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 Abderrahmane SISSAKO (Mali, director of Bamako: 30. maj do 3. junij)
Born in 1961 in Kiffa, Mauretania. He spent his childhood in Mali and after finishing high school set off for Moscow. He studied at the Film Institute VGIK, where he graduated with the
film The Game. After his graduation he filmed October, which – through a story about an impossible love affair – deals with the theme of exile. His fourth film Camels and Floating Sticks is based on a fable by de la Fontaine. In the year of making his film Life on Earth he established his Parisian company DUO Films. In consequence of his own nomadic lifestyle, the main themes of all of his films are exile and a troublesome, unsolved relationship
between Africa and Europe. His films are a mixture of documentary and fiction, whose specific feature is that Sissako does not use professional actors. Improvisation plays an
important part in his work, for he believes that when a director works with amateur actors he assumes the position of a student rather than a teacher, which means he has to be open to life. Sissako is an old friend of Slovene audiences: Life on Earth was the opening film of the Slovenian Cinematheque’s African Cinema retrospective (2000), while the first edition of Kino Otok – Isola Cinema film festival in 2004 featured Waiting for Happiness, later in regular theatrical distribution in Slovenia.
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 Mahamat-Saleh HAROUN (Čad, director of Dry Season: 31. maj do 3. junij)
Born in Abéché, Chad, in 1960. He first studied at the film school in Paris then journalism school in Bordeaux. In 1999 he directed his first feature-length film, Bye Bye Africa, awarded Best First Film at the Venice Film Festival. In 2002, he directed Abouna, selected for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. Dry Season is his third feature.
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 Žanabek ŽETIRUOV (Kazakstan, director of The Lineman’s Diary: 30. maj do 5. junij)
Born in Kazakhstan, in 1958. He graduated at the Faculty of Philology of the Kazakh State University in 1986. After that he started a career as a trackman. In 1992 he completed a scriptwriting and film-directing school in Moscow, after which he directed his first short film and a series of documentaries. The Lineman’s Diary is his feature debut.
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 Inés EFRON (Argentina, actress in Glue: od 2. junija)
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 Kumondor ABYLOV (Kirgizistan, actor in Saratan: 31. maj do 5. junij)
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 Vittorio DE SETA (Italija, director of Bandits of Orgosolo, Letters from Sahara: od 2. junija)
Born on 15 October 1923 in Palermo, he made his directorial debut with a series of Neorealist-inspired documentaries focusing on workers’ conditions in Sicily and Sardinia (Islands of Fire, Best Documentary, Cannes Film Festival 1955; Sulphur Mines, Silver Plaque, David di Donatello Awards 1956/57 and many others). Bandits of Orgosolo (1961), of which he was also responsible for production, editing, cinematography and screenplay, was his first feature-length film: a terse, essential work with a strong social content, featuring local non-professional actors. This movie won the Best First Film award at the Venice Film Festival, a Nastro d’Argento (Silver Ribbon) for Best Black & White Photography and other prestigious prizes. His other fiction films include Half a Man (1966), a more intimate, introspective work, The Uninvited (1969), De Seta’s only ‘traditional’ production, Diary of a Schoolteacher (1972, for RAI television) in which the director protests against Italy’s ‘waste’ (to quote the Italian activist intellectual Danilo Dolci) of Italians. Recently, there have been many tributes to De Seta’s cinema in the United States. In 2005 Martin Scorsese introduced the Italian director’s films at the Full Frame Festival and at Robert De Niro’s Tribeca festival. The MoMA in New York also paid homage to him as a master of realist cinema with a retrospective from 24 to 30 June, where Diary of a Schoolteacher was presented in the US for the first time. The other outstanding works featured were Bandits of Orgosolo and Half a Man, and ten documentaries, including those filmed in Sicily and Sardinia before the economic boom.
Today aged eighty-three, Vittorio De Seta is an iconic Italian director, whose varied output consists of dozens of documentaries, several shorts and only four fiction films. Always a ‘loner’ in the Italian cinema, he lives in Calabria, far from the movie capital, far from the film world and cinema currents. Today, De Seta is a major point of reference in the exploration of reality through film, an essential model for the investigative documentary.
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 Peter SCHREINER (Avstrija, director of Bellavista, 31. maj do 5. junij)
Born 1957 in Vienna. Filmography (all documentaries):2006:Bellavista; 1994 Blaue Ferne; 1991 I Cimbri; 1988 Auf dem Weg; 1985 Kinderfilm; 1983 Erste Liebe; 1982 Grelles Licht.
