Chanel

Our coordinator Manuel Canteras Campos sent us a link to a special channel including our activities, events and products.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf5t6rP59u1R3EcSHAuq1Hw/videos

Link for cover, poster and screenplay

Here at the Polish school website you can find some materials to download:
screenplay, cover, poster and some more.

http://sp14lodz.szkolnastrona.pl/p,49,comenius

Dictionary

             

                                                       

DICTIONARY OF CINEMATOGRAPHIC TERMS

                              

„THE MYSTERY OF EUROPE: THE FILM”

COMENIUS PROJECT no. 2013-1-ES1-COM06-73156

2013-2015

Partners:

Colegio San Buenaventura-Capuchinos, Murcia, SPAIN

Szkoła Podstawowa nr 14 im.Józefa Lompy w Łodzi, Lodz, POLAND

Istituto Comprensivo  “ N. Alunno” di Belfiore, Foligno Frazione di Belfiore, ITALY

Agrupamento de Escolas Henriques Nogueira, Torres Vedras, PORTUGAL

Piyalepaşa Ortaokulu Müdürlüğü, Yalova, TURKEY

Liceul Tehnologic „Grigore Moisil”, Braila, ROMANIA

Table of contents:

I. Dictionary of cinematographic terms

II. Types of films

III. Famous actors and actresses

Spain: Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, Javier Bardem

Italy: Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroiani, Monica Vitti

Poland: Danuta Szaflarska, Izabella Scorupco, Piotr Adamczyk

Portugal: Daniela Ruah, Diogo Morgado, Joaquim de Almeida, Maria de Medeiros

Turkey: Halit Ergenç, Songül Öden, Afife Jale

Romania: Amza Pellea, Maia Morgenstern, Marcel Iureş

IV. Famous film directors

Spain: Pedro Almodóvar

Italy: Federico Fellini

Poland: Jerzy Hoffman

Portugal: Manoel de Oliveira

Turkey: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Romania: Sergiu Nicolaescu

