José Luis Guerin (Spain)

José Luis Guerin was born in Barcelona in 1960. He received many awards for his films. In particular Los motivos de Berta: fantasía de pubertad  (1985) won the Sant Jordi Award for Best Film and the Berlin Forum Special Prize. Innisfree  (1990) won the Sant Jordi Award (RNE) for Best Film; the European Cinema Awards for Best Young Film and received the Best Film of the Year Prize from the Writer’s Association. Tren de sombras  (1997) won the Sant Jordi Award for Best Film and was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs section. En construcción  (2001) won the Silver Fotogramas Best Film Award, the Goya Award for Best Documentary, the Sant Jordi Award for Best Film and the Barcelona City Award. In 2007 En la ciudad de Sylvia  entered the 64th Venice Film Festival (official competition) and was mentioned in «Cahiers du Cinéma España» as one of the best films of the year in Spain. The same year this film entered also the Toronto, the New York and the São Paulo Film Festival competitions. In 2008 it won the Jules Verne Award at the Festival du Cinéma Espagnol de Nantes and ran for Bienal de Annecy in France, San Francisco Film Festival, Bafici Film Festival and Jeonju Film Festival.

Veiko Õunpuu (Estonia)

Veiko Õunpuu (Saaremaa, Estonia, 1972) made his successful debut as a director in 2006 with the short-length feature film Tühirand  winning all the Estonian film awards. Thanks to the balance between subtle irony and his marked poetic form, a characteristic of Õunpuu’s style, the short-length feature film conquered the heart of both the public and the critics. In 2007 he made his debut on the international scenes with a world preview of his first long-feature film Sügisball  (Autumn Ball) at the 64th Venice International Film Festival, winning the Premio Orizzonti.
Presented by Õunpuu as a black comedy that talks of solitude and hope, the film tells the tale of several characters who live in a complex of palace buildings in the Soviet era. An alcoholic writer whose wife leaves him, a solitary bachelor accused of paedophilia, a woman pursed by her ex-husband and, finally, an architect who leaves his wife to devote himself to aesthetics. Sügisball  received, amongst others, the top prizes at the Bratislava, Thessaloniki and Marrakech Film Festivals.