BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1974, USA, Oscar®-nominated film director Joshua Oppenheimer is recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” (2015-2019). His debut feature film, The Act of Killing (2012, 159 min and 117 min), was named Film of the Year in the 2013 by the Guardian and the Sight and Sound Film Poll, and won 72 international awards, including the European Film Award 2013, BAFTA 2014, Asia Pacific Screen Award 2013, Berlinale Audience Award 2013, and Guardian Film Award 2014 for Best Film. It was nominated for the 2014 Academy Award® for Best Documentary, and has been released theatrically in 31 countries. His second film, The Look of Silence (2014, 99 min), premiered In Competition at the 71st Venice Film Festival, where it won five awards including the Grand Jury Prize, the international critics award (FIPRESCI Prize) and the European film critics award (FEDEORA Prize). Since then, The Look of Silence has received the Danish Academy Award for Best Documentary and the prestigious Danish Arts Council Award. It screened at the Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival (Best World Documentary), the Copenhagen Documentary Festival (Grand Prize), Festival d’Angers (Audience Award for Best Film), and the Berlin Film Festival (Peace Film Prize). Oppenheimer is a partner at Final Cut for Real in Denmark, and Artistic Director of the Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film at the University of Westminster in London.

FILMOGRAPHY

– The Act of Killing  – winner of 72 international awards, including the European Film Award 2013, BAFTA 2014, Asia Pacific Screen Award 2013, Berlinale Panorama Audience Award 2013, Guardian Film Award 2014 for Best Film; nominated for the 2014 Academy Award® for Best Documentary; released theatrically in 30 countries; screened in countless film festivals, including the Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, and Berlin International Film Festival.

– The Globalisation Tapes (documentary, produced with Christine Cynn,2003)

– The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (50 min, 1997; Gold Hugo, Chicago, 1998; Telluride Film Festival, 1997)

– These Places We Learned to Call Home (short, 1997; Gold Spire, San Francisco, 1997)

Signe Byrge Sørensen is CEO and producer at Final Cut for Real, which she founded with Anne Köhncke in 2009. Signe Byrge Sørensen has a master degree in International Development Studies and Communication Studies, RUC, (1998). She did EURODOC in 2003 and EAVE in 2010. Signe has produced documentaries since 1998, first at SPOR Media (1998-2004), then at Final Cut Productions (2004-2008), and then she founded Final Cut for Real in 2009. Amongst the films Signe has produced are The Look of Silence (2014), by Joshua Oppenheimer, Last Dreams (2013), by Estephan Wagner, The Act of Killing (2012), by Joshua Oppenheimer (Cph Dox Award, BAFTA, Asia-Pacific Film Award, European Film Award and 2014 Oscar nomination plus ca. 60 other awards); The Human Scale, (2012), by Andreas Dalsgaard, The Kid and the Clown (2011), by Ida Grøn and Football is God (2010), by Ole Bendtzen. Signe has also produced and co-directed (with Janus Billeskov Jansen) Voices of the World (2005) and The Importance of Being Mlabri (2007), and in 2008 she post-produced the fiction feature Everlasting Moments by Jan Troell. Her most recent co-productions are: Night will Fall (2014), by André Singer, The Pirate Bay – Away from Keyboard, by Simon Klose (2012), Gulabi Gang, (2011), By Nishtha Jain and Char – No Man’s Island, by Sourav Sarangi, (2012). The Final Cut for Real films are produced in collaboration with Anne Köhncke and the other producers at Final Cut for Real. Signe has also given lectures at for example EAVE, ESODOC, and Nordic Forum, and was the Danish co-producer for the first Steps for the future project in Southern Africa. Signe received the Danish documentary award, the Roos Award in 2014.

Due to the nature of this film it has unfortunately been necessary to credit this remarkable collaborator as Anonymous.

André was Editor of Granada Television’s Disappearing World series during the 1980's. He ran the BBC Documentary Department’s Independent Unit in the 1990’s where he founded the award-winning documentary strand Fine Cut (now Storyville). As an independent producer, he established Café Productions and later West Park Pictures (now a DCD Media owned company).

André is a Documentary Campus board member, and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute's Film Committee. He has been responsible for several hundred hours of factual programs for the international TV market and producer or executive producer of fourteen films with Werner Herzog since Lessons of Darkness in 1992.

Werner Herzog was born in Munich on September 5, 1942. He grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria and studied History and German Literature in Munich and Pittsburgh. He made his first film in 1961 at the age of 19. Since then he has produced, written, and directed more than sixty feature- and documentary films, such as Aguirre der Zorn Gottes (AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, 1972), Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht (NOSFERATU, 1978), FITZCARRALDO (1982), Lektionen in Finsternis (LESSONS OF DARKNESS, 1992), LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY (1997), Mein liebster Feind (MY BEST FIEND, 1999), INVINCIBLE (2000), GRIZZLY MAN (2005), ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (2007), Die Höhle der vergessenen Träume (CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, 2010). Werner Herzog has published more than a dozen books of prose, and directed as many operas. Werner Herzog lives in Munich and Los Angeles.

Roger Ebert has said, “After twenty years of reviewing films, I haven't found another filmmaker who intrigues me more…Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini.” 

Morris’ films have won many awards, including an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, an Emmy, the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival, the Silver Bear at Berlin International Film Festival, the Golden Horse at the Taiwan International Film Festival and the Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.  His documentaries have repeatedly appeared on many ten best lists and have been honored by the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review.  His work has been the subject of a full retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1999. Roger Ebert, in fact, has placed Morris’ first feature Gates of Heaven on his list of the 10 Best Films of All Time.

In his latest film, The Unknown Known (April 4, 2014), Morris explores the long political history and the worldview of Donald Rumsfeld, as the two-time former secretary of defense himself describes it. Through dozens of hours of interview footage and thousands of Rumsfeld's memos (many of which have never before been released), Morris puts on display the dizzying, Carrollian illogic used by members of the Bush administration to justify war in Iraq.

Morris's latest book, A Wilderness of Error:  The Trial of Jeffrey MacDonald was released September, 2012 (Paperback: January, 2014).  A New York Times bestseller, the book examines the nature of evidence and proof in the notorious MacDonald murders.  His previous book, Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, was also a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times notable book of 2011.

Morris has directed over 1000 television commercials, including campaigns for Apple, Citibank, Cisco Systems, Intel, American Express, Nike, Target, General Motors, Levis and Miller High Life.  Morris also directed short films for the 2002 and 2007 Academy Awards as well as for charitable and political organizations such as Stand Up to Cancer and Moveon.org.  In 2011 he directed They Were There, a film to commemorate IBM’s Centennial.  In 2000-2001, Morris directed two seasons of the television series, First Person. 

Morris has received five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a graduate student at Princeton University and the University of California-Berkeley.