I. Dictionary of cinematographic terms

English term	Definition	Spanish	Italian	Polish	Portuguese	Turkish	Romanian
Actor	a person portraying a character in a dramatic or comic production	Actor	Attore	Aktor	Ator	Aktör	Actor
Actress		Actriz	Attrice	Aktorka	Atriz	Aktris	Actriță
Angle (low angle; high angle)	Filmed from below Filmed from above	Ángulo	Angolazione	Kąt	Ângulo	Açı	Unghi
animation	Moving images created from drawings that are photographed or created by a computer.	Animación	Cartoni animati	Animacja	animação	Animasyon	Animație
Animator	Someone who makes animated films, drawings.	Animador	Animatore	Animator	animador	Animatör	Animator
Box office	The place in a cinema or theatre where tickets are sold	Taquilla	Biglietteria	Kasa biletowa	Bilheteira	Gişe	Casa de bilete
Cameraman	A person who operates a camera when films or television programmes are being made	Camarógrafo	Cameramen	Operator kamery	Operador de câmera	Kameraman	Operator camera
Camerawork	The way in which cameras are used in films	Trabajo de cámera	Riprese cinematografiche	Praca kamery	Trabalho de câmara	Kamera	Filmări
Casting director	The person responsible for selecting the cast of a theatrical production, motion picture.	Director de casting	Direttore decasting	Kierownik castingu	Diretor de Casting	Döküm yönetmeni	Director de casting
Celluloid	A type of plastic used to make, especially in the past, photographic film	Celuloide	Celluloide	Celuloid	Celulóide	Selüloit	Banda de celuloid
Cinema	A theatre where people pay to watch films	Cine	Sala cinematografica	Kino	Cinema	Sinema	Cinema
Cinemagoer	A person who regularly goes to watch films at the cinema	Aficionado al cine	Cinefilo	Kinoman, Kinomanka	Cinéfilo	Sinema izleyicisi	Cinefil
Cinematic	Relating to the cinema	Cinematográfico	Cinematografico	Kinowy	Cinematográfico	Sinematik	cinematografic
Cinematography	The art and methods of film photography	Cinematografía	Cinematografia	Kinematografia	Cinematografia	Sinematografi	Cinematografie
Clapperboard	A device, used by people making films, that consists of a board with two parts that are hit together at the start of filming	Claqueta	Ciack	Klaps	Placa	Klaket	Clacheta
Clip	A short part of a film or television programme	Clip	Filmato	Klip	Clip	Klip	Videoclip
Close-up	A photograph taken from a short distance that gives a very detailed picture	Acercamiento	Primo piano	Zbliżenie	Primeiro Plano	Yakın	Prim plan
Computer-generated imagery	The process of using computers to create pictures or characters in film and television	Imágenes generadas por ordenador	Immagini prodotte al computer	Wszelkie elementy obrazu, wygenerowane przy pomocy komputera	Imagem gerada por computador	Görüntü	Imagini realizate pe computer
Costume designer	person who designs costumes for a film or stage production	Diseñador de vestuario	Costumista	Kostiumograf	Responsável pelo guarda roupa	Kostüm tasarımcıs	Costumier
Credit (list of names)	A list of people who helped to make a film or a television programme, that is shown or announced at the beginning or the end of it	Ficha técnica	Titoli di coda	Napisy końcowe	Ficha Técnica	Kredi	Fisa tehnica
Director	The person who directs a film	Director	Regista	Reżyser	Realizador	Yönetmen	Regizor
Director of photography	A chief over the camera and lighting crews working on a film, television production	Director de fotografía	Direttore della fotografia	Autor zdjęć do filmu	Diretor de fotografia	Görüntü yönetmeni	Director de fotografie
Fade out	To (cause to) lose colour, brightness or strength gradually	Desvanecer	Disolvenza	Zanikanie	Desvanecer	Karartmak	Estompare/inchidere prin intunecare
Film	A series of moving pictures, usually shown in a cinema or on television and often telling a story	Película	Film	Film	Filme	Film	Film
Film star	A famous cinema actor	Estrella de cine	Stella del cinema	Gwiazda filmowa	Estrela de cinema	Film yıldızı	Vedetă de film
Filmgoer (moviegoer)	A person who regularly goes to watch films at the cinema	Aficionado al cine	Frequentatore di cinema	Bywalec kin	Cinéfilo	Sinema izleyicisi	Cinefil
Film editor	Person who edits the film	Editor de cine	Tecnico del montaggio	Montażysta	Editor	Editör	Editor
Filming	The activity of making a film	Rodaje	Filmare/ girare le scene	Filmowanie	Filmar	çekim	Filmare
Filmstrip	A length of film with a set of pictures that are shown one at a time	Tira de película	Pellicola cinematografica	Kadr	Película	Film şeridi	Pelicula cinematografica
Frame	One of the pictures on a strip of photographic film, or one of the single pictures that together form a television or cinema film	Enmarcado	Fotogramma	Klatka	Enquadramento	çerçeve	Cadru
Freeze-frame	A single picture from a film, or the device that allows you to stop a film at a particular point and look at a single picture	Imágen congelada	Blocco di fotogramma	Stopklatka	Parar a imagem (congelar)	Dondurulmuş çerçeve	Stop cadru
Gaffer	The person responsible for the lights and other electrical equipment used when making a film or television programme	Técnico de iluminación	Tecnico delle luci	Mistrz oświetlenia	Técnico de luzes	Işıkçı	Tehnician de lumini
Location	A place	Ubicación	Ambientazione	Miejsce, plan zdjęciowy	Localização	Konum	Locație
Makeup artist	A person applying make-up	Maquillador	Truccatore	Charakteryzator	Técnico de maquilhagem	Makyajcı	Responsabil machiaj
Motion picture	A movie	Película	Pellicola	Film	Filme	Sinema	Film
Movie	A film shown in a cinema or on television and often telling a story	Película	Film	Film	Filme	Sinema	Film
Premiere	The first public performance of a play or another type of entertainment	Estreno	La Prima proiezione di un film	Premiera	Estreia	Gala	Premieră
Project	To cause a film, image or light to appear on a screen	Proyectar una película	Proiettare	Wyświetlić	Projetar	Proje	A proiecta
Projection	The act of projecting a film or an image onto a screen or wall	Proyección	Proiezione	Projekcja	Projeção	Projeksiyon	Proiecție
Projector	A device for showing films or images on a screen or another surface	Proyector	Proiettore	Projektor	Projetor	Projektör	Proiector
Release	To allow something to be shown in public; if a company releases a film or musical recording, it allows the film to be shown in cinemas	Estrenar	Distribuzione	Wydać	Lançamento	Sunum	Lansare
Remake	To make a new film that has a story or title similar to an old one	Nueva versión	Restauro	Remake	Segunda edição	Yeniden yapmak	Reeditarea unui fim
Retake	To take a photograph or shoot a part of a film again	Filmar de nuevo	Ripetizione/ replica	Na nowo nakręcić scenę	Filmar novamente	Geri almak	A refilma
Screen	A flat surface in a cinema, on a television, or as part of a computer, on which pictures are shown	Pantalla	Schermo	Ekran	Ecrã	Ekran	Ecran
Screening	A showing of a film	Proyección	Sceneggiare	Projekcja	Apresentação	Tarama	Ecranizare
Screenplay	The text for a film, including the words to be spoken by the actors and instructions for the cameras	Guión	Sceneggiatura	Scenariusz	Guião	Senaryo	Scenariu
Script	written copy for the use of performers in films and plays	Guión	Testo	Scenariusz	Argumento	Senaryo	Scenariu
Script supervisor	A supervisor that makes sure that the production has continuous verbal and visual integrity	Supervisor guionista	Supervisore testi		Diretor do argumento	Supervizör	Director scenariu
Sequence	A part of a film that shows a particular event or a related series of events	Secuencia	Sequenza	Sekwencja	Sequência	Dizi	Secvență
Shoot	To use a camera to record a video or take a photograph	Filmar	Girare	Nakręcić scenę	Filmar	Sürgün	A filma
Shot	A photograph; a short piece in a film in which there is a single action	Foto	Scatto	Ujęcie	Imagem	Atış	Instantaneu
Show	A public event	Espectáculo	Spettacolo	Pokaz	Espetáculo	Gösteri	Spectacol
Slapstick	A type of humorous acting in which the actors behave in a silly way, such as by throwing things, falling over	Momento humorístico	Comico	Błazenada	Momento de humor	şakşak	Moment umoristic
Slide projector	A machine that shines a light through a photograph made into a slide to produce a larger image on a screen	Proyector	Proiettore di diapositive	Rzutnik	Projetor	Slayt projectörü	Proiector
Slow motion	A way of showing pictures from a film or television programme at a slower speed than normal	Camara lenta	Moviola/ rallentatore	Zwolnione tempo	Câmara lenta	Ağır çekim	Prezentare lenta
Sound editor	Person responsible for the sounds in a film	Editoe de sonido	Tecnico del suono/ montatore della colonna sonora	Reżyser dźwięku	Editor de som	Ses editörü	Editor de sunet
Sound effect	In a radio or television programme or a film, one of the sounds other than speech or music that are added to make it seem more exciting or real	Efecto de sonido	Effetti sonori	Efekt dźwiękowy	Efeitos sonoros	Ses efekti	Efecte de sunet
Sound man		Técnico de sonido	Addetto al suono	Dźwiękowiec	Técnico de Som	Sesadam	Sunetist
Soundtrack	The sounds, especially the music, of a film, or a separate recording of this	Banda sonora	Colonna sonora	Ścieżka dźwiękowa	Banda sonora	Ses bandı	Coloana sonora
Storyboard	(in films and television) a series of drawings or images showing the planned order of images	Guión gráfico	Storyboard/ bozzetti	Storyboard	Esboço sequencial	Hikaye sırası	Secvente desenate/storyboard
Studio (recording studio)	A room with special equipment where television or radio programme or music recordings are made	Estudio de grabación	Studio di registrazione	Studio nagrań	Estudio	Stutyo	Studio de inregistrari
Stunt	An exciting action, usually in a film, that is dangerous or appears dangerous and usually needs to be done by someone skilled	Truco	Caduta/ acrobazia	Sztuczka kaskaderska	Duplo	Hüner	Cascadorie
Subtitles	Words shown at the bottom of a film or television picture to explain what is being said	Subtítulos	Sottotitoli	Napisy	Legendas	Altyazı	Subtitluri
The big screen	Films that are shown in cinemas	Gran pantalla	Grande schermo	Wielki ekran	Grande ecrã	Büyük ekran	Marele ecran
The silver screen	The film industry	Industria de cine	Industria del cinema	Srebrny ekran	Indústria cinematográfica	Beyaz perde	Industia cinematografica
Time-lapse	Used to refer to a method of filming very slow actions by taking a series of single pictures over a period of time and then putting them together to show the action happening very quickly	Lapso de tiempo	Intervallo di tempo	Technika poklatkowa	Lapso de tempo	Hızlandırılmış	Interval de timp
Title	The name of a film, book, painting, piece of music	Título	Titolo	Tytuł	Título	Başlık	Titlu
Track	One of several songs or pieces of music on a CD or another recording	Pista	Traccia	Ścieżka, utwór	Faixa	Iz	Melodie
Viewing	An occasion for a special look at an exhibition, film	Visualización	Visione	Pokaz, oglądanie	Amostragem	Görüntüleme	Vizualizare
Zoom	Fixed camera; entire scene magnified equally often plunging viewer	Zoom/ Enfocar	Zoom	Zoom	Zoom	Yakınlaştırma	Apropiere, mărire

