a reincarnation.?

Grandfather is my spiritual guide.

The film reveals the hidden treasure within him and reconnects both him and his audience to the timeless human essence which is us. "

"Canadian/ Israeli filmmaker.

Graduate of the Film & Television department at the Sapir Academic College.

As a Filmmaker, he won many grants and prizes, among them the America?Israel Cultural Foundation special award, IRC Scholarship Committee (Canada?Israel) and he won the David Perlov Grant for the film ""SABA"".

Amram practices stills Photography as well as Cinematography and one of his main works was the catalogue for Dorit Jacoby's Exhibition ""Gate of Tears, Rain of Roses"",that was shown in the Vatican in 2001.

As well as having his photographs published in various travel and art magazines, he was awarded a Prize at the Dead Sea Photo Contest in October 2002."

A murder, just one news item like so many others. For police inspector Luca, busy helping his beautiful girlfriend Veronica move in with him, it should be nothing more than a routine call at an inconvenient time. But Luca is scrupulously devoted to his job and has a special sensitivity that sets him apart from his colleagues and their impassive cynicism. This is also what made Veronica want to commit herself so quickly to a relationship with him. She didn?t think twice about enthusiastically accepting to move from her native France to Italy to live with him.

Though still young and not yet put through significant tests, their love is strong and shows all the signs typical of a very intense, exclusive bond.

The call, however, puts Luca onto a case that immediately has a disturbing effect on him, as it absorbs him more than any case he has ever dealt with before: Valentina, a beautiful young woman, barely out of her teens, has been mysteriously murdered in her off-campus flat.

Roberta Torre was born in Milan in 1962. After studying philosophy, she attended the Milan Film School and the Paolo Grassi Dramatic Arts Academy. In 1991 she began to make shorts in video and film that were presented, and often awarded, at important Italian and international festivals. Though inspired by a form close to the documentary and anthropological research, Torre?s directing is often stylistically close to that of stage direction, one that combines a bent for the portrait with a special sensitivity to the musical element in film.

The director?s first feature, To Die for Tano (1997) was precisely a musical, the portrait of Tano Guarrasi, a small-time boss of the Palermo neighborhood of Vucciri. The film was received with great success by critics and the public for the original use of the narrative language.

In 2000 Torre ideally continued in this direction with South Side Story, again a musical. This was a reworking of the story of Romeo and Juliette reinterpreted with a multiracial slant. In 2002, she made Angela, a melodrama presented at the Cannes Film Festival in the section, Quinzaine des Realisateurs. This marked a radical change in style and a return to the realism of her first documentary portraits as the director brought back a classical narrative structure.

Mare Nero is Roberta Torre?s fourth film.

3 professional women go to the seaside, two of them (Miglio, Gianfelici) to comfort the other (Nano), who has been left by her husband. In the process of attempting to console Anna, the other two are dragged into the maelstrom of her sadness.

This work is more a tone poem narrative, in which the real subject, the impact of 9/11 on European and Italian intelligencia, is never mentioned, but lays in the background invisibly distorting the characters.

La Lunga Ombra was made in 5 days in an improvised manner, with no script whatsoever, only a vague thought to address the disquiet which pervades Europe in the wake of 9/11, a disturbance which works unacknowledged and of which little is ever said.

Born in Chicago in 1943, of a military family, Jost grew up in Georgia, Kansas, Japan, Italy, Germany, and, Virginia. Expelled from college in 1963, He began making 16mm films. He is self-taught. He has made some 20 shorts and 16 feature films, all of which he has conceived, written, photographed, directed, and edited. In 1965 Jost was imprisoned by US Federal authorities for 2 years and 3 months for refusal to cooperate with the Selective Service System. On release, he quickly became engaged in political activities, helping start the Chicago branch of what became NEWSREEL, the New Left film production and distribution group, as well as working for the draft and the Chicago Mobilization. Jost made his first feature-length film in 1974, and has since devoted to the making of a wide-ranging series of films, largely focused on specifically American topics, in form ranging from essays, to essay-fictions, to avant-garde and new narrative forms. His work has shawn widely in museums, film archives and festivals since 1975. In 1991, The MOMA in New York assembled and presented a complete retrospective of Jost's work encompassing 11 features and 5 programs of shorts.

"Yonghi Yang is a second generation Korean who was born and raised in Japan.

She was raised by parents who dedicated all of their lives to their ?home country? as leaders of General Association of Korean Residents.

Her three brothers have ?returned? to North Korea more than thirty years ago. They still live in Pyongyang thus her family is dispersed.

Why did her father and mother who cherished family send their sons to their ?home country?? Why do they continue to dedicate all of their lives this much to the home country?

She who wouldn't hope to cast away ?choices of life on her own will? under the name of ?system? and ?allegiance to home country? cannot accept ?her parents' choices.?

Feeling a strong sense of rejection, finally, she starts to talk repeatedly with her parents. The parents and a daughter accept each other?s different styles of lives and seek for a new relationship. When confronting father's death, the father and the daughter start to develop a new strong bond."

"Yonghi Yang, Film maker. As second-generation Korean Resident so called ?Zainichi,? Yang was born and raised in Osaka, Japan.

Graduated from Department of Literature, Korea University in Tokyo. Obtained MA from the graduate school of New School University in New York. Formerly a teacher, an actress, and a radio DJ.

From 1995 she started to introduce mainly documentary works of hers as an auteur.

Obtained MA in Media Studies at New School University Graduate School in New York, U.S.

After having returned to Japan in 2003, she resumed her activity in Japan."

"Tokyo at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Mao feels very insecure these days. She works as an editor in a publishing house specializing on books on cinema, but every day she feels she doesn?t have enough knowledge and experiences in her job. Recently, another headache has been added to her already-not-so-wonderful life: wherever she goes, she finds the same young man who immediately starts following her.

Yushin, a university student, joins the publishing house as a part-time worker. He studies films and is very happy working here, feeling he has joined the ?film industry? (or the adult world), even though his actual job is in most parts, just maintaining the books in stock. But outside of the job, he is frustrated with his girlfriend who always behaves childishly and always comes late to their dates.

Kurumi works as a ?Queen? in a Sado-Masochistic club; a profession she took because she fest she enjoyed beating men, but recently she rarely takes pleasure in her work. Every weekend, she meets an old classmate from her hometown, Masato in a park, with whom she seems to find not attraction, but relaxed moments. Unlike Kurumi who earns her own living, Maato has continued his studies and now is a graduate student. But Kurumi innocently considers him an intellectual unlike herself, and a future university professor, that?s seems not to be exactly what Masato thinks of himself?

Atsushi always carries a Polaroid camera and takes photos at everywhere he goes; not of the places he visits, but of his own face?

In the extremely urbanized contemporary metropolis which is Tokyo, the lives of those young people start to cross mysteriously with each other, and each of them will experience unexpected turns of their lives?"

"This film was created as a ?collective improvisation? with non-actors. Each participant had only the character loosely based on him/herself, and the stories have developed as improvisations along the way of filming, reacting to each other as well as to the surrounding environments: the reality of Tokyo where even private spaces like apartments are constantly invaded by sounds and noises from the public space outside. Most scenes were carefully composed as continuous, uninterrupted sequence shots. The desire was to capture the atmosphere as a whole; as slices, or fragments, of our contemporary urbanized reality, and to observe how we cope (or very often we cannot) with it.

