Archive of Directors
Carlos Alcázar (1986, Mexico City) is currently a senior film student at Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica. He says he felt an interest for films and their narrative possibilities as well as for certain realities that were seemingly invisible. He has tried to present his social concerns through some of his work.
Born in Lebanon but raised in Ivory Coast, Stéphane Moukarzel has a degree in communication studies from Montreal’s Concordia University and in film directing from Institute National de l’Image et du Son.
Meryam Joobeur is a Montréal-based director and producer of Tunisian origin. She earned a BFA in film production from Concordia University.
Leslye Headland (1981, Westport, Connecticut, USA) is an American playwright, screenwriter and director. She got her BFA degree from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University in 2002. Upon graduation, she worked as assistant for
film producer Harvey Weinstein for four years. As playwright, she is best known for her Seven Deadly Sins cycle, which included a Bachelorette as gluttony. In 2012, she made Bachelorette into a film, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival.
Sleeping with Other People is her second film as a director.
Danny Boyle (1956, Manchester, United Kingdom) worked with the BBC since 1982, first as producer and later as director. His big screen debut came with Shallow Grave (1994). Black comedy Trainspotting (1996) brought him global fame and paved his way to Hollywood – the results included somewhat disappointing Life Less Ordinary (1997) and The Beach (2000). Upon his return home, he made sci-fi thriller 28 Day Later… (2002), sci-fi comedy Millions (2004), adventure sci-fi thriller Sunshine (2007), an all-round blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire (2008 – eight Academy Awards including one for Best Director), adventure drama 127 Hours (2010) and mysterious crime story Trance (2013). In 2011, he staged Frankenstein at the National Theatre.
Mark Hartley (Melbourne, Australia) launched his filmmaking career in the domain of music videos. He rose to the status of cult documentarist especially thanks to documentary features Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation (2008) and Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010); they both premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Cem Kaya is a Berlin-based documentary filmmaker of Turkish descent with a quirky interest in found footage work. Coming from the field of cultural studies, he combines humorous storytelling with deep background knowledge in his films. Completing Remake, Remix, Rip-Off took seven years during which Kaya watched and indexed hundreds of Yeşilçam movies. In 2015, the picture screened at some of the most prestigious international film festivals.
Joel Silberg (1927, Palestine) learned the ropes of drama directing at London’s Old Vic theatre and upon his return to Israel he decided to pursue this profession full-time. As a film director, he shot mostly comedies as well as music and dance pictures in which he could benefit from his craftsmanship and a sense for choreography.
Sam Firstenberg (1950, Wałbrzych, Poland) grew up in Jerusalem. Before he completed formal education as a filmmaker at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, he had directed 22 theatrical feature films. At Cannon Films, he worked his way up from a production assistant and director’s assistant to one of the label’s principal directors. He became known for directing low-budget B-films of virtually all genres, ranging from comedies and musicals to action films and thril- lers to horrors and sci-fi. The first two parts of the American Ninja series and the sequel Breaking 2: Electric Boogaloo that he directed, rank among the studio’s biggest smash hits.
Menahem Golan (1929, Palestine) studied stage direction at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art; later, he studied filmmaking at the University of New York. For some time, he served as a pilot of Israeli Air Force. Together with his cousin, Yoram Globus, they took the film industry by storm with a production company that bore their surnames and later swallowed the Cannon Films studio. Under this label, they produced hundreds of films in the 1980s. Their business model was based primarily on low-budget action B-movies.
A London-based Romanian documentary filmmaker, Ilinca Calugareanu studied documentary filmmaking at Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology. Her short films have been screened at festivals around the world. Calugareanu’s credits include The Writing on the Wall (2006) released in Romania and Endgames (2008) released in the United Kingdom and distributed by the Royal Anthropological Institute. She has also been working as editor of fiction and documentary shorts and features for the past five years.
Michal Baláž (1986, Humenné, Slovakia) graduated from the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, majoring in scriptwriting, dramaturgy and fiction direction. During his studies he shot five short films:
Raven (Havran, 2008), Monster (Monštrum, 2009), The Second Attempt (Druhý pokus, 2011), Amber Road (Jantárová cesta, 2011) and Bastard (2013).
Upon graduation from the Film School in Zlín, Slávek Horák (1975, Gottwaldov,now Zlín, Czechoslovakia) was admitted to the Faculty of Feature Direction and Scriptwriting at Prague’s FAMU but did not finish it due to heavy workload. He worked with Jan Svěrák as second assistant director on Kolja, which won Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1997. Then he switched to advertising; over the past 17 years, he directed over 120 commercial spots including many for worldwide campaigns. Based on his mother’s accounts, he wrote a screenplay for Home Care and decided to make it his big screen debut as a director.
Mišo Suchý (1965, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, today Slovakia) graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava in 1988 and immediately afterwards he moved to the United States. His films have been screened at film festivals in Oberhausen, Edinburgh, Florence, San Francisco, Krakow, Hamburg, and at Cinéma du Réel in Paris. Currently, he is with the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University.
Gust Van den Berghe (1985, Borgerhout, Belgium) is a versatile artist who grew up in the world of theatre and dance. The label “maverick” applies to him like to very few in the film industry today. His graduation film from the RITS in Brussels, Little Baby Jesus of Flandr (En waar de sterre bleef stille staan), premiered during the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs at Cannes IFF in 2010, just like his next picture, Blue Bird, did a year later. Lucifer (2014) is his third film.
Martin Hollý (1931, Košice, Czechoslovakia – 2004, Bratislava, Slovakia) began to study directing at Prague’s FAMU but dropped out. He debuted in 1962 with The Raven Path (Havrania cesta). He made over 30 films, most notably psychological studies such as A Case for Attorney (Prípad pre obhajcu, 1964) or Custom-Made Death (Smrť šitá na mieru, 1979), fairy-tale Salt & Gold (Soľ nad zlato, 1982) or WWI drama Signum laudis (1980). His pictures typically feature carefully constructed stories, psychologically precise characters and powerful performances. His TV film, The Ballad of the Seven Hanged (Balada o siedmich obesených, 1968), was awarded at Monte Carlo ITF.