Type of film	Spanish	Italian	Polish	Portuguese	Turkish	Romanian
Action film	Película de acción	Film d'azione	Film akcji, kino akcji	Filmes de ação	Aksiyon filmi	Film de acțiune
Adventure film	Película de aventuras	Film d'avventura	Film przygodowy	Filmes de Aventuras	Macera filmi	Film de aventuri
Animated film	Película animada	Film d'animazione	Film animowany	Desenhos Animados	Animasyon	Film de animație
Biography	Biografía	Biografia	Biografia	Biografia	Biyografi	Biografie
Cartoons	Dibujos animados	Cartoni animati	Kreskówka	Desenhos Animados	çizgifilm	Desene animate
Comedy	Comedia	Commedia	Komedia	Comédia	Komedi	Comedie
Documentary film	Documental	Documentario	Film dokumentalny	Documentário	Belgesel	Film documentar
Drama	Tragedia	Film drammatico	Dramat	Drama	Drama	Drama
Horror film	Película de terror	Film horror	Horror	Filme de Terror	Korku	Film de groaza
Romance/ love story	Novela /historia de amor	Film d'amore	Romans	Romance / História de amor	Romantik	Film de dragoste
Musical	Película musical	Musical	Musical	Musical	Musikal	Film muzical
Romantic comedy	Comedia romántica	Commedia romantica	Komedia romantyczna	Comédia Romântica	Romantik komedy	Comedie romantica
Science fiction film	Película de ciencia ficción	Film scientifico	Film s.f.	Filme de ficção científica	Bilim kurgu	Film stiințifico- fantastic
Thriller	Película de misterio	Thriller	Dreszczowiec	Filme de suspense	Gerilim	Film thriller
War film	Película de guerra	Film di guerra	Film wojenny	Filme de guerra	Savaş	Film de război
Western	Película western	Western	Western	Filme de cowboys	Batı	Film western