Toshi Fujiwara, Tokyo, Dec. 2005"

Fujiwara Toshi, born on July 23, 1970 in Yokohama, grew up in Tokyo and Paris. He studied film sciences at Waseda University, Tokyo, and at the faculty for film and television at the University of Southern California. Bevor making films himself he worked as a film critic. WE CAN?T GO HOME AGAIN is his first full-length feature.

One day I was suddenly told that my mother had one or two years to live.

In the third years of her illness, I bought a small video camera innocently believing that she would recover.I dreamed of recording her TV or movie-like "miracle" recovery. but the reality of everyday life was nothing more than ordinary routine. All that my small camera recorded were the same things contained in ordinary home videos of ordinary families. On the contrary,as my mother's condition worsened and her suffering and sorrow increased,all I could do was watch over her closely.I didn't have the courage to level my camera at her. When pain and sorrow really started to take hold on my mother,and when she started to die,I was not able to record even a single shot.

It was only after her death that I first found the determination to begin filming.I realized that people left behind by death have to keep crawling forward even as they cry like babies.I also could not accept my mother's death unless I could find something comforting and meaningful in this pain and loss.

All those sad things I couldn't film might have been, in a way, things I didn't need to film, because even now the pain allows me to remember them clearly. More than that, the memories that I hold dear now probably would have slipped away if I hadn't recorded them on video-those monotonous, repetitive, but painful hours with my mother that video had transformed into sweet, gentle, ordinary happiness.

Born in 1966,Kato Haruyo graduated from the Department of Art Science in the Faculty of Art and Design at Tama Art University,and worked as the assistant of a still photographer.After two years with the Black Tent Theater company, her mother's illness brought her back to her hometown.She now lives in Gunma Prefecture.

From the director of ?Memories of Murder? comes Bong Joon-Ho's THE HOST, fresh from success in Cannes where Variety dubbed it ?arguably the hit of the festival?. This fantasy monster movie, which expertly mixes humour and horror, has broken box office records in its native Korea, taking the opening weekend record and the highest single-day admissions ever. THE HOST recently showed in the Director's Fortnight section of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and has been compared in its scare-quotient to both ?Jaws? and ?Alien?

Gang-du is a dim-witted man working at his father's tiny snack bar near the Han River. One day, Gang-du's one and only daughter Hyun-seo comes back from school irritated. She is angry at her uncle, Nam-il, who visited her school shamelessly drunk. Ignoring her father's excuses for Nam-il, Hyun-seo is soon engrossed in her aunt Nam-joo's archery tournament on TV.

Meanwhile, outside the snack bar, people are fascinated by an unidentified object hanging onto a bridge. In an instant, the object reveals itself as a terrifying creature turning the riverbank into a gruesome sea of blood. Amid the chaos, Hyun-seo is snatched up by the creature right before Gang-du's eyes. These unforeseen circumstances render the government powerless to act. But receiving a call of help from Hyun-seo, the once-ordinary citizen Gang-du and his family are thrust into a battle with the creature to rescue their beloved Hyun-seo.

Bong Joon-ho, born October 1969 is a South Korean film director and screenwriter. He is a graduate of the Korean Academy of Film Arts. Bong directed multiple critically-acclaimed short films before his feature film debut Barking Dogs Never Bite in 2000. He is probably best known for his 2003 film Memories of Murder, for which he won the South Korean film industry's Grand Bell Award for best film director.

"HOW MANY ROADS gives a special view on forty years of contemporary American history through the experiences of various fans of Bob Dylan. Dylan?s lyrics appear to have a sometimes funny, sometitmes dramatic, but always far-reaching impact on people?s lives and convictions.

This documentary is made up of 11 separate portraits of people whose lives, due to the influence of Dylan?s words, took a surprising or decisive turn. They seem to be very ordinary people: a teacher, an accountant, a housewife and a student. They are of various ages, religions and convictions. But they all have one thing in common: without Dylan they would be entirely different from what they now are. Each portrait is connected to a line in one of Dylan?s songs. The documentary is thus compiled like an album consisting of varying songs that nevertheless form a unity.

HOW MANY ROADS is a road movie through both todays? American landscape and the poetic landscape of Dylan?s songs."

Jos de Putter (1959) studied political science and literature, and worked several years as a film critic before he made his first documentary in 1993. IT?S BEEN A LOVELY DAY, about the last year of his parent?s work and life on their traditional farm, was hailed internationally as a film in the purest documentary tradition. One year later, SOLO, THE LAW OF THE FAVELA, focusing on the dreams of teenagers in the slums of Rio de Janeiro to become soccer stars, won the prestigious Joris Ivens Award at the Amsterdam Documentary Filmfestival. Many other awards followed for films as THE MAKING OF A NEW EMPIRE (1999, the Godfather-like story of a Chechen warlord), Dans, Grozny Dans (2002, following a tour of a Chechen children?s dance troupe) Brooklyn Stories and Alias Kurban Sa?d (2004, about five different families who claim to be the heirs of a mysterious writer). In 2005, de Putter was honored with a retrospective of all his films in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

"Ever since the earthquake of December 2003, Bam in Southern Iran is nothing but rubble and ruin. Not only have its walls crumbled, exposing kitchens and courtyards, the hearts of its people too, appear to have fallen open. Like a ghost, the camera drifts through the town,

recording the everyday events of Bam?s inhabitants and picking up the intimate, inner conversations they have with their dear departed. In doing so, the film also touches upon the relationship between men and women in Iran and their relationship to God. Above all, ?Voices of Bam? is an ode to the indefatigable life-force embodied by the people of this town. The film is inspired by photographs that were recovered from the town?s debris...the only tangible mementoes left of life before the earthquake."

"Aliona van der Horst (1970) was born in Moscow, Russia, and grew up in the Netherlands. After she graduated Cum Laude at the University of Amsterdam in Russian Language and Literature in 1993, she started studying documentary filmmaking at the Dutch Film and Television Academy. Her graduation film ?The Lady with the White Hat? (1997) was awarded several times, nationally and internationally. Since then Aliona made various documentaries for Dutch public broadcasters: Chained (1997), The Little Red Box (1998), After the Spring of ?68 (2001), winner of a Dutch Academy Award for best documentary, Hermitaz-niks (2003), winner of a Dutch Academy Award for best Cultural Program and Relieved (2004).

Maasja Ooms (1968) studied Photography at the Dutch Academy of Arts and the Dutch Film and Television Academy. Maasja and Aliona have been working together since Aliona?s graduation film The Lady with the White Hat. She was DoP for many documentaries since. In 2003 she also started co-directing documentaries."

"Naples is a city with many crowded pour neighborhoods . Tucked into these areas are ?ricevitorie?, small gambling offices where people go daily to play the lottery.

Visitors do not pick their lotto numbers randomly, instead their numbers have personal associations with happy or tragic events they experienced; for them there is a direct link between the chosen numbers and their attempt to change destiny. All daily events seem to have meaning for the Neapolitans, and are transformed on to the lotto form. In Dreaming By Numbers, some regular visitors to a local gambling office are portrayed and tell their personal stories in wich faith is interwoven into the rest of their lives. The intimate images of the small office run by two sisters, Maria and Angela, is combined with vivid street scenes. The result is a balance between realism and magic.

