Author: Bijan Tehrani

Milan (a co-production of Germany, Serbia, and Montenegro), Directed by Michael Kezele, won Bridging the Borders Award at the Palm Springs ShortFest International Film Festival and Market. Jury members at this year’s event are actor Bill Pullman; Eileen Arandiga, Festival Director of the Worldwide Short Film Festival in Toronto; Dana Harris, editor Variety.com; Sydney Levine of Film Finders; and Dragan Milinkovic, Serbian film academic and producer. Milan is about a day in the life of a family in the countryside near Belgrade during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Ognjen, maybe 16, horses around with his younger brother, Milan,…

<b>Moon Molson</b> was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and moved more than 15 times before settling in his current “home town” of New York City. He graduated from Dartmouth College where he received a B.A. in English, Film Studies and Philosophy.<br>In fall 2000, Moon entered the M.F.A. program in Film Directing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. In 2002, he won the prestigious Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Student Internship and was flown to Los Angeles to work in television commercials.His thesis short film “Pop Foul” won the REEL Shorts Jury Prize at the 2007 South By Southwest…

At the end of the 1980’s, as director of the Sarajevo Obala Art Center <b>Mirsad Purivatra</b> oversaw the works of numerous theater productions. Many of them, including Tatoo Theatre and Moonplay, were featured in theatre festivals in Edinburgh, Paris, Toronto, New York, Montreal, and London. During the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Center organized a great number of exhibitions by B&H; authors that were shown around the world and in Sarajevo. Obala hosted such international artists as Christian Boltanski, Annie Leibowitz, Sophie Ristelhueber, and Peter Waldegg. In 1995, Obala established the Sarajevo Film Festival, which in 12 years has…

Vera Mijojlic is the founder and director of the South East European Film Festival in Los Angeles. Formerly a film critic in ex-Yugoslavia, she also works as a marketing consultant for art house films in the U.S.12:08 East of Bucharest: 16 years after the Revolution and just days before Christmas, a local television station in Bucharest has invited several guests to share their moments of glory, as they allegedly stormed city hall, chanting “down with Ceasescu!,” before Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, and his wife fled the presidential palace by helicopter so many years ago. An alcoholic history teacher and a…

One of the most electrifying and multifaceted actresses working today, actress Wanda De Jesús galvanizes audiences with her complex and beautifully crafted performances. She brings her talent and experience in film, theatre and television to her latest project, “Illegal Tender,” a film produced by John Singleton and written and directed by Franc Reyes, opening in August, 2007. De Jesús next re-teams with writer-director Reyes to co-star opposite Harvey Keitel and John Leguizamo in the upcoming New York-based drama The Ministers.De Jesús was last seen in “Blood Work” opposite Clint Eastwood. De Jesús turned in a strong dramatic performance in the…

Writer/director Danielle Lurie graduated from Stanford University in 2000 with a BA in Philosophy. In it’s Summer 2005 issue, FILMMAKER MAGAZINE listed Danielle as being one of the 25 new faces of independent film.Danielle’s debut short film, IN THE MORNING, premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, and has won nine film festivals to date, including ‘Best Narrative Short’ at the Oscar qualifying Nashville Film Festival. On November 9, 2005, IN THE MORNING screened before members of the U.S. Congress during the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on Honor Killings, and would later screen before members of UNIFEM (United Nations Development…

<b>Darryl Macdonald</b> is the Executive Director of the Palm Springs International Film Society, which produces both the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films. He is the co-founder and has been the Executive and Artistic Director of The Seattle International Film Festival since its inception in 1975, where he served in that capacity until assuming the position of Executive Director of the Palm Springs International Film Society in October of 2003. Simultaneously, he served as the Artistic Director of the Palm Springs Film Festival (1989 -1993), the Hamptons Film Festival (1993 -1996) and…

Nasir Khamier, writer, filmmaker, poet, painter, sculptor, calligrapher is born in Korba, Tunisia in 1948. Since his childhood he lived in the culture of narrations and he never stopped to collect ad write them. In 1982 he was invited by Antoine Vitez to tell the story of One Thousand One Nights in the Theatre Nationale in Chaillot. The short-time character of the oral story doesn’t keep him from changing the story to another life by his graphical and plastic experiences. From 1975 he is publishing a lot of titles, among them ‘Le Soleil emmuré’, ‘Le conte des conteurs’, ‘Le nuage…

David Lee Strasberg serves as Creative Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles and New York. The world famous Institute was founded by Lee and Anna Strasberg in 1969 and serves as an international center for training method actors. The Institute also features the new Lee Strasberg Digital Film School that nurtures the personal visions and skills of new directors.Strasberg has produced short films and dozens of plays with The Group at Strasberg, an in-house production company based at the not-for-profit Lee Strasberg Creative Center in Los Angeles. Before taking the reigns of the…

Ryo Nagasawa Program Officer, of Japan Society Film Program was Born in 1979 in Yamagata, Japan and she grew up in a family-owned movie theater business in northern Japan. Ryo moved to US in 1998 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Purchase College, State University of New York in 2004.In 2004 and 2005 Ryo Nagasawa worked on two film series, Critic’s Choice: Susan Sontag on Japanese Film, Part II and Otaku Cinema Slam!. She has also worked as a film coordinator on After War, Hiroshi Sugimoto Film Series: The Moving Image of Modern Art and Against…