Heddy Honigmann
Heddy Honigmann, a child of Holocaust survivors, was born in 1951 in Lima, Peru, where she studied biology and literature at the University of Lima. She left Peru in 1973, traveled throughout Mexico, Israel, Spain and France, and later studied film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Since 1978 she has been a Dutch citizen and presently lives in Amsterdam, although her filmmaking career has taken her around the world.
As the child of exiles, it's not surprising that the plight of exiles and outsiders is a recurrent theme in her documentaries, as is memory, music and love. Her subjects have included cab drivers in Peru, immigrant musicians on the Paris Metro, senior citizens in Brazil, and Cuban exiles in New Jersey.
In addition to the elegantly composed imagery of her films, Honigmann's most often recognized talent as a documentary filmmaker is her ability to make an emotional connection with the people she films, an empathetic ability to listen and to elicit surprisingly intimate responses from them. As Honigmann has described her approach, "I don't do interviews. I make conversation."
Thomas Grube
Born in 1971, Thomas Grube studied politics and north American and east European culture at the Free University in Berlin. He also studied film and television at the college Konrad Wolf in Babelsberg on the edge of Potsdam. In his spare time he began working as a director and producer.
In 1993 he founded his first production firm, with which he then made short films, documentaries and music films as a script writer, director and producer. His first long film, LOVE IS THE MESSAGE (1994), is a comprehensive record of his own early techno-generation.
In 1996 he met his partner Uwe Dierks. Both were inspired by the personality and music of the American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein so turned their attention to the genre of 'classical music', in the hope of enabling it to reach a wider public. Together, as directors and producers, they made various documentary and music films.
In 1999 they joined Andrea Thilo to found the firm BOOMTOWNMEDIA GmbH&CoKG. Since then, as a director and producer, Thomas Grube has made many documentaries for television and the cinema. In the year 2000 he was nominated for the German Television Prize for WARSAW EXPRESS; in 2004, together with his co-director Enriquez Snchez Lansch, he received the Bavarian Film Prize for having directed RHYTHM IS IT! then in 2005 he received the German Film Prize for having produced it.
Steve James
Born
1954,Hampton, Virginia, United States
Job Titles
Director, Editor, Producer, Writer
Education
James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, communications, BS, 1977
Southern Illinois University, Illinois, film production, MFA, 1985
Milestones
1986 Began producing and directing documentaries for Kartemquin Films
1991 Wrote and directed documentary Grassroots Chicago
1994 First feature length documentary Hoop Dreams
1997 Directed first feature, the biopic Prefontaine
1999 Helmed the TNT movie Passing Glory
Formed Longshot Films with Peter Gilbert
Signed two-year deal with Disney
Steve James is the award-winning director, producer, and co-editor of Kartemquin's Hoop Dreams, which won every major critics award as well as a Peabody and Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 1995. The film earned James the Directors Guild of America Award and the MTV Movie Award's "Best New Filmmaker". Recently, Hoop Dreams was selected for the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, signifying the film's enduring importance to American film history.
Mark Lewis
For more than a decade, producer and director, Mark Lewis, has been renowned for developing the unusual genre of comical nature documentary, making films that focus on mans quirky and quizzical relationship with animals - and provoke us to rethink how we view creatures great and small. Besides examining the behaviour of beasts, Lewis frequently turns his lens inward to ultimately reveal surprising insights about one of the worlds strangest animals C human beings. Often illustrated through narrative vignettes by ordinary people with unusual fascinations or problems with a particular animal, Lewis imbues his films with a combination of hard fact, tongue-in-cheek irony, and his unique brand of gentle humour.
His films have earned him many awards, including a British Academy Award nomination, a nomination from the Directors Guild of America, two Emmys for Outstanding Direction in documentary film, and an Emmy for Outstanding Science Program on American Television.
Peter Wintonick
He is out there. Right now. Somewhere. He is talking, typing, shooting, discussing, listening, editing, thinking, looking. Montreal-based film/video/web-maker Peter Wintonick has been for over three decades, in both high profile and, more often, invisible ways, a prime mover in Canada's internationally acclaimed documentary tradition. Perceptive, peripatetic, protean, persistent: Wintonick is a one-man documentary film culture, both in Canada and abroad. Award-winning filmmaker, educator, advocate for media literacy, and internet pioneer, he is a tireless energetic combination of passion and scepticism, investigating not only the world as we see it, but the lenses through which we observe reality. In the gifted, generous hands of Peter Wintonick, the enterprise of documentary cinema is not simply to show us the world, but rather to illuminate imaginatively how we see that world in the first place.
Born in 1953 and raised in Ottawa, Wintonick studied journalism and philosophy at Carleton University and film production at Algonquin College. He began his film career at Montreal's International Cinemedia Centre Ltd. In the mid-1970s where he worked as an editor on sponsored films, and on the fiction feature films of George Kaczender. He then moved into documentary filmmaking, editing and associate producing such noted works as Ron Mann's Poetry in Motion (1982) and directing and producing a feature documentary
