Film Festival

Béla Tarr

Béla Tarr began his career at the age of sixteen as an amateur filmmaker. He later worked at Balázs Béla Stúdió, Hungary's leading experimental film workshop, where he made his feature film directorial debut. Tarr was a student at the Academy of Theater and Film (Színház- és Filmművészeti Egyetem) in Budapest between 1977 and 1981. In 1981, he was one of the founders of the Társulás Filmstúdió, and since its closure in 1985, he has worked as an independent filmmaker. In 1989 and 1990 he lived in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogram, and between 1990 and 2011 he was an associate professor at the DFFB (Berlin Film School, Germany). He became a member of the European Film Academy in 1997.
In 2003, he founded TT Filmműhely, an independent film workshop which he ran until 2011. TT Filmműhely has produced his latest films, and Tarr has also acted as producer for the films of other notable filmmakers, including Miklós Jancsó. The film.factory international film school in Sarajevo was founded by Tarr in 2012, where he was program manager and professor until 2016. Tarr remains a visiting professor at several film academies. He is president of the Hungarian Filmmakers' Association, a member of the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts, and has been awarded Hungary's most prestigious prize for artists, the Kossuth Prize, as well as the Hungarian prize for filmmakers, the Balázs Béla Prize. He was named Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and has been honored with numerous outstanding national and international prizes, honorary doctorates and lifetime achievement awards.
His filmography includes Family Nest / Családi tüzfészek (1977), Hotel Magnezit (short film) (1978), The Outsider / Szabadgyalog (1981), Macbeth (feature film/TV film, video) (1982), The Prefab People / Panelkapcsolat (1982), Almanach of Fall / Öszi almanach (1985), Damnation / Kárhozat (1988), City Life - Segment The Last Boat / Utolsó hajó (1989), Sátántangó (1994), Journey on the Plain (short film, video) (1995), Werckmeister Harmonies / Werckmeister harmóniák (2000), Visions of Europe - Prologue segment (short film) (2004), The Man from London / A londoni férfi (2007) and The Turin Horse / A torinói ló (2011). After his self-proclaimed retirement from cinema, he embarked on a new creative path with his highly acclaimed exhibition Till the End of the World, seen by 40,000 visitors to Amsterdam's Eye Film Museum in 2017. His latest monumental production, Missing People, presented exclusively at the Wiener Festwochen on the very location where it was shot, showed Tarr experimenting with a new format at the intersection of film, installation and performance, which he described as a "visual poem".

Mati Diop

Born in 1982, Mati Diop lives and works between Paris and Dakar.
Her first feature film, Atlantique (2019), won the Grand Prix of the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival, the inaugural Mary Pickford Award at the Toronto Film Festival, the First Feature Film Award from the New York Critics Circle and the British Film Festival. That same year, Atlantique was named one of the Academy's 10 best international films.
His medium-length and short films Mille Soleils (2013), Big in Vietnam (2012), Snow Canon (2011) and Atlantiques (2009) have been selected and awarded at numerous international festivals. In 2016, Mati received the "Martin E. Segal - Emerging Artist Award" from Lincoln Center for her body of work.
As an actress, Mati Diop has appeared in Trente-cinq rhums by Claire Denis (2008), Simon Killer by Antonio Campos (2012), Fort Buchanan by Benjamin Crotty (2014), Hermia y Helena by Matias Piñeiro (2016) and in her latest short film, In my room (2020), recently presented at the Venice Film Festival.

Teresa Castro

Teresa Castro is a lecturer in film and audiovisual studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Trained in art history in Lisbon and London, she wrote her thesis in film studies in Paris. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the musée du quai Branly (Paris) and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), where she worked on anthropological atlases. She has published La Pensée cartographique des images. Cinéma et culture visuelle (Aléas, 2011) and coordinated several collective volumes and thematic dossiers for journals. She is the author of over fifty texts, published in scientific journals and books in various countries. A major part of her recent research focuses on the links between cinema and animism, eco-criticism and plant life forms in visual culture. In this context, she has published "The Mediated Plant" (E-flux, 2019), co-edited the collective work Puissance du végétal et cinéma animiste. La vitalité révélée par la technique (Dijon, Presses du réel, 2020), participated in the exhibition Plant Revolution! (CIAJG, Guimarães, 2019) and hosted the website Segredos da Natureza / Secrets of Nature (Culturgest, Lisbon, 2021). She is a member of the La vie à l'œuvre collective and the advisory board of the Doc's Kingdom international seminar. In addition to her academic activities, she also works as a critic and programmer.