II.Types of films

III. Famous actors and actresses

Spain: Penélope Cruz

Born in Spain in 1974, actress Penelope Cruz studied classical ballet at a young age and later moved to Hollywood, California, to pursue acting. She soon landed roles opposite the likes of Matt Damon and Tom Cruise. She won an Academy Award—becoming the first Spanish actress to do so- for her performance in the film Vicky Christina Barcelona. Cruz married her Vicky Cristina Barcelona co-star, Spanish actor Javier Bardem, in 2010.

Penelope Cruz Sanchez was born on April 28, 1974, in Alcobendas, Madrid, Spain. Cruz was born as the eldest of three and a natural performer; her father, Eduardo, worked as a car mechanic, and her mother, Encarna, was a hairdresser. As a child, Cruz amused her family by re-enacting television commercials. Though a natural actress, she took up dance for her choice of performance arts. She studied classical ballet for nine years at Spain's National Conservatory, and then moved to New York to dance under a series of prominent performers.

When she was 15 years old, Cruz found her true vocation after beating out 300 other girls at a talent agency competition. Following this early success, she landed several roles as a dancer for music videos, as well as a gig hosting Spanish TV's La Quinta Marcha. Additionally, Cruz explored her more sensual side in the French erotic TV series Serie Rose.

Penelope Cruz made her film debut in 1992, in the dark film Jamón Jamón. The film's director, who had been unable to cast Cruz as the lead in another film because of her young age, waited until she was old enough for his next film. Her performance earned her nominations for both the Spanish Actors Union Newcomer Award and the Goya Award (Spain's Academy Award) for best lead actress. A year later, Cruz played Luz in The Age of Beauty (1992). The film won an Oscar (best foreign language film), virtually swept the Goya Awards and earned Cruz the Spanish Actors Union Award for best supporting performance.

With an impressive apprenticeship to the craft, Cruz earned her place in Spanish cinema as a leading lady. Her resumé continued to grow over the following few years, clocking up three or four films each year. In 1997, Cruz took the role of Isabel Plaza Caballero in Carne Tremula—marking the first time that she worked with internationally renowned director Pedro Almodóvar, who, in turn, became a lifelong friend, as well as her vehicle for global fame. Cruz garnered further critical recognition for her performance in the film.

Two years later, in 1999, Cruz landed a role in another film directed by Almodóvar, Todo Sobre Mi Madre, which went on to win Oscar and a BAFTA (best foreign language film) awards. With a series of well-respected movies under her belt, by this time, Cruz was in demand on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

At the age of 25, Cruz made the bold decision to move to Hollywood, California. Fully in command and on top of her career, she took on the role of a control freak and successful chef in Woman on Top (2000). That same year, she played the romantic lead in Billy Bob Thornton's Western All the Pretty Horses. Both films garnered critical success.

Cruz's next film, Abre Los Ojos, caught the attention of director Cameron Crowe and film icon Tom Cruise. Impressed by the script and the actress, the duo created an American remake of the film: Vanilla Sky (2001). The movie helped make Cruz a crossover success, and her ensuing relationship with co-star Tom Cruise put her firmly in American headlines.

Cruz went on to further prove she could hold her own among heavy-hitting actors in 2001, when she starred opposite Johnny Depp in the film Blow. That same year, she appeared in Captain Corelli's Mandolin; her performance earned her a European Film Award nomination for best actress. Cruz's next film, Waking Up in Reno (2002), featured her alongside Billy Bob Thornton and Patrick Swayze. The romantic comedy about two couples headed to a Monster Truck show received little box office attention.

In 2005, Cruz appeared in Sahara, a comedic adventure film. Not long into filming, the actress began a year-long relationship with her Sahara co-star, Matthew McConaughey. The couple later split, reportedly citing conflicting film schedules.

Returning to Spanish-language filmes, Cruz appeared in Bandidas (2006) with friend and co-star Salma Hayek. That same year, she starred in Volver, another Almodóvar film; the director had held the role specifically for Cruz, and her performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress. A year later, Cruz won her first Academy Award (best actress in a supporting role) for the Woody Allen film Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008).

Cruz reunited with Almodóvar a year later for the film Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces), released in 2009. That same year, she had a supporting role in the musical Nine, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a famous Italian director. Cruz played Carla, the director's mistress and only one of the many women in his life. The film, adapted from the Broadway show, was directed by Rob Marshall and also featured Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench and Sophia Loren.F or her portrayal of Carla in the film, Cruz received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress.