The people portrayed in this film keep hunting for luck:: some of them play the same numbers during a lifetime, because of the special meaning for them. They all believe in numbers, and in their power to make their life change."

"My starting point is the Neapolitan belief in numbers.

Why do we believe in something? The belief in numbers first came into existence and was handed down in order to control fear. While waiting for some magic to happen the Neapolitans are surrounded by daily reality: life in a chaotic city, unemployment, personal tragedies. So the lotto is not a Fremdk?rper, something separate from everyday reality. On the contrary, it is an expression of the culture and of the spirit of the Neapolitans: the game of chance expresses the need for hope in a town devoid of hope. The numbers are woven with everyday life just like ordinary activities such as sleeping and eating."

"Anna Bucchetti was born in Milan in 1963 where she studied at the Film and Tv Academy (CFP) as lighting cameraman.

In 1992 she moved to Amsterdam where she started working on human interests items

for local ?multicultural?television. Between 1994 and 2003 she wrote and directed

several documentaires (for the youth serial ?YOY?, for VPRO and NPS Broadcast).

In 2004 she was chief editor for Educational television (Etv) in Amsterdam by Frontmedia. "

Ventura, a Cape Verdean laborer living in the outskirts of Lisbon, is suddenly abandoned by his wife Clotilde. Ventura feels lost between the dilapidated old quarter where he spent the last 34 years and his new lodgings in a recently-built lowcost housing complex. All the young poor souls he meets seem to become his own children.

Pedro Costa was born in Lisbon and studied at the Escola Superior de Cinema. He made his feature directorial debut with The Blood, which played at the Festival in 1990. His subsequent features include Casa de Lava (94), Bones (97), In Vanda's Room (00) and O? g?t votre sourire enfoui? (co-director, 01). Colossal Youth (06) is his most recent film.

"1987 Cartas a J?lia (short)

1990 O Sangue

1994 Casa de Lava

1997 Ossos

2000 No Quarto da Vanda

2001 O? g?t votre Sourire enfoui?

2002 6 Bagatelas (short)

2003 The End of a Love Affair (short)

2006 Juventude em Marcha

2006 Ne Change Rien"

Two young mobsters get hold of a case full of heroin belonging to a local well established and respected gangster (Nikita Mikhalkov). The young neophytes try to cheat him not quite understanding how tough a man he really is. A top-flight ensemble of popular Russian actors creates a collective portrait of the Russian Mafia of 1990?s with their macho attitude, raspberry jackets, short haircuts and finger thick golden neck chains and penchant to shoot one another with reckless abandon.

Director, scriptwriter, producer ALEXEY BALABANOV was born in Sverdlovsk in 1959. Graduated from Foreign Languages College in Gorky and Director?s Courses in Moscow. He made two documentaries and moved to St. Petersburg where he directed his first feature film.

"(as director)

1988 The Day of the Angel

1990 The Day of the Spirit

1995 The Time of Sorrow Has Not Come Yet

1995 The Russian Idea"

"In the state of Judea in southern Africa, violence, poverty and sectarianism are endemic. The neighbouring Alliance has invaded to restore ?peace? at gunpoint. Bloody street battles accompany the neighbouring dictatorship?s incursion into its weaker satellite. Promises of a transition to open democratic rule accompany summary executions and brutal massacres.

As the civil war reaches a new level, a divine child is born to a lowly couple. As he grows and witnesses the inhumanity of the world he lives in, his angelic guardians offer him an escape to the heavens. He refuses. This is his world and he must try to save it from the work of evil men and from the darkness working through them.

As an adult, he travels to the capital, gathering followers from the armed factions of rebels that crisscross the land. He demands that his followers give up their guns and confront their corrupt rulers with a vision of non-violent protest and solidarity. Inevitably, he attracts the attention of the Judean tribal leaders who have struck a power-sharing deal with the aloof Governor Pilate. The Son of Man must be brought down and destroyed. It should be another simple ?disappearance? like any other?

Son of Man was filmed in the township of Khayelitsha and on the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This new and adventurous interpretation of the New Testament was filmed by Mark Dornford-May in collaboration with the pioneering Dimpho Di Kopane theatre troupe and choir network. As with his first film, U-Carmen eKhayelitsha? the classic Carmen opera translated into the Xhosa tongue?the original yet traditional dance, songs and rhythms infuse this film with the life and spirit that really cuts its own voice to speak. "

"Mark Dornford-May worked in theater in England for 25 years and founded Broomhill Opera. Mesmerized by the talent he had witnessed in South Africa, he returned in 2000 with Charles Hazlewood to create a new theatre company in Cape Town. That troupe would become Dimpho Di Kompane

U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, Dornford-May?s first film, won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival 2005.

Son of Man is Dornford-May?s second film"

Kim, a director, receives an unexpected phone call from his cousin, Il-kyu, who tells him his mother will soon meet his father, after having been separated from each other during the Korean War. Kim returns to his birthplace in search of his father. During the trip, he meets a woman he will later see again in his hometown. She is searching for her younger sister, who disappeared years earlier. The film?s rigorous style, slow rhythm, long silences and cold atmosphere work to obtain moments of pure lyricism and offer a reflection on cinema, love, the division of the country, memory and the deepest wounds of each human being.

Jeon Soo-il studied theatre and film at Kyungsung University in Pusan, and film direction at the ESRA film school in Paris. Jeon's d?but feature, Wind Echoing in My Being (1997) screened in Cannes' Un Certain Regard programme in 1997. The Bird Who Stops in the Air (1999) received the Grand Prize at Fribourg and the NETPAC Award at Pusan in 2000.

1961 wurde S?dkoreas Regierung durch einen von General Park Chung Hee gef?hrten Milit?rputsch entmachtet. Danach f?hrte Park das Land 18 Jahre mit eiserner Hand und war wegbereitend f?r Koreas Aufstieg zum modernen Industrieland. Im Oktober 1979 wurde er ermordet. Am fraglichen Tag, machte Park sich einen sch?nen Abend mit Wein, Weib und japanischen Gesang. Mit am Tisch, der Chef des Koreanischen Geheimdienstes Kim, Chefsekret?r Yang und der dicke Bodyguard Cha. Einer davon sollte sich im Verlaufe des Abends dazu entscheiden, den Pr?sidenten zu erschie?en. Sang-Soo Ims Politthriller, hat in S?dkorea heftige Diskussion ausgel?st. Es mussten schlie?lich auf Befehl des Obersten Gerichtshofs insgesamt vier Minuten Archivmaterial am Anfang und Ende des Films entfernt werden. Trotzdem ist der Thriller, teils schwarze Kom?die, ein bis in die Nebenrollen bestens besetztes, hochunterhaltsames St?ck Politfiktion.

Born in 1962 in Seoul, he studied Sociology at Yonsei University. His father was a leading film critic in the 1980s and in 1989 he went on to study film for one year at the Korean film Academy. That same year he worked as assistant director for Park Jongwon's KURO ARIRANG (1989). He then worked as assistant director to the great Korean director Im Kwontaek (Cannes best director CHIHWASEON) for THE GENERAL'S SON I & II.

