Two Iranian cineastes and 5 international ones will judge Cinema Salvation section of 34th Fajr International Film Festival.
According to the public relations office of 34th FIFF they are Majid Majidi, Nasser Taghvayi, Zeynep Atakan, José Luis Guerín, Ivo Felt, Juang Juang Tian, and Emanuel Perrus.
Zeynep Atakan
Zeynep Atakan was born in 1966 in Istanbul. Graduating from the Film and TV department at Marmara University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, she worked as an assistant director and producer in the television advertisement industry from 1986 to 1999, and founded her advertisement production company in 1994. In 1999, Atakan transitioned to the film industry and began producing international film projects. She managed to start her production company, Zeynofilm, in 2007. In 2010, Atakan won the Best Producer Award from the European Film Academy, and founded Yapimlab. Atakan has been the chairwoman of SE-YAP, the Turkish Guild of Film Producers, since 2011. In 2014, Atakan was elected vice president of EWA, the European Women’s Audiovisual Network. She won the Bilge Olgac Achievement Award at the 17th International Women Film Festival in 2014. Her latest production, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Winter Sleep”, won the Palm d’Or Award at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.
Filmography: Lola (1999), In Nowhereland (2002), Climates (2006), Three Monkeys (2008), Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (2011), Winter Sleep (2014)
José Luis Guerín
Born in 1960 in Barcelona, José Luis Guerín, is one of the most influential, most innovative European documentary makers with a unique place in the absolutely dynamic, yet still underrated Catalan Cinema. A noble, insightful director, Guerin also teaches at Pompeu Fabra University. He has managed to bring a new experimental spirit to Spanish and Catalan Cinema. Together with his colleague, Joaquim Jorda, Guerin has transferred the Documentary Program at Pompeu Fabra University into one of Europe’s most significant centers for experimental non-fiction cinematic work and inspired a new generation of young filmmakers worldwide.
After a period of experimentation and self-learning in the field of short films, he directed and wrote his first feature film entitled ‘Los motivos de Berta‘ in 1983. Throughout the 1990s, he wrote and directed a series of documentaries such as ‘Innisfree‘, and he came to the attention of the wider public with his feature film, ‘En construcción’, with which he won a Goya award for best documentary in 2001. In 2007, ‘In the City of Sylvia’, selected by the 2007 Venice Film Festival. In 2010, his documentary ‘Guest’ was screened at Venice. He co-directed ‘Correspondence’ with Jonas Mekas in 2011 and in the same year made ‘Memories of A Morning’ and ‘Dos cartas a Ana’. His 2015 drama ‘L’Accademia delle muse’ was awarded Gold Giraldillo at Seville Film Festival and selected at IFF Rotterdam and Locarno Film Festival.
Ivo Felt
Ivo Felt was born in 1968 in Tallinn, Estonia. Ivo initially began his career in the film industry as a sound designer for film and TV, but began focusing on production from 2006 at Allfilm, the company he co-founded in 1995. Ivo’s recent productions include Zaza Urushadze’s ‘Tangerines’, which was nominated for the Academy Award and Golden Globe in the Best Foreign Language Film category in 2015, as well as Finnish director Klaus Harö’s award-winning ‘The Fencer’ and the artist Jaan Toomik’s drama ‘Landscape with Many Moons’.
Tian Zhuangzhuang
Tian Zhuangzhuang born April 1952 in Beijing, China is a Chinese film director and producer.
Tian was born to an influential actor and actress in China. Following a short stint in the military, Tian began his artistic career first as an amateur photographer and then as an assistant cinematographer at the Beijing Agricultural Film Studio. In 1978, he was accepted to the Beijing Film Academy, from which he graduated in 1982, together with classmates Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. The class of 1982 collectively would soon gain fame as the so-called Fifth Generation film movement, with Tian Zhuangzhuang as one of the movement’s key figures.[1]
Tian’s early career was marked both with avant-garde documentary infused films (On the Hunting Ground (1985), The Horse Thief (1986)) to more commercial fare (Li Lianying: The Imperial Eunuch (1991)). In 1991, Tian began work on a quiet epic about one of modern China’s darkest moments. This film, The Blue Kite (1993), would eventually result in Tian’s nearly decade long exile from the film industry, an exile he returned from with Springtime in a Small Town (2001). Throughout the 2000s, Tian Zhuangzhuang returned to the fore of Chinese cinema, directing films like the biopic The Go Master (2006) and the historical action film The Warrior and the Wolf (2009). Since his banning after the release of The Blue Kite, Tian has also emerged as a mentor for some of China’s newest film talents, and he has helped produce several important films for these new generations of directors.
Majid Majidi
Born in 1959 in Tehran, Majid Majidi started his artistic career in theater. He later joined the Circle of Islamic Art and Thoughts and started stage acting, screenwriting, and directing short films. His screenwriting and directorial debut, “Explosion”, was a 16mm short film, followed by his first feature film “Baduk”. Majidi is one of the most internationally accomplished Iranian directors. His 1997 feature film, “Children of Heaven” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1998. He has directed a lot of films including, “Baran”, “The Willow Tree”, “Father”, “Muhammad, the Messenger of God”, etc.
Nasser Taghvayi
Born in 1941 in Abadan, Nasser Taghvai is an Iranian screenwriter and cineaste who started his cinematic career after some experiences as a story writer. His short story collection, “That Year’s Summer”, promised the rise of a talented, skillful writer. Even though he eventually selected cinema, he has made most of his films based on acclaimed literary works in order to stay in touch with literature. Taghvai launched his cinematic career making documentaries, and further made his debut feature film, “Tranquility in the Presence of Others”, in 1973. Alongside Masoud Kimiai and Dariush Mehrjui, Nasser Taghvai is considered a pioneer of the Iranian New Wave. His major films include, “Sadegh the Kurdish”, “Curse”, “Captain Khorshid”, “Oh Iran”, and “Unruled Paper”.