Antonio Banderas

Antonio Banderas was born on August 10, 1960, in Málaga, Spain. From 1982 to 1986, he acted exclusively in films directed by Pedro Almodóvar. His success as an actor in American came with his role in Philadelphia (1993). In 1994, Banderas won a role in Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles. In 1997, he made The Mask of Zorro. He performed the voice of Puss in Boots in the Shrek film series, and in the 2011 spin-off film, Puss in Boots.

Actor José Antonio Domínguez Banderas was born on August 10, 1960, in Málaga, Spain. Banderas studied drama, eventually moving to Madrid where he performed in plays including Historia de los Tarantos and La hija del aire. There, he met Pedro Almoóvar who gave him a small part in the film Laberinto de pasiones (1982), and from then on he worked exclusively with Almodóvar in such films as Matador (1985) and La ley del deseo (1986).

His first American movie role was in The Mambo Kings (1992), and still speaking no English, he was forced to learn his lines phonetically. To his credit, his performance as a struggling musician was critically praised.

Early in the 1990s, largely due to the international popularity of Almodóvar's films, he began a film career in Hollywood. His real breakthrough to the mainstream American audience came with starring in Philadelphia (1993). Banderas played the gay lover of a lawyer with AIDS, played by Tom Hanks, with a sensitivity that earned him much kudos. His star was shining brightly and the following year he won a role in Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994) with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. His work as a star standing on equal ground with other A-listers signified that Banderas had truly made the grade in Hollywood.

Banderas' next big movie, Evita (1996) opposite Madonna, found the Spanish actor in a role singing and dancing. The following year, Banderas starred in The Mask of Zorro (1998), with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Anthony Hopkins. Along with his work in front of the camera, Banderas has found success by using only his deep, distinctive voice. He won new fans as Puss in Boots in the popular animated film Shrek 2 (2004), which was folowed by the spin-off film Puss in Boots (2011), featuring popular actors Salma Hayek and Zach Galifianakis.

Javier Bardem 

Born on March 1, 1969, in the Canary Islands, Spain, Javier Bardem was born into an acting clan and eventually embarked on a film career. He's worked with director Pedro Almodóvar and earned Academy Award nominations for his roles in Before Night Falls and Biutiful, winning for the chilling No Country for Old Men. Additional projects have included Skyfall and Eat Pray Love. Bardem wed actress Penelope Cruz in 2010.

Javier Encinas Bardem was born on March 1, 1969, in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain. Born into a popular acting family—his mother, Pilar Bardem, has appeared in several of her son's movies—Bardem built a considerable reputation among Spanish movie audiences as the sexy star of such steamy films as Las Edades de Lulu (The Ages of Lulu, 1990); Jamón, jamón (1992); and Huevos de oro (Golden Balls, 1993)—all of which were directed by filmmaker Bigas Luna (Huevos de oro also featured fellow up-and-coming Latino actor Benicio Del Toro).

Bardem expanded into more dramatic roles in the mid-1990s, playing a drug addict in Días contados (Numbered Days, 1994) and a police detective in El Detective y la muerte (The Detective and Death, 1994). In 1995, he showed considerable comedic talent when he spoofed his heartthrob image in Boca a boca (Mouth to Mouth), playing a struggling young actor who gets a job as a phone sex operator. The actor reteamed with celebrated Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar—who had cast him in 1991's Tacones lejanos (High Heels)—for 1997's Carne trémula (Live Flesh), also featuring Spanish actress and Bardem's future wife, Penelope Cruz. In that film, Bardem had the meaty role of a policeman paralyzed in a shooting accident who ends up marrying the same woman his shooter is in love with.

Bardem made his English-language debut in Perdita Durango (1997), playing Romeo, the lover of the film's title character, portrayed by actress Rosie Perez. The film made little impact on critics or audiences. In 1999, Bardem starred with Spanish siren Victoria Abril in Entre las piernas (Between Your Legs).

Javier Bardem's performance as Cuban writer and revolutionary Reinaldo Arenas, who committed suicide in 1990, following a long struggle with AIDS, in Julian Schnabel's edgy Before Night Falls (2000) earned Bardem the best reviews of his life—as well as a place on the international radar screen. With several major awards—including best actor honors from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics—under his belt, Bardem became the first Spanish actor to earn an Academy Award nomination.

Bardem went on to tackle a prominent role in actor John Malkovich's directorial debut, The Dancer Upstairs (2002). After a supporting role in the Tom Cruise-Jamie Foxx thriller Collateral (2004), he starred as a quadriplegic fighting for his right to die in The Sea Inside (2004), based on a true story.

In 2007, Bardem appeared in two literary adaptations: Love in the Time of Cholera, derived from the best-selling novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and No Country for Old Men, adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name. While Love in the Time of Cholera received mixed reviews, Bardem garnered wide praise for his performance as Anton Chigurh, a hitman who lives by his own code, in No Country for Old Men. A modern Western of sorts made by Ethan and Joel Coen, the dark film also stars Tommy Lee Jones (as the sheriff who frustratingly but continually tries to solve the string of murders that Chigurh leaves in his wake). One of the most striking physical features of Chigurh was his haircut—which Bardem actually referenced at the 2008 Academy Awards, in the acceptance speech that he delivered after receiving the Oscar for best supporting actor. "Thank you to the Coens for being crazy enough to think I could do that, and for putting one of the most horrible haircuts in history over my head," Bardem told the audience.

