International Guests

Claire Aho
Aho & Soldan 2 - Claire Aho

The daughter of Heikki Aho, the co-founder of the production company Aho & Soldan, is a pioneer of Finnish colour photography. Claire Aho’s first camera appearance was in the 1930s when she was captured on film by her father and uncle Björn Soldan. She stepped behind the camera in 1949. A year later, Heikki proudly filmed his daughter’s camera work. After Soldan moved to London, Claire was a big support to her dad. Her role and input was essential at the early stage of colour film.

Samantha Buck
21 Below

Samantha Buck (born in 1976) is an American actress and director, who had a role in Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Buck's television roles have not been limited only to drama; she also played a character on the comedy series Stella. She recently completed her directorial debut, 21 Below, a documentary that takes an in-depth look at a family from Buffalo, New York. It reveals their economic, social, and interpersonal struggles, and their fight to stay together while the world around them pulls them apart. When she was younger, Samantha Buck worked as a VJ for MTV.

Lucy Gaffy
Century Witness

Berni Goldblat
The Hillside Crowd

Berni Goldblat is a Swiss citizen who was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. Since 2000, he has directed and produced films mainly in West Africa. He was a Jury member at the 2008 and 2009 Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) in Nigeria, as well as at the 2008 Imagé Santé International Film Festival in Liege, Belgium. He is also a founding member of the CINOMADE association (www.cinomade.org). The Hillside Crowd is his second feature film after Mokili, a fiction film released in 2006.

Alexander Gutman
17 August

Alexander Gutman (1945), is a Russian film director. During over 30 years he has shot over 50 documentary films, 13 of them as film director. He is a winner of numerous awards at Russian and international film festivals.

Thomas Heise
Material

Vadim Jendreyko
The Woman with the 5 Elephants

Vadim Jendreyko was born in Germany in 1965, from where he moved to Switzerland, where he lives also nowadays. Father of two has studied in the Basel School of Applied Art and the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Jendreyko realized his first film in 1986, and he has since had a remarkable career as a documentary director. In 2002, he and Hercli Bundi founded production company Mira Film GmbH.

Jendreyko’s work include Bashkim (2002), a film about a young Kosovan boxer, Transit: Zurich Airport (2003), a documentary that follows refugees and emigrants at the airport, and Maximum Performance (2004).

Marcin Koszałka

Cinematographer for fiction and documentary films, director for documentaries and script writer Marcin Koszałka (born in 1970 in Krakow) is a graduate of the Krzysztof Kieślowski Faculty of Radio and Television at the University of Silesia. Already his debut documentary film, Takiego pięknego syna urodziłam (2000), won several prizes at various festivals. Also later he has been a laureate of numerous awards at festivals in Nyon, Berlin, Gdynia, Krakow and Wrocław, to name but a few. Above all, Koszałka is known for his significant work as a cinematographer, having worked together with many esteemed Polish directors.

Marcel Łoziński

Ranking among the world’s top documentary filmmakers, Marcel Łoziński is a veteran of Polish cinema, who has been working in his home country since the 1960s. Łoziński is one of Poland's most internationally acknowledged documentary filmmakers. He has won awards at the Leipzig, Oberhausen and San Francisco film festivals, to mention but a few. Łoziński has also made a significant contribution by teaching many of the rising Polish documentarians whose films are featured in DocPoint’s Polish Heart programme.

Paweł Łoziński
Chemo

Director, scriptwriter and producer of documentary and fiction films, born in Warsaw in 1965. He earned his degree from the Film Directing Department of Łódź Film School. In his famous debut Birthplace (1992), Paweł Łoziński found his own path and showed his temperament as a documentary filmmaker. At the same time he remained a continuator of the Polish documentary tradition. His documentaries include Birthplace (1992), The Way It Is (1999), Sisters (1999), Between the Doors (2004), Wygnańcy (2005), Kitty, Kitty (2008) and Chemo (2009). Łoziński has won prestigious awards at festivals in Bornholm, Paris, Leipzig and Krakow.

Andri Snær Magnason
Dreamland

Andri Snær Magnason (1973) is an Icelandic writer. He has written novels, poetry, plays, short stories, essays and CD's. His work has been published or performed in more than 16 countries. His most recent work is the book Dreamland, a highly praised work of non-fiction dealing with many issues in modern Iceland, mostly environmentalism but also the US Army being in the country, inconsistencies in policies regarding towns outside of Reykjavík. Magnason has collaborated with various artists, mostly with a band called múm. Andri is vice-president of The Icelandic Writers Union, board member of The Culture House in Reykjavik and has been active in the fight against the destruction of the Icelandic Highlands.

Jenny Maguire
21 Below

Maguire lives in New York, but was born in Houston, Texas and raised in Front Royal, Virginia; a small town nestled in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Maguire is a summa cum laude graduate from James Madison University.