He made his feature-debut as writer-director in 1998 with GIRLS NIGHT OUT, the story of 3 single women and their active sex lives. His next film, TEARS, which he also wrote, told the hard story of misfit and wayward Korean youth. His third film, A GOOD LAWYER?S WIFE which threw a punch at Korean society with its biting depiction of a disintegrating upper middle class family was not only embraced by the Korean public but also earned the film international acclaim especially through its selection in competition for the Venice Film Festival in 2003.

His forthright critique of Korea?s mainstream society and its rules and values has truly established him as perhaps the most controversial Korean filmmaker who challenges the norm. In his most recent feature project, THE PRESIDENT?S LAST BANG, he succeeds in giving a cinematically outstanding and mature approach to one of the most shocking incidents in modern Korean history.

One hot summer night, Tae-jung receives a call from Seung-young, an old junior high classmate. They were reunited when Seung-young entered the army under him. Though Tae-jung has since been discharged, Seung-young is still serving. Out on leave, Seung-young asks to meet. However, Tae-jung seems uncomfortable around him. Near the end of his army service, Tae-jung, a sergeant, took Seung-young under his wing because he was an old classmate when he entered the army as a private. Seung-young was having a hard time adjusting to army life where it is all about orders and obedience. But even as time passes, Seung-young is unable to adjust to army routine and he becomes more and more isolated from his fellow soldiers. Even Tae-jung is constantly put in an awkward spot because of him. Then Tae-jung is discharged and with it goes his safety net. So Seung-young slowly starts to change?

Mr. Yoon Jong-bin was born in 1979 in Pusan, Korea. He graduated from Film Studies Dept., Chung-Ang University. His short film <Identification of a Man> was awarded Best Comedy Award from The 3rd Mise-en-scene Short Film Festival(2004).

This film ?The Unforgiven? is his debut feature film.

2004 Identification of a Man 16mm/ color/ 32min./ short fiction

The 3rd Mise-en-scene Short Film Festival, Best Comedy Award

The forgotten story of the women who killed their husbands The Angelmakers is an observational portrait of the sleepy village of Nagyrev in rural Hungary. We meet its inhabitants, who share with us their daily life as well as their memories of the village's tainted past. We gradually come to understand the extent of the 'arsenic murders' which took place in 1929, when a large group of women were held responsible for poisoning their husbands with the so-called 'flypaper' method. An intriguing web of stories unfolds through the characters' memories which recapture old but ever-lasting tales of life, death and the struggle between the sexes.

Astrid Bussink (Eibergen, 1975) studied several disciplines at the Academy of fine Arts, AKI in Enschede. She graduated with a project consisting of an art magazine and organisation 'Het Ei'. Besides her studies she was active in several art organisations and the local radio.

After her studies she was involved in the fireworks explosions of Enschede and had to flee her burning house. This experience and the aftermath of the disaster she closely followed and documented, from a personal as well as a creative point of view. This is where her fascination for documentaries developed.She moved to Amsterdam and for several years worked as a picture editor for the glossy business magazine Quote. However, it eventually became clear that her real interest lay in film-making. She studied the technical aspects of filmmaking at Open Studio in Amsterdam. To deepen her knowledge and ideas she consequently did a Masters in Film at the ECA. During this master she stayed in Budapest for four months to work together with the Budapest Filmschool (ZSFE) to shoot her first documentary 'The Angelmakers' that has won several prizes (First Appearance Award IDFA, Amsterdam, Best young author award, Zagreb, Best short Documentary, European Independent Fimlfestival Paris and more) and is still screening on many, many festivals.

Her second short documentary is called R?ckenlage / Upside Down about the mysterious flight of deputy F?hrer Rudolf Hess to Scotland. It will be screening at Edinburgh Filmfestival and New Zealand Documentary Filmfestival, among others.

Astrid Bussink now lives and works in Amsterdam where she just finished another short documentary 'The 9 lives of my car' (premiere Dutch Filmfestival october 2006) and is currently working on a feature length documentary.

In her work as an artist and filmmaker, Astrid is interested in the theme of escape. She is intrigued by how people make certain decisions that appear incomprehensible outside the specific contexts they were taken in, why do people make certain choices, how do they handle limiting and disturbing circumstances and how far will they go to escape, these are reoccurring themes in her work.

"In rural Slovenia, Pero (Gregor Bakovic) is a sensitive intelligent man in his mid-thirties who lives close to death. He works writing and giving the speeches of the town?s funerals. These are not mere eulogies for the deceased, since Pero consciously or unconsciously entwines his own perception of the course of events and his life philosophy into them.

Pero lives with his father, Dedo, and his two sisters Ida, who is deaf and dumb, and Vilma who has a son. Pero?s neighbour, Shooki , is also his best friend and a very close member to Pero?s family. Gravehopping is a film about the ups and downs of our protagonists' destinies and about their search for warmth and love in the absurd chaos that is life.

The story of the film and its essence establishes itself through the prism of their interpersonal relationships. While Ida (Pero?s younger sister) falls for Shooki, Vilma tries to cope with a no-good husband. Meanwhile Pero seeks to win the heart of local girl Renata, whereas the solitude and sadness Dedo feels since he widowed are the cause of his frequent by but farcically inept, suicide attempts. The film focuses on the basic force of human existence; Fear. Out of fear from death stems the craving for eternity, while out of fear from life stems the desire for security, warmth and love.

Love is the only drug powerful enough to overcome death. The story of the film and its essence establishes itself through the prism of the interpersonal relationships of this small community. Although the film sets off with a comical tone it leads up to a tragic finale that leaves both Pero, and the viewer, literally speechless.

"

"Born in 1966, Slovenia, Jan studied archaeology, receiving his degree in 1999.

Since 1998 he has written the screenplays for shorts, feature films and TV series. His first written work was for the award winning short ?Robbery of the Century? (Rop stoletja) . Thereafter, Jan played the leading role as well as co-writing with director Janez Burger the award-winning film Idle Running (V leru) in 1999.

His 2001 first feature film debut Bread and Milk ( Kruh in Mleko ) won the Golden Lion of the Future Best First Film at Venice Film Festival . "

Santiago has never been the main character of anything... neither of theatre nor of cinema... not even of his own life. But Santiago had never thought that to lodge his thirtyish son Guillermo in his house for some days would change his life so much?.

"Vete de mi" is a "familiar" mask dance, a dance of encounters and mix-ups between two congenital selfish men: a compulsive liar that is able to alter the emotional state of relatives surrounding him, and a supporting actor who has not been successful in his working life and who discovers that his whole life is a lye .., it is a satiric and bitter comedy about how to arrive to our fifties, lose our job and find our son, but desire just the opposite.

V?ctor Garc?a Le?n

He was born in 1976, and although he has a journalistic education, V?ctor Garc?a Le?n has participated like an actor, production assistant, script and camera apprentice in many filming.

He directed the short ?El Gilipollas? (awarded in various festivals). In the year 2001 he directed his first film, called ?M?s Pena que Gloria?, where he was also co-scriptwriter with Jon?s Trueba. This film has participated in many festivals (Chicago, Los Angeles, Toulouse, San Sebastian, Malaga, etc.) obtaining the Best Actor Award in the Malaga Festival

Man was made to be happy for simple reasons and unhappy for even simpler ones ? just as he is born for simple reasons and dies for even simpler ones... Isa and Bahar are two lonely figures dragged through the ever-changing climate of their inner selves in pursuit of a happiness that no longer belongs to them.