Bardem starred with Penelope Cruz again in Woody Allen's popular 2008 film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. He later played a leading role in the 2010 film Eat Pray Love.

Italy: Sophia Loren

Italian actress Sophia Loren was born in Rome on September 20, 1934. Raised in poverty, she began her film career in 1951 and came to be regarded as one of the worlds most beautiful women. Loren won the Best Actress Academy Award for the film Two Women in 1961 and an Academy Honorary Award in 1991. Married to producer Carlo Ponti for 50 years until his death in 2007, Loren lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

Actress Sofia Villani Scicolone was born on September 20, 1934 in Rome, Italy. Her father, Riccardo Scicolone, considered himself a "construction engineer," but in fact he spent most of his time hanging around the fringes of show business, hoping to romance young actresses. Sophia Loren's mother, Romilda Villani, was one of them. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to Greta Garbo, Villani had once been offered a trip to the United States to play Garbo's body double, but her mother refused to let her go.

After Sophia Loren's birth, her mother took her back to her hometown of Pozzuoli on the Bay of Naples, which one travel book described as "perhaps the most squalid city in Italy." Although Riccardo Scicolone fathered another child by Villani, they never married. As Loren's mother put it, "That pig was free to marry me, but instead he dumped me and married another woman."

Although she would go on to be considered one of the most beautiful women in history, Sophia Loren's wet nurse remembered her as "the ugliest child I ever saw in my life." A quiet and reserved child, Loren grew up in extreme poverty, living with her mother and many other relatives at her grandparents' home, where she shared a bedroom with eight people. Things got worse when World War II ravaged the already struggling city of Pozzuoli.

The resulting famine was so great that Loren's mother occasionally had to siphon off a cup of water from the car radiator to ration between her daughters by the spoonful. During one aerial bombardment, Loren was knocked to the ground and split open her chin, leaving a scar that has remained ever since.

Nicknamed "little stick" by her classmates for her sickly physique, at the age of 14 Loren blossomed, seemingly overnight, from a frail child into a beautiful and voluptuous woman. "It became a pleasure just to stroll down the street," she remembered of her sudden physical transformation. That same year, Loren won second place in a beauty competition, receiving as her prize a small sum of cash and free wallpaper for her grandparents' living room.

In 1950, when she was 15 years old, Loren and her mother set off for Rome to try to make their living as actresses. Loren landed her first role as an extra in the 1951 Mervyn LeRoy film Quo Vadis. She also landed work as a model for various fumetti, Italian publications that resemble comic books but with real photographs instead of illustrations. After various bit parts and a small role in the 1952 film La Favorita, the first for which she adopted the stage name "Loren," she delivered her breakthrough performance as the title character in the 1953 film Aida. Another leading role in The Gold of Naples (1954) established Loren as one of the up-and-coming stars of Italian cinema.

In 1957, Loren starred in her first Hollywood film, The Pride and the Passion, filmed in Paris and costarring Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra. At the same time, she became enmeshed in a love triangle when both Grant and an Italian film producer named Carlo Ponti declared their love for her. Although she had a schoolgirl's crush on Grant, Loren ultimately chose Ponti, a man the media joked was twice her age and half her height.

Even though they married in 1957, complications regarding the annulment of Ponti's first marriage prevented their union from being officially legally recognized in Italy for another decade. Loren and Ponti's marriage nevertheless remains one of the rare, heartwarming success stories among celebrity relationships. They remained happily married for 50 years until Ponti's death in 2007. According to Loren, the secret to their relationship was maintaining a low profile despite their celebrity status. "Show business is what we do, not what we are," she said.

In 1960, Sophia Loren turned in the most acclaimed performance of her career in the Italian World War II film Two Women. In a film with parallels to her own childhood, Loren played a mother desperately trying to provide for her daughter in war-ravaged Rome. The film transformed Loren into an international celebrity, winning her the 1961 Academy Award for Best Lead Actress. She was the first actress ever to win the award for a non-English-language film.

Throughout the 1960s, Loren continued to star in Italian, American and French films, cementing her status as one of the great international movie stars of her generation. Her most notable 1960s performances include Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1963), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Marriage, Italian Style (1964), for which she earned another Oscar nomination for Best Actress, and A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), costarring Marlon Brando.

Marcello Mastroianni

Marcello Vincenzo Domenico Mastroianni, Knight Grand Cross (Italian pronunciation: [marˈtʃɛllo mastroˈjanni]; 28 September 1924 – 19 December 1996) was an Italian film actor. His prominent films include La Dolce Vita; 8½; La Notte; Divorce, Italian Style; Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow; Marriage Italian-Style; A Special Day; City of Women; Henry IV; Dark Eyes; and Stanno tutti bene. His honours included British Film Academy Awards, Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival and two Golden Globe Awards.

