Biography

Born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1978, she graduated with a degree in film directing from the State Theatre and Film University of Georgia in 2001. She attended the producer’s workshop of the European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs (EAVE) and made several short films before her feature film debut BRIDES. The film premiered in the 2014 Berlinale Panorama and went on to screen at many international festivals. Her most recent feature HORIZON had its world premiere at Berlinale Panorama 2018.

Synopsis 

The change in Giorgi’s life could not be more radical. The city, art, his regular, middle-class existence and his marriage to Ana are all behind him. Now he is alone. Giorgi goes into isolation on a small barren island in a simple hut by the sea. In an inhospitable environment, surrounded only by a handful of strangers, between chicken farming and duck hunting, he is trying to pick up the pieces of his life. But his wounds are deep, and the shadows of his happy past repeatedly catch up with him.

Biography

Born in Tuscany, Alice Rohrwacher graduated from Torino University in Literature and Philosophy. She directed a segment in the collective feature film Checosamanca. At 29 years old, Corpo Celeste is her feature length writing and directing debut 

Synopsis

This is the tale of a meeting between Lazzaro, a young peasant so good that he is often mistaken for simple-minded, and Tancredi, a young nobleman cursed by his imagination. Life in their isolated pastoral village Inviolata is dominated by the terrible Marchesa Alfonsina de Luna, the queen of cigarettes. A loyal bond is sealed when Tancredi asks Lazzaro to help him orchestrate his own kidnapping. This strange and improbable alliance is a revelation for Lazzaro. A friendship so precious that it will travel in time and transport Lazzaro in search of Tancredi. His first time in the big city, Lazzaro is like a fragment of the past lost in the modern world.

Biography

Born in Vienna, Austria in 1970, Wolfgang Fischer studied psychology and painting at the University of Vienna as well as film and video at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Nan Hoover. From 1996 to 2001 he took a degree in film and television at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. In 2002 he attended a course in how to work with actors led by Mark Travis in Poland and in 2004 a workshop for writing and developing genre with Stephen Cleary and Simon van der Borgh in Rome. In 2005 he received a scriptwriting scholarship for the Munich Screenplay Workshop where he developed the script for his debut film WHAT YOU DON'T SEE (2009). STYX (2018) is his most recent film.

Synopsis

STYX depicts the transformation of a strong woman torn from her contented world during a sailing trip. When she becomes the only person to come to the aid of a group of refugees shipwrecked on the high seas, she is shown the limits of her importance and of the empathy of her cultural milieu. She is left slipping impotently from one nightmare to the next, and by the end she is forced to recognize that there is no way to counter the cruelties of real life. Only chance can save her.

Biography

Sergei Loznitsa (b. 1964, Baranovichi, Byelorussian SSR) studied mathematics and then moved on to film school in the 1990s. Even his very first artistically stylised documentaries placed him right up there among Europe’s elite directors. His contemplative films, screened regularly at KVIFF, subtly and precisely conjure up the tangible essence of the Russian landscape (Landscape, 2003), of stagnation (The Train Stop, 2000) and, elsewhere, of archetypal industrial operations (Factory, 2004). Loznitsa’s documentaries reflect both current events (Maidan, 2014) and key moments in Russian history (Blockade, 2006; The Event, 2015). The director made his first foray into feature film direction in 2010. His latest offering A Gentle Creature(2017), like his two previous titles My Joy (2010) and In the Fog (2012), was screened in the main competition at Cannes.

Synopsis

Poignant fragments of the spectral existence of an eastern Ukrainian republic straddling the border between law and injustice, fantasy and reality, dreams and nightmares. The artistically treated documentary material provides disturbing evidence of the intense bifurcation of fact and fiction in today’s pseudo-reality of media images.

Sergei Loznitsa (b. 1964, Baranovichi, Byelorussian SSR) studied mathematics and then moved on to film school in the 1990s. Even his very first artistically stylised documentaries placed him right up there among Europe’s elite directors. His contemplative films, screened regularly at KVIFF, subtly and precisely conjure up the tangible essence of the Russian landscape (Landscape, 2003), of stagnation (The Train Stop, 2000) and, elsewhere, of archetypal industrial operations (Factory, 2004). Loznitsa’s documentaries reflect both current events (Maidan, 2014) and key moments in Russian history (Blockade, 2006; The Event, 2015). The director made his first foray into feature film direction in 2010. His latest offering A Gentle Creature(2017), like his two previous titles My Joy (2010) and In the Fog (2012), was screened in the main competition at Cannes.

Biography

Paweł Maślona is a graduate of political sciences and Radio and Television Faculty at University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. He is the director of several award-winning short films and commercials, including VFF Young Talent Award for the Best Film at International Festival of Film Schools in Munich 2010. His diploma film was MAGMA and his feature film debut PANIC ATTACK (2017) had its international premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Synopsis

In his blackly humorous debut, talented director Paweł Maślona has submitted a consummate answer to the question whether or not a panic attack can be translated into film language. Dramatic moments in the lives of several unfortunates living in contemporary Warsaw are here presented with refreshing playfulness and a singular knack for mixing the tragic and the comic.