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 Jacqueline VEUVE (Švica, director of SRČNA MEGLENICA, UMETNIKOVO PLAČILO in MALA DAMA IZ KINA CAPITOLE: 31. maj do 5. junij)
Before collaborating with Jean Rouch at Paris' Musée de l'Homme in 1955 and with Richard Leacock at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jacqueline Veuve studied library research, cinema and anthropology in Switzerland and France. Her first short, The Meat Basket (1966) launched her career as a filmmaker. Her first full-length film, Death of the Grandfather or the Sleep of the Just, was selected at the Locarno Festival of 1978. From then on, she produced many documentaries, and two works of fiction: Left, Address Unknown (that won several awards and was presented in Cannes) and Fainted Away. Almost all of her films have received international prizes. Jacqueline Veuve has so far produced over 50 films. Filming and describing her country with scant nostalgia through its army, its farmers, its wine growers, its craftspeople, the Salvation Army, and of course, its women, this film maker has become one of the most important producers of Swiss documentaries. For more: http://www.jacquelineveuve.ch/
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 Boris LEHMAN (Belgija, director of POSKUS OPISATI SEBE: 30. maj do 3. junij)
Born in 1944 in a Jewish family, Boris Lehman creates images of his own obsessions, sometimes related to his Jewish origins. As co-writer, assistant or actor he has collaborated with several filmmakers in Belgium, including Chantal Akerman and Henri Storck. However, his films are not readily separable from his life in Belgium and, of course, from the artistic and popular life of Brussels. Not only does Boris Lehman produce and direct all his films, but he prefers to screen them himself, sometimes in the living room of his audience. He is the professional of the “home made”. He makes films about things close to him. But his approach, while poetical, absurd and ironic, is also close to the ethnological. His sometimes very intimate personal sequences can also turn towards broader issues about Western Europe and attempts to understand the Other and the meaning of life. Boris Lehman’s films show the influence of his art philosophical commitments. His attitude to time does not betray any stress: the film Babel: Letter to my friends who stayed in Belgium is six hours long (part I of a tetralogy in progress). One can say that he has turned his life into a film, as the films have become his life. This explains why his filmography amounts to hundreds of works, some of them films edited for a single screening only. He is close to Jonas Mekas’ way of considering cinema, preferring to see the cineaste as an artist based in daily life. Boris Lehman is an ‘unclassifiable’ filmmaker in the landscape of Belgian independent cinematography.
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Slobodan VALENTINČIČ (Slovenija, OM production: 31. maj do 5. junij)
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 Jurij MEDEN (Slovenija, director of Operation Mammoth: 30. maj do 5. junij)
Born in 1977 in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
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 Christopher COPPOLA (ZDA, director of PAH-FEST: 31. maj do 4. junij)
Christopher Coppola has completed eight feature motion pictures. He is co-founder and spokesperson for EARS XXI, a film and television mini-studio. EARS XXI is also committed to building an education arm. Coppola is currently in post-production on a high definition one-hour episodic pilot, The Biker Chef. Shot in cutting edge high definition video, the show will combine high energy cross country adventure with humor, local culture, motorcycles, and fine cuisine. The series will be directed by Coppola, who is also playing the title role of the Biker Chef. Coppola continues to be an active member in the Director’s Guild of America and frequently speaks at public forums on independent filmmaking and HD digital technology. Coppola studied music composition at Redlands University. He then went on to study film at The San Francisco Art Institute.
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 Nicolas REY (Francija, director of Schuss!: 2. junij do 5. junij)
Born in 1968. Unlike the famous American director, his name is not a pseudonym. Nor is he the son of the French experimental filmmaker Georges Rey. He has been making films since 1993; in 1995 he co-founded L’Abominable, an artist-run film lab in Paris. His films hover somewhere between photography, documentary and experimental cinema. More info: http://nicorey.club.fr/index.html (photo: F.J. Chotard)
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 Graham ROBERTSON (ZDA, director of Able Edwards: 3. junij do 7. junij)
A native of Colorado, Robertson studied film in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For the past eight years, he has worked in Los Angeles as a Set Dresser and Graphic Designer for numerous motion pictures and television shows. In recent years, he was the co-creator of the popular Internet series, Galaxy Defenders. Able Edwards is his first feature project.
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 José ARAÚJO (Brazilija, director of The Temptations of Brother Sebastian: 31. maj do 5. junij)
Born and raised in the rural part of Northeast Brazil. In 1973 he left Brazil to study film at the San Francisco State University. In 1987 Araújo directed and produced the documentary Hail Umbanda about the Afro-Brazilian religion of Umbanda. In 1997 Araújo’s first feature film Landscapes of Memory won several awards. Landscapes of Memory was among the International Critics’ choice of the ‘Best 150 Unreleased Foreign Language Films of the Nineties’, according to Film Comment magazine. In 2005 Araújo released his second feature film The Temptations of Brother Sebastian.
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 Abolfazl JALILI (Iran, director of Full or Empty: 6. junij do 8. junij)
Born in Saveh, Iran in 1957. He studied at the Iranian College of Dramatic Arts, then worked for national television (IRIB), producing several children’s films. He began making films while he was a teenager, creating a number of short documentary films on social issues and war. The first feature film he directed was entitled Milad, while his subsequent films have been presented at numerous world festivals and have won several awards.
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 Boris PETKOVIČ (Francija/Slovenija, director of PARIS.LOVE: 8. junij do 11. junij)
Born April 22, 1971 in Zenica (Bosnia), graduated from the Faculty for Navy Navigation in Koper, Slovenia. Between 1996 and 2003 he lived in Ljubljana, working as a TV and film director. In 2006, he completed training at the EICAR film school in Paris. He currently lives in Paris and is a teacher at EICAR
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