Born in Istanbul in 1959. After graduating from Bosphorus University, he studied filmmaking for two years at the Mimar Sinan University of Istanbul. In 1995 he directed the short film Koza which was in competition at the Festival de Cannes. His feature film debut, Kasaba, won the Caligari Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1998. He also directed Mayis Sikintisi (Clouds of May) which was shown in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in 2000. In 2003 his film Uzak (Distant) was awarded the Grand Prix and Best Actor prize at Cannes.

Pod is a migrant worker from up-country who drifts from job to job: chopping his finger off in a sardine factory, becoming a security guard and eventually a taxi driver. He meets Jin, a maid who has her nose perpetually buried in a mysterious white book written in a foreign language that she dreams of someday understanding. Pod is smitten. But the Jin becomes obsessed with a hippie westerner and the environmental movement. Somehow, Pod becomes a celebrity because he is the only guy in Bangkok without a tail. If he grows one, he?ll just be one of the crowd, a ?Citizen Dog? alluded to in the title.

After training at Silpakorn University, Bangkok's most important art school, Wisit Sasanatieng worked as a commercials' director. He wrote scripts for his friend and colleague Nonzee Nimibutr, including for Nang nak (1999). ?Tears of the Black Tiger (2000)?, his directing d?but, is the first Thai film ever selected officially for the Cannes Film Festival, where it was bought for many countries.

"Mah nakorn (2004) aka Citizen Dog

Fah talai jone (2000) aka Tears of the Black Tiger "

In Thailand, karaoke is a favourite recreational pass-time, and innumerable karaoke video-clips use the sea as decorative background. Santi Taepanich watches one of these karaoke clips being shot: in front of a giant poster, a young model lolls around: but, much to the photographer's fury, she refuses to spread her legs. The next model is a transsexual who talks about the loneliness brought about by his operation. In the background, we see a white, softly shining sandy beach dotted with palm trees. On the glossy paper and beneath the spotlight, its beauty is similar to that of the model: artificial, yet convincing. Under the surfae, both conceil their wounded and sad stories.

Young Jean Berlot?s mother has died in the lunatic asylum at Charenton. On his way home from the funeral he spends a night at a roadside inn. There he has a vivid dream ? the same dream he always has in times of stress, in which two hospital orderlies in white coats try to force him into a straitjacket. After a violent struggle, Berlot always wakes up to find that the room has been completely demolished. Another guest at the inn, the Marquis, witnesses the nightmare and its results. He pays for the damage and invites Berlot to his castle. On the way he hears Berlot?s story: when his father died his mother, who was much younger, went mad with grief. Since then Jean, who takes after her, has been haunted by the idea that he too will end up in an asylum ? hence the nightmares.

For the screenplay of ?Lunacy? I have borrowed ideas from two stories by Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial and The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether. These ideas are incorporated into a plot which otherwise owes nothing to Poe. One of the main characters, the Marquis, was inspired by the Marquis de Sade, from whose writings I have lifted several passages . ?Lunacy? will be a live action feature film; animation will be used only sparingly, chiefly in the dream and surreal sequences. Although the story appears to be set in early 19th C France, the film contains many deliberate anachronisms which remind us that this is an allegory of the modern world. And what better setting for this world than a lunatic asylum? If I had to attach a genre label to the film, it would be ?philosophical horror?. Its theme is absolute freedom, civilizational repression and manipulation.

"Born on September 4th, 1934

His studies at the College of Applied Arts in Prague in the Stage Design Department and at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts in the Department of Puppetry (directing and stage design) largely predetermined his own creative development.

In the Laterna Magica Theatre he experimented with some film procedures, including special effects, for the first time. He made his first film in 1964 at the Kr?tk? film Studio in Prague. The creative diversity of Jan ?vankmajer, however, exceeds the limits of film. The artist is active in autonomous visual expression, which he has practised since the end of the 1950s. His literary expression consists mainly of scenarios and tactile poems, while his theoretical activity has focused on research into the nature of tactile phenomena and the imagination. A considerable part of the imaginative strength of Jan ?vankmajer consists of blasphemous black humour and a playful viewpoint which, together with an extraordinary sensibility and a penetrating critical intellect, form the determining facets of his creative personality. His work, whether film, visual, or literary, is connected with the collective activities of the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists. "

"The Last Trick

Posledn? trik pana Schwarcewalldea a pana Edgara

Czechoslovakia, 1964, colour, 12 mins

Kr?tk? Film (Prague)

J.S.Bach - Fantasy in G Minor

J.S.Bach - fantasia g-moll

Czechoslovakia, 1965, black and white, Cinemascope, 10 mins

Kr?tk? Film (Prague)

A Game with Stones

Spiel mit Steinen

Hra s kameny

Austria, 1965, colour, 8 mins

Studio A (Linz)"

?A Snake?s Tail,? written, acted and directed by Bijan Daneshmand is a film about the quest of a successful Iranian businessman for his roots, his friendship with a Mullah, his addiction to opium and his eventual spiritual awakening. The film is set in London and is about the relationship between Kami, a forty year old businessman whose father has just passed away, and Agha, the Mullah or Priest who conducts the burial ceremony. The story shows how Agha, an opium addict with a penchant for Persian Sufi poetry, takes Kami, who is distraught by the death of his father, under his wings. During their weekly meetings Agha not only exposes Kami to the beautiful poetry of Rumi and Hafiz but to the euphoric pleasures of opium, the preferred drug of Iranians since time immemorial.

Bijan Daneshmand Writer, Director, Actor. Lives in London, England. Trained at the London Centre of Theatre Studies 2001, and commenced his artistic career in 2001 as an actor. As Producer and as Director: 2004- Produced and acted in 20 Fingers This film won the Best Film Digitale at the Venice Film Festival 2004, The Spirit of Freedom Prize at the Bahamas International Film Festival 2004, and Best Film at Barcelona Di, screened at over 30 festivals worldwide. 2005- Wrote and directed debut feature A Snake?s Tail

?Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn?t give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire? - Slavoj Zizek

THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made. Serving as presenter and guide is the charismatic Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst. With his engaging and passionate approach to thinking, Zizek delves into the hidden language of cinema, uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves.

THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA offers an introduction into some of Zizek's most exciting ideas on fantasy, reality, sexuality, subjectivity, desire, materiality and cinematic form. Whether he is untangling the famously baffling films of David Lynch, or overturning everything you thought you knew about Hitchcock, Zizek illuminates the screen with his passion, intellect, and unfailing sense of humour. THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA applies Zizek's ideas to the cinematic canon, in what The Times calls 'an extraordinary reassessment of cinema.'

The film cuts its cloth from the very world of the movies it discusses; by shooting at original locations and on replica sets, it creates the uncanny illusion that Zizek is speaking from within the films themselves. Described by The Times as 'the woman helming this Freudian inquest,' director Sophie Fiennes' collaboration with Slavoj Zizek illustrates the immediacy with which film and television can communicate genuinely complex ideas. Says Zizek: "My big obsession is to make things clear. I can really explain a line of thought if I can somehow illustrate it in a scene from a film. THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA is really about what psychoanalysis can tell us about cinema."

THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA is constructed in three parts. Says Fiennes: 'The form of the Guide is a deliberately open one. There are three parts, but there could be more. Zizek's method of thinking is exciting because it?s always building. Things relate forwards and backwards and interconnect into a mind-altering network of ideas. The film?s title is something of a McGuffin ? just a way to get you into this network.?

Sophie Fiennes received no formal education. She worked as an apprentice to film director Peter Greenaway from 1987 - 1992, managed the Michael Clark dance company from 1992-1994 and began making films in 1999. Fiennes' films play with notions of performance and identity. She is widely acclaimed for her unique observational eye as well as her strong sense of cinematic form. Films include Lars From 1-10 (1999) The Late Michael Clark (2000) Because I Sing ( 2001) and Hoover Street Revival ( which was released theatrically in the UK 2003 by Metro Tartan and Tartan USA ). She received a NESTA fellowship and The Pervert's Guide To Cinema was born out of research during this fellowship period.

For a number of years last decade, a British conman, Alan Conway, lived fairly large: ambling around London society pretending to be the great Stanley Kubrick. He was aided in no small part by the filmmaker's legendary reclusiveness, which ensured that few ordinary mortals knew what he looked or sounded like. Played here by John Malkovich, Conway is a compelling rogue, so confident in his deception that he barely bothered to learn his own supposed filmography (or even see Kubrick's films in the first place) - and his exploits are detailed with a cool, picaresque delight: not for nothing is this subtitled 'A true ... ish story.' Packed with insider film references, from the visuals to the score (both the screenwriter and director worked for some time with the real Stanley K), this is a study

of celebrity, deception and good old-fashioned grifting

BRIAN COOK (Director / Producer), after a distinguished career as an assistant director and producer, is making his directorial debut. His thirty-year working relationship with Stanley Kubrick made Colour Me Kubrick the perfect choice?Cook worked as first assistant director on Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), and Eyes Wide Shut (1996); he was also co-producer on Eyes Wide Shut. He worked as first assistant director on five Michael Cimino films, including Heaven?s Gate (1980), Year of the Dragon (1985), and Desperate Hours (1990); Mel Brooks? History of the World Part I (1981); Casualties of War, the 1989 Brian de Palma film; Robert Benton?s Billy Bathgate (1991); and two films directed by Sean Penn?The Crossing Guard (1995) and The Pledge (2001 Cook also worked as production supervisor on Ridley Scott?s Academy Award-winner Gladiator (2000).

"The wind that Shakes the Barley", winner of the Palme d' Or of this year's Cannes Film Festival, tells the story of Damien, whose young career as a doctor turns into the fervid and impeteous life of a revolutionist. He joins the allies of his brother Teddy who start campaigning against the British Crown after the Irish Easter Rising and the globally ignored independence of Ireland. Being armed but nevertheless defenceless, numerous but nevertheless too few, passionate but nevertheless vulnerable, they force their only chance - the guerilla war against a world power - right into the inferno. But the weapons that hit their targets yesterday, will be exhausted by the next day. The questionable peace treaty with the British disrupts not only the resistance movement, but also breaks up the brothers Damien and Teddy. Far too late they understand that their adversary has quickly realized how to benefit from the individual interests of the insurrectionists. Radical confrontation vanishes into inner and outer disruption; Damien and Teddy find themselves opposed to each other as deadly enemies in the following civil war. Only Damien's love for Sinead seems to have lost nothing of it's purity. Ken Loach created a visually exceeding movie full of emotional intensity. Aesthetically located between poetic transfiguration and realistic severity he presents human tragedies resulting from resistance and overthrow in a time where revolt and independence appear to be impossible.

Born on June 17th, 1936 in Nuneaton (UK).

1965 : Up the Junction (Tv)

1966 : Cathy Come Home (Tv)

1968 : Poor Cow

1970 : Kes

1972 : Family Life

1974/76 : Days of Hope

1978 : Black Jack

1980 : Looks and Smiles

1985 : Fatherland

1990 : Hidden Agenda

1991 : Riff-Raff

1993 : Raining Stones

1994 : Ladybird Ladybird

1995 : Land and Freedom

1996 : Carla's Song

1998 : My Name is Joe

2000 : Bread & Roses

2001 : The Navigators

2002 : SWEET SIXTEEN

2002 : 11'09'01 (CM/S)

2003 : AE FOND KISS (JUST A KISS)

2004 : TICKETS

In BACKSEAT, a 'coming of age late' story about prolonged adolescence, two old friends flee New York City on a three-day road trip to Montreal to escape their problems and meet the great Donald Sutherland. Between running drugs and meeting a man who only communicates through instant messaging, they run head-on into the always lingering problem of real life. Directed by award-winning commercials director, Bruce van Dusen (who wrote and directed the Sundance hit COLD FEET) and written by and starring Josh Alexander, BACKSEAT is an off-beat and refreshing comedy about generation x as it struggles through prolonged adolescence and into adulthood. With a cast of truly wonderful up-and-comers (Will Janowitz from The Sopranos, Rob Bogue from Guiding Light, Aubrey Dollar from Fox's Point Pleasant) and featuring a soundtrack with some of the biggest indie acts currently playing the US music scene, BACKSEAT is that rare gem at film festivals - an entertaining, and ultimately moving snapshot of a few regular folks struggling to make sense of their lives and what they want from them.

Things are hard enough for the Schaffer family of Bittersweet Place, Long Island. Pappy, the widowed patriarch and his hapless son-in-law run a local car service that?s seen better days. His two adult daughters live at home in rooms they knew as children?posters from out-dated rock bands fading on the walls. Their neighborhood is changing, the insular town developing. Pappy idealizes the past, nostalgic for a simpler time. But when Paulie, the youngest daughter, stops taking her lithium and Pappy discovers he is ill, things quickly spiral out of control. Bittersweet Place is a portrait of a family in crisis, learning to love and survive. Troubled characters fighting fear and uncertainty--trying to overcome their own selfishness and xenophobia--people who know no boundaries, bumping and clawing furiously at each other?s lives. With empathy and humor, this story describes the messy production of a family, the burden and the intensity of feeling towards those we love.

ALEXANDRA BRODSKY --- WRITTER/DIRECTOR/PRODUCER Alexandra received her MFA from The Yale School of Art. She is an adjunct instructor at Long Island University. Alexandra has directed two short films, Didactic Encounter, based on the play by Elizabeth Benjami and Rabbi Rick and the Hamburger Choo-Choo. Both films have been screened at several international film festivals. Bittersweet Place is her first feature-length debut.

Danielson: a Family Movie is a documentary about unbridled creativity vs. accessibility, Christian faith vs. popular culture, underground music vs. survival, and family vs. individuality. The film follows Daniel Smith, an eccentric musician and visual artist, as he leads his four siblings and best friend to indie-rock stardom. Beginning in 1994 when the youngest band member was 10 years old, the Danielson Famile performs in white, vintage nurse costumes to symbolize the healing power of the Good News, a recurring subject matter. Though tepidly received by the Christian music world, the South Jersey farmland-bred clan is widely embraced by the mainstream independent music community, written about in Rolling Stone, Spin, the New York Times and elsewhere as an outsider curiosity backed up by innovative, experimental music. But as with other family acts, and particularly those that don't make much money, members of the band begin to seek out their own paths as they go through college and Daniel eventually faces the struggle to become viable as a solo act. With production starting in 2002, at a high water mark for the band, all the drama is played out before the camera making Danielson: a Family Movie both engaging and entertaining. Collage, direct cinema, animation and memorable performances all contribute to this thoughtful and thought-provoking spectacle.