Biography

Born in Izmir, 1963. He studied cinema and television at the Fine Art University "Dokuz Eylül" of Izmir until 1984. He's one of the most profiled writers/directors/producers of present-day filmmaking in Turkey, having received important national awards such as the Golden Orange (Antalya IFF) and the Golden Tulip award (Istanbul IFF) for his third feature EGG. 
His feature films have also screened at festivals around the world, earning him international awards, such as FIPRESCI prize for at the Istanbul IFF and the Best Film Alternativa award for ANGEL'S FALL at the Barcelona IFF. 
HONEY is the third part of the Yusuf Trilogy, which traces the origins of a soul. Like in his previous films, Semih Kaplanoglu decides to work without music to create the emotional world of the film. 
GRAIN is his latest feature selected for the Sarajevo FF.

Synopsis

In the near future, an abrupt climate change has led to the extinction of life on Earth. In this world with redrawn borders, migrants are massed in designated areas waiting to integrate the city protected by magnetic shields.

SYNOPSIS

On the outskirts of Birmingham and the margins of society the Billingham family perform extreme rituals and break social taboos as they muddle through a life decided by factors beyond their control. At times shocking and laced with an unsettling humour, three episodes unfold as a powerful evocation of experience of growing up in a Black Country council flat.

Biography

Richard Billingham in 1997 he was the first recipient of the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize and the following year BBC2 broadcast his film Fishtank, (47mins) produced by Artangel and filmmaker Adam Curtis. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale 2001 and was nominated for the Turner Prize, also in 2001. He has made work about his immediate family, about animals in zoos around the world and about the British landscape. Recently he has written and directed his first feature film for cinema called ‘Ray & Liz’, shot on location in the Midlands where he grew up. His work is held in many collections including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum, New York, V & A and Tate Galleries, London.

Warsaw, 1975. Kapuscinski is a brilliant veteran journalist, an idealist and a friend of lost causes and revolutions. At the Polish Press Agency, he convinces his boss to send him to Angola where a bloody civil war has broken out on the eve of the country’s independence. He embarks on a seemingly suicidal road trip into the heart of the civil war. There, he witnesses once again the dirty reality of war and
discovers a sense of helplessness previously unknown to him. 
Angola will change him forever: it was a reporter that left Poland, but it was a writer that returned.

Biography

Nuri Bilge Ceylan was born in Istambul, 1959. After graduating from Engineering Department of Bosphorus University, he studied Film Making for two years at Mimar Sinan University, Istambul. Ceylan’s short film Koza (Cocoon) was screened in the Cannes Film Festival in 1995. He received many awards with his debut feature Kasaba (Small Town) and his second feature Mayis Sikintisi (Clouds of May). His third feature Uzak (Distant) received the Grand Prix and award for Best Actor at Cannes 2003, and was praised internationally. His 2006 film Iklimler (Climates) won the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes in 2006 and received international prize by critics and experts. He won the Awards at Festival de Cannes for his last films – Three Monkeys, Once upon a time in Anatolya, Winter’s Sleep.

Synopsis

Sinan has always wanted to be a writer. Convinced of his own exceptionalism, he returns to his hometown where he would like to earn enough money to publish his own book. Instead, he finds himself caught up in the same debts as his father… This visually captivating film is a reminder of the ineluctability of fate.

Jumpman

Russia/Lithuania/Ireland/ France, 2018, 90 min.

Director: Ivan I. Tverdovsky 

Screenplay: Ivan I. Tverdovskiy

Cinematography: Denis Alarcón Ramirez

Editing: Ivan I. Tverdovskiy

Music: Kirill Richter

Cast: Denis Vlasenko, Anna Slyu, Danil Steklov, Pavel Chinarev, Vilma Kutavičiútë

Biography

Ivan I. Tverdovsky was born in 1988, in Moscow. In 2011 he graduated from Moscow’s Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). His documentaries have earned honours at Russian and international festivals, among them short AS IF WAITING FOR A BUS (2009), PIANISM (2012), and short SPACE DOG (2013). CORRECTION CLASS (2014), inspired by the novel of the same name by psychologist Ekaterina Murashova, is his feature debut, followed by ZOOLOGY (2016), Special Jury Prize at the Karlovy Vary IFF. His most recent feature film, JUMPMAN, screened in competition at Karlovy Vary IFF 2018.

Synopsis

Young Oksana put Denis in a baby box when he was an infant. Sixteen years later she steals him away from a children’s home, intent on making amends for her neglect. Denis, however, has no idea of the heavy price to be paid for his mother’s favour: the fragile boy has one unusual quality which Oksana has no qualms about exploiting.