Mastroianni was born in Fontana Liri, a small village in the Apennines in the province of Frosinone, Lazio, and grew up in Turin and Rome. He was the son of Ida (née Irolle) and Ottone Mastroianni, who ran a carpentry shop, and the nephew of the Italian sculptor Umberto Mastroianni (1910–1998). During World War II, after the division into Axis and Allied Italy, he was interned in a loosely guarded German prison camp, from which he escaped to hide in Venice.

His brother Ruggero Mastroianni (1929–1996) was a highly regarded film editor who not only edited a number of his brother's films, but appeared alongside Marcello in Scipione detto anche l'Africano, a spoof of the once popular peplum/sword and sandal film genre released in 1971.

Mastroianni made his onscreen debut as an uncredited extra in Marionette (1939) when he was fourteen, and his first big role was in Atto d'accusa (1951). Within a decade he became a major international celebrity, starring in Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958); and in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita opposite Anita Ekberg in 1960, where he played a disillusioned and self-loathing tabloid columnist who spends his days and nights exploring Rome's high society. Mastroianni followed La Dolce Vita with another signature role, that of a film director who, amidst self-doubt and troubled love affairs, finds himself in a creative block while making a movie in Fellini's 8½ (1963).

His other prominent films include La Notte (1961) with Jeanne Moreau; Pietro Germi's Divorce, Italian Style (1961); Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), Marriage Italian-Style (1964), A Special Day (1977) and Robert Altman's Ready to Wear (1994), all co-starring Sophia Loren; Mario Monicelli's Casanova 70 (1965); Stay As You Are (1978) with Nastassja Kinski; Fellini's City of Women (1980) and Ginger and Fred (1986); Marco Bellocchio's Henry IV (1984); Nikita Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes (1987); Giuseppe Tornatore's Everybody's Fine (1990); Used People (1992) with Shirley MacLaine; and Agnès Varda's One Hundred and One Nights (1995).

He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor three times: for Divorce Italian Style, A Special Day and Dark Eyes. Mastroianni, Dean Stockwell and Jack Lemmon are the only actors to have been twice awarded the Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. Mastroianni won it in 1970 for Dramma della gelosia - tutti i particolari in cronaca and in 1987 for Dark Eyes.

Mastroianni starred alongside his daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, in Raúl Ruiz's Three Lives and Only One Death in 1996. For this performance he won the Silver Wave Award at the Ft. Lauderdale International Film Festival. His final film, Voyage to the Beginning of the World (1997), was released posthumously.

Monica Vitti

Monica Vitti (born 3 November 1931) is an Italian actress best known for her starring roles in films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni during the early 1960s. After working with Antonioni, Vitti changed focus and began making comedies, working with director Mario Monicelli on many films. She has appeared opposite Marcello Mastroianni, Richard Harris, Terence Stamp, Michael Caine and Dirk Bogarde. Vitti won five David di Donatello Awards for best Actress, seven Italian Golden Globes for Best Actress, the Career Golden Globe, and the Venice Film Festival Career Golden Lion Award.

Born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli in Rome, she acted in amateur productions as a teenager, then trained as an actor at Rome's National Academy of Dramatic Arts (graduating in 1953) and at Pittman's College, where she played a teen in a charity performance of Dario Niccodemi's La nemica. She toured Germany with an Italian acting troupe and her first stage appearance in Rome was for a production of Niccolò Machiavelli's La Mandragola.

Vitti's first film role was in Edoardo Anton's Ridere Ridere Ridere (1954) but her first widely noted performance was at the age of 26, in Mario Amendola's Le dritte (1958). In 1957 she joined Michelangelo Antonioni's Teatro Nuovo di Milano and later played a leading role in his internationally praised and award winning film L'avventura (1960) as a detached and cool protagonist drifting into a relationship with the lover of her missing girlfriend. Giving a screen presence which has been described as "stunning" she is also credited with helping Antonioni raise money for the production and sticking with him through daunting location shooting. L'avventura made Vitti an international star and one of Italy's most famous actresses of the 20th century. Her image later appeared on an Italian postage stamp commemorating the film.

Vitti received critical praise for starring roles in the Antonioni films La Notte (Night, 1961), L'Eclisse (Eclipse, 1962) and Deserto Rosso (Red Desert, 1964), which are often cited with L'avventura as a series. After her relationship with Antonioni ended, the two did not work together again until Il mistero di Oberwald (1980).

Vitti's made only two English language films. The first was Modesty Blaise (1966), a mod James Bond spy spoof with Terence Stamp and Dirk Bogarde which had only mixed success and received harsh critical reviews. The other English film was Michael Ritchie's An Almost Perfect Affair (1979) with Keith Carradine which takes place during the Cannes Film Festival.

In 1970 Vitti starred with Marcello Mastroianni in Ettore Scola's highly successful romantic comedy Dramma della gelosia (The Pizza Triangle, 1970). In 1974 she won the David di Donatello award for Best Actress in Alberto Sordi's Polvere di stelle (1973). She starred in Luis Buñuel's innovative Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974). This is often considered her last great film.