"JL Aronson?s own documentary and experimental film work includes ""Senior Picture"" (distributed on the Kill Rock Stars ?Starter Set? DVD) and the feature documentary, ""Punk Rock/ Heavy Metal Karaoke"" (2001). He is also the founder of Creative Arson Productions, creating TV commercials, marketing videos and full-length programs for the Village Voice, Siren Music Festival, Central Park Summerstage, Coney Island, and Wired Magazine, among many others. A feature documentary about pigeon fanciers in a changing Brooklyn landscape will be released in 2007. "

Encompassing a single, fateful evening in the sprawling metropolis of Sao Paulo, Brazil, JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT is a gritty, crime thriller which centers around an illicit transaction gone awry?Two Americans in exile?Rosso (Scott Glenn) and his son, Paul (Brendan Fraser)?have been carving out a living of sorts, operating a run-down nightclub-brothel. But, they both harbor dreams of getting out of the racket once and for all. One night, it seems their prayers are answered when a customer leaves behind a suitcase containing the means for them to change their fates. Rosso will take his beautiful, young wife Angie (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and their 5 year-old son Lazare to start over in a new city, far away. Paul will escape his mounting debts, an escalating coke habit, and finally be rid of his father (who he despises and blames for all of his problems). All will depend on one person?a Nigerian immigrant named Wemba (Mos Def)?who must make his way safely, trafficking the cash through the perilous, nocturnal underworld of Sao Paulo.

Eric Eason is a New York City-based filmmaker whose first feature Manito won the Special Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and 14 other awards at festivals around the world, including the American Express Emerging Filmmaker Award at the 2002 Tribeca Film Festival. Manito, released theatrically in 2003, went on to win the Gotham Award and receive three Independent Spirit nominations.

Julia Barker is late for work at the Paradise Bingo, again. Struggling to make ends meet and to raise her daughters, Julia suppresses her own needs and desires to support her family. But the headaches, excruciating migraines, keep coming.Inside her splitting mind, disturbing visions erupt: water, rafters and then the blinding white windows of a warehouse sized room. The space is menacing, mysterious and seductive. The visions intensify and soon there are signs. Julia knows that she must find the room. Desperate, she robs the Bingo hall, abandons her family and flies to New York. Her pilgrimage has begun.

Kyle has directed two documentaries: AMERICAN COWBOY, a ?98 Student Academy Award winner, and UNIVERSITY INC. (?99), a doc about the corporatization of the largest university in America. Kyle is also the editor of the Sundance award-winning film MANITO (?02), and the PBS documentaries ARE THE KIDS ALRIGHT (?04) and LEARNING TO SWALLOW (?05).. He calls Austin, Texas home, and ROOM marks his feature narrative film debut.

"In TELL ME DO YOU MISS ME, the four members of the celebrated New York-based indie-rock band LUNA confront the ceiling of their ambition, the harsh realities of their modest success, and their conflicted feelings about each other as they embark on their final world tour and uncertain futures.

Laced with moments of both humor and melancholia, TELL ME DO MISS ME earnestly exposes the underbelly of a touring rock band in their final days together.

Supported sonically with Luna's dreamy catalog of indie-pop and visually with lush travelogue footage with adventurous stops in England, Japan, and Spain, TELL ME DO YOU MISS ME is an elegy for an era."

"Matthew Buzzell is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker.

Matthew received his M.F.A. in Directing from the American Film Institute. Films include WHAT A GIRL WANTS (2001), Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew (2002). Putting The River In Reverse, is a document of the collaboration between music legends Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint as they embark on the first major recording sessions to take place in New Orleans post-Katrina.

Matthew?s most recently completed project, Companeras, tells the story of America?s first female Mariachi band. Currently, Matthew is in post-production with his debut narrative feature, a dark comedy starring Saturday Night Live cast-member Chris Parnell and Napolean Dynamite?s Diedrich Bader. The film is called Sunny and Share Love You."

"A meditation on the US/Mexico border in an age of homeland insecurity. A 2000 mile journey along the US/Mexico border reveals a geography of aspiration and insecurity. Brown considers the border as a landscape, at once physical, historical, and political.

"

"?To describe myself as documentary filmmaker is to own up to a troubled profession, what with its unfortunate aspiring to Truth and Objectivity. I?ve tried to cope with this by personalizing my films, insinuating my own voice and disavowing any pose of authority or conclusiveness. More than that, I?m interested in moving the documentary toward something like a metaphysics of fact, where fact materializes for a moment, only to dissolve into daydreams and melancholy and goosebumps. I find myself drawn again and again to the same spaces: those wide open, inbetween spaces; landscapes of abandoned things; border zones and landscapes of transition, whether on the far edges of Las Vegas suburban sprawl, or along the fence line of abandoned missile silos in North Dakota. I?m drawn to the drama of transits and transitions played out on landscapes like these. I find myself drawn to the uncanny, too: UFOs and crop circles and ghost stories. The uncanny short-circuits the conclusiveness of our daily lives, which is something I like about it. I?m not sure if the uncanny has some special access to truth, but the uncanny and the true both are spooky. Both haunt us, hovering close by but just out of reach.?

Bill Brown"

"Bill Brown is a filmmaker from the ?Paris of the Plains,? Lubbock, Texas. He has made several short experimental documentaries about the dusty corners of the North American landscape. Along with filmmaker Tom Comerford, Brown created the Lo Fi Landscapes tour, traveling across country in 2002 and 2005 with a program of short films concerned with history and place.

Currently, Brown lives in Detroit."

Holly G. (played by Victoria Foyt), is a successful clothing designer with her own boutique. In the course of a tumultuous Mother?s Day weekend she is confronted with deceit, elation, desperation, kleptomania, rebellion, addiction and passion. All this while under pressure to save her business and her family in just two days! In addition to a compelling story line, the film is peppered with poignant testimonials (documentary style) from the women within the film who 'confess' the real and all too often unacknowledged role that shopping plays in their lives. Jaglom has created a film which deals with the often overlooked phenomenon of women?s addiction ?? both good and bad ? to shopping. A sister film to his earlier ?Eating? and ?Babyfever? it co-stars, Victoria Foyt, Lee Grant, Rob Marrow, Bruce Davison, Mae Whitman and Jennifer Grant.

Henry Jaglom. American actor/director/writer Henry Jaglom studied acting at the University of Pennsylvania, then completed his training at the Actors Studio in New York. Jaglom acted on stage and in TV, marking time in small roles until 1967, when Jaglom found a project that could provide his big break: a marathon documentary of the Israeli six-day war, which he filmed, wrote and edited, but which was never generally released. Back in the U.S. as an actor in 1968, Jaglom was able to attain backing for his first film directorial job, A Safe Place (1971). While capable of turning out a "safe" commercial film like Always (1985), Jaglom has preferred to work in a European-style cinema verite fashion, encouraging his actors to improvise within a "party" framework. The director's Someone to Love (1987), set during a birthday celebration, allowed Orson Welles in his last screen appearance to expouse his philosophies to his heart's content. Jaglom's Eating (1990), which took place during another birthday bash, contained an incredibly self-revealing scene featuring Frances Bergen, Candice Bergen's mother.