Jenny Maguire visits DocPoint as a producer, but her actual career is in front of camera. She has been a professional New York actor in theatre, television and film for over fourteen years. Maguire has appeared for instance in film The Baxter (2005) starring Michelle Williams, and guest starred on The 70’s Show and Law&Order. Recently Maguire has become a producer. His first work was short film Somewhere Is the Middle, a co-operation with Jenni Tooley, followed by Break (2009), Surrender (2009) and 21 Below (2009).

21 Below portrays the life of the conflict-torn American family. Different customs and skin colours cause conflicts, but dying little girl prevents the family from falling apart.

Darius Marder
Loot

Darius Marder is an American director and editor, working and living in Brooklyn, NY. He worked as an editor on the Oscar winning documentary Freeheld (2007), which also won the Special Jury prize at Sundance. Marder’s directoral debut Loot (2008) is screened for the first time outside the United States at DocPoint Festival.

Donal Mosher
October Country

Donal Mosher is an American photographer, writer, musician, and nowadays also director. His photo documentary work inspired the film October Country. Portions of the project have been shown in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco’s SF Camerawork as well as online at the Marjorie Wood Gallery. Mosher’s fiction and non-fiction writings have appeared for instance in Satellite, Instant City, and Life As We Show It – Writing On Film.

Mosher is also a principle subject of Robert Arnold’s documentary film Key of G, which focuses on life and work with a severely disabled young man. Documentary October Country, collaboration between Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri (also as a guest at DocPoint), has been featured at several film festivals around the world and has been awarded for instance in Silverdocs and DocLisboa festivals.

A Selection of Mosher’s work can be found at ghostype.blogspot.com and donalmosher.com.

Michael (Mike) Palmieri
October Country

Michael Palmieri knew already as a child that he wants to became a director. Palmieri’s dream became true, when he began his directing career working with Garry Trudeau, the Pulitzer Price -winning cartoonist and writer of Doonesbury. Later Palmieri utilized creative hybrid of digital stop motion and unique interviewing techniques when working for Sundance Channel in New York. His method attracted the attention of the musical artist Beck, leading to two music videos with him and a three-year association with film production company A Band Apart in Los Angeles.  Palmieri has directed over twenty music videos for artist as Beck, The Strokes, The Foo Fighters, The New Pornographers, and Belle and Sebastian. His commercial work includes spots for Converse, Coke, MAC Cosmetics, and ESPN. Other notable collaborators include Academy award winning documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.

Palmieri has studied philosophy at Berkeley, and is an adjunct professor of film and video at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He now resides in Portland, Oregon.

Documentary October Country, the collaboration between Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher, has been featured at several film festivals around the world and has been awarded for instance in Silverdocs and DocLisboa festivals. A wide selection of Palmieri’s work can be found at www.michaelpalmieri.com.

Nicolas Philibert

Nicolas Philibert will be honoured in a small retrospective. Philibert is renowned for his distinctive style of cinéma vérité. His film To Be and to Have (2002) gained success at festivals and among audiences all over the world.

Representative to his work is an uncompromising formal conviction, with no room for artificial light, scripts or actor-like subjects. As a premise for his films he sees freedom and the relationship to those his films, not knowledge. “The less I know about a subject, the better I feel”, has Philibert claimed.

Jakub Piątek
Mother

Director Jakub Piątek studied at the Polish National Film School in Lodz and Adrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing. His films include Teacher (2006, part of the Polish-German project Reflection), Carousel Guys (2008), 350 km (2009), and Mother (2009).

Kimberly Reed
Prodigal Sons

After studying cinema at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University, Kimberly Reed was looking forward to a promising career as a filmmaker. She was a young, award-winning filmmaker, had worked as a commercial editor and had become an early expert in the nascent field of digital filmmaking and post-production. But then she transitioned genders and disappeared. Prodigal Sons is her first feature-length documentary film. Kimberly Reed is already recognized as the first transgender feature filmmaker.

Ross Whitaker
Saviours

Irish Ross Whitaker has developed, produced and directed a number of successful independent documentaries.

Saviours is the directorial debut of Liam Nolan and Ross Whitaker, two Dublin filmmakers who came together to produce a 25-minute documentary but realised they could gather enough material for a full-lenght film. Filming then took place over the following two years but with no budget.

Tomasz Wolski
The Clinic, The Lucky Ones

Wolski is a scriptwriter and documentary film director born in 1977. A graduate of the Jagiellonian University (Journalism) and the Andrzej Wajda Master School of Film Directing, he has worked as a director’s assistant to Jacek Bławut on Born Dead (2004). His documentary films include The Clinic (2006), Goldfish (2008), The Actors (2009) and The Lucky Ones (2009). He has won a number of festival awards in Neubrandenburg, Pamplona, Wrocław and Kraków, among others.