Peter, a psychotherapist, and Suzanne, a professional dominatrix, have been meeting once a week for over two years. In the privacy of a dungeon room in an S & M house, Suzanne delicately pierces, prods and ultimately soothes Peter as they engage in sensual, dominance and submission reenactments. Peter?s wife Pat knows about her husband?s other life, but there is an understanding between them; what happens in the dungeon is relegated to the world of fantasy. There are rules. Now it seems those rules are about to be broken as Peter and Suzanne, undeniably drawn to each other, agree to see each other on the outside. Though Suzanne is clearly ambivalent about any sort of physical intimacy, Peter becomes increasingly obsessed with consummating their relationship. The more Suzanne pulls away, the harder Peter finds it to let go. As they meet in coffee shops, bars and restaurants throughout New York City, Peter remembers the erotic ?scenes? between them and the relationship these fantasies have to his past. A sudden crisis in Suzanne?s life leads Peter to a meeting with Suzanne?s family where some of her own past torments are revealed. What draws Peter and Suzanne together, however, is also what pulls them apart. Even though both see the impossibility of the affair, it is Peter who suffers most when Suzanne decides to cut off contact. Whether or not this resolves the emotional and erotic issues the relationship created for both of them remains a question.

Eric Werthman has been a practicing psychotherapist for over twenty-five years. Before and during this career he has been involved in filmmaking. He worked for Walter Manley Productions for four years, is a graduate of the NYU?s ?Sight and Sound? intensive film workshop and made one short fiction film, The Scalper's Lament before making his feature film debut with Going Under.

When award-winning Korean-American filmmaker Grace Lee was growing

up in Missouri, she was the only Grace Lee she knew. But when

she later moved to New York and California, everyone she met seemed to

know "another Grace Lee." But why did they assume that all Grace Lees

were nice, dutiful, piano-playing bookworms? Pursuing the moving target of

Asian American female identity, the filmmaker plunges into a clever, highly

unscientific investigation into all those Grace Lees who break the mold -

from a fiery social activist to a rebel who tried to burn down her high school!

With wit and charm, THE GRACE LEE PROJECT puts a hilarious spin on

the eternal question "What's in a name?"

Grace Lee is an award-winning writer/director whose short films have screened at festivals all

over the world including Berlin, Tribeca, Pusan and Los Angeles. Named one of Filmmaker

Magazine's ?25 New Faces of Independent Film,? Grace received her MFA from UCLA Film

School in 2002. Her thesis film, BARRIER DEVICE, starring Sandra Oh, won a 2002 Student

Academy Award, a Directors Guild of America Student Award, LA Asian/Pacific Film Festival?s

Golden Reel Award and Urbanworld?s Grand Jury Prize, and was broadcast on the Sundance

Channel. She also directed BEST OF THE WURST, a documentary essay about Berlin today,

which has been showcased at festivals worldwide and was funded by the Medienboard Berlin

Brandenburg.

Little Miss Sunshine is an American family road comedy that shatters the mold.

Brazenly satirical and yet deeply human, the film introduces audiences to one of the most endearingly fractured families in recent cinema history: the Hoovers, whose trip to a pre-pubescent beauty pageant results not only in comic mayhem but in death, transformation and a moving look at the surprising rewards of being losers in a winning-crazed culture. A runaway hit at the Sundance Film Festival,

where it played to standing ovations, the film strikes a nerve with everyone who?s ever been

awestruck by how their muddled families seem to make it after all.

JONATHAN DAYTON and VALERIE FARIS

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris make their feature film directorial debut with LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE. However, the married team has already built an impressive body of innovative projects as directors and producers in a variety of mediums, collaborating together on over 75 projects in film, television, commercials and music videos.

Jonathan and Valerie began their careers creating and directing the pioneering MTV show, ?The Cutting Edge.? They continued to work at the leading edge of music television, directing awardwinning videos and documentaries for artists including REM, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane?s Addiction, The Smashing Pumpkins, Macy Gray, Janet Jackson, Oasis, Weezer and The Ramones.

Their music productions ultimately earned them two Grammy Awards, nine MTV Music Video Awards and a Billboard Music ?Director of the Year? Award.

In addition, Jonathan and Valerie have worked extensively in television, including directing episodes of the groundbreaking sketch comedy series ?Mr. Show with Bob and David? for HBO. They also produced two feature films: the documentary THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION PART II: THE METAL YEARS for New Line Cinema and Jane?s Addiction?s GIFT for Warner Bros. Music.

In 1998, Jonathan and Valerie co-founded Bob Industries, one of the country?s leading commercial production companies, where they have directed high profile television ads for VW, Sony Playstation, Gap, Target, Ikea, Apple and ESPN, among many others. In 2004, Boards Magazine placed Dayton and Faris among the top ten directors working in commercials today.

Leila, a young East-European immigrant in New York City, wants to become a violinist. She is in search of the American Dream.

In this stylish, atmospheric thriller, a hit man who learned his deadly craft in the Balkan wars, his beautiful former lover, and her police officer boyfriend all cross paths in lower Manhattan. The looping, nonlinear narrative structure and crisscrossing fates of its colorful characters may remind many of Pulp Fiction, but instead of recycling the hipster argot and rap rhythm of that influential L.A. story of more than a decade ago, love gives us a wintry, present-day New York City that is very much a cosmopolitan metropolis, a city of immigrant hustlers and their Old World accents-the Yugoslavian hit man, the German doctor, the French coquette, and the Neapolitan crook, and many others. love is all the more stimulating because of the elegant simplicity with which it was made; aside from its thriller plot, the spare visual composition and beautifully lit scenes are alone more than reason enough to see this picture. From its memorable scenes, which include a killing in a park to the Mexican stand-off inside a church to the dimly lighted nightclub, where an emcee in drag promises the jaded patrons 'music you've never heard before,' this stylish crime tale makes the New York scene glow with color-drenched beauty, menace, and mystery.

(2005, Tribeca Film Festival)

Vladan Nikolic is an award winning filmmaker from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, who moved to New York City in 1992. Before coming to New York Mr. Nikolic worked as a director for the first independent TV network in Yugoslavia. Mr. Nikolic has worked as writer, director and editor on shorts, feature films, documentaries, commercials and music videos. His awards include the TV Sarajevo Award and Zeta Film Award for Best Screenplay (1987), Eastman Kodak Award for his short film Serendipity (1992), Telluride Indiefest Best Film Award for his feature Burn (2001), and others. His first narrative feature film Burn prompted Amy Taubin of the Village Voice to write that Vladan Nikolic proves himself a director to watch with this intense, nightmare thriller about Yugoslavian refugees in New York.

His second feature, LOVE (2005) premiered at the Tribeca and Venice film festivals to critical acclaim. It went on to win awards at film festivals in Geneva, Switzerland, Barcelona, Spain, and the Best Director Award at the Tiburon International Film Festival, California (2006). Mr. Nikolic also teaches Film Directing, Production and Digital Filmmaking at The New School University, and at New York University.