Throughout the later 1970s and early 1980s Vitti appeared mostly in Italian films which did not gain international distribution. Even though Il mistero di Oberwald is noted for the last collaboration between Vitti and Antonioni, it is not as well known as L'Avventura. After this movie was made, Vitti did not do as much screen work. In 1989 however, Vitti tried writing and directing and created Scandalo Segreto, which she also starred in. The film was not a success and she then retired from cinema.

By 1986 Vitti had returned to the theatre as an actress and teacher. During the 1990s she did television work, acting and directing. In 1993 Vitti was awarded the Festival Tribute at the Créteil International Women's Film Festival, in France.

Poland: Danuta Szaflarska

Danuta Szaflarska (born February 6, 1915) is a Polish screen and stage actress. In 2008 she was awarded the Złota Kaczka for the best Polish actress of the century. Szaflarska participated in the Warsaw Uprising as a liaison. Szaflarska was awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta, Commander's Cross and Commander's Cross with Star, one of Poland's highest Orders and Gold Medal of Gloria Artis (2007).

Szaflarska was born in Kosarzyska, Piwniczna-Zdrój, Poland. She married her first husband, Jan Ekier, a pianist, in 1942. They had one daughter, Maria. The pair divorced. Her second husband, Janusz Kilański, was a radio announcer. He is father of Szaflarska's second daughter, Agnieszka. Kilański and Szaflarska also divorced. Szaflarska turned 100 in February 2015.^[3] She is a regular employee of Teatr Rozmaitości in Warsaw, specializing in modern and progressive drama, and currently appears in 4 different plays at the theatre.

Izabella Scorupco

Izabella Scorupco (born Izabela Dorota Skorupko, June 4, 1970) is a Polish-Swedish actress, singer and model. She played Bond girl Natalya Simonova in the 1995 James Bond film Golden Eye.

Scorupco was born to Lech and Magdalena Skorupko in Białystok, Poland, in 1970. When she was one year old, her parents separated, and she remained with her mother. In 1978, they moved to Bredäng in Stockholm, Sweden, where Scorupco learned to speak Swedish, English and French.

In the late 1980s, Scorupco travelled throughout Europe working as a model, and appeared on the cover of Vogue. In 1987, she was discovered by director Staffan Hildebrand and starred in the film Ingen kan älska som vi ("Nobody can love like us"). In the early 1990s, she had a brief but successful career as a pop singer, releasing the album IZA, which was certified gold in Sweden in 1991. In 1995, she played Natalya Simonova in the James Bond film GoldenEye, starring opposite Pierce Brosnan.

On December 25, 1996, Scorupco married Polish ice hockey player Mariusz Czerkawski, then a player for the Edmonton Oilers. They separated in 1998, having had one daughter together, Julia (born September 15, 1997). On January 30, 2003, Scorupco married an American, Jeffrey Raymond; they have a son, Jakob (born July 24, 2003), and now live in Los Angeles and New York City.

In 2011, Scorupco reprised her singing career, duetting with Swedish musician Peter Jöback in his single Jag Har Dig Nu and featuring in the song's music video. She also starred in Jöback's short extension film La vie, L'amour, Le mort. Scorupco went on to host the spring 2012 series of Sweden's Next Top Model but did not continue it for a second series.

Scorupco moved into the comedy world in July 2013 when she was named to a lead role in a new Swedish romantic comedy, Micke & Veronica, alongside David Hellenius. It premiered on December 25, 2014.

Piotr Adamczyk

Piotr Adamczyk (born March 21, 1972 in Warsaw) is a Polish actor.

He portrayed Karol Wojtyła, who later became Pope John Paul II, in the movie Karol: A Man Who Became Pope and its sequel Karol: The Pope, The Man.

Since his early childhood he knew he wanted to become an actor. He attended the Machulski youth theatre group in Warsaw. Thanks to an international scholarship, he was able toattend international theatre workshops in the UK and Germany. He continued his acting education by attending the Theatre Academy in Warsaw. During his second academic year, he won a scholarship from the Soros Foundation which allowed him to attend the British American Drama Academy for one year, where he performed Hamlet for his diploma.

Once he graduated from the Theatre Academy, he was hired by the Teatr Współczesny in Warsaw. His career in the film industry however grew much more intensively. His role of Stawrogin in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed started Piotr’s long list of roles. The breakthrough in his career was his part as Frédéric Chopin in the film "Chopin - Desire of Love" - with this role he joined the club of Polish stars.

The climax of his popularity was reached when he played the title role of another Polish historical figure in a two part Italian movie - "Karol the Man who became Pope" and "Karol: The Pope-The Man". The movie was viewed by several dozen million viewers, and made him popular in Italy, Latin America and many other Catholic countries.

Piotr also managed to take advantage of his popularity abroad to play at the Sala Uno Theatre in Rome, in Italian. He also played in Liliana Cavani’s movie "Einstein" and in the Portuguese production "Second Life".

He has been in over 800 radio roles and around 100 theatre, television and film parts. He is also appreciated for his dubbing roles. In animated films he played, among others, the giraffe in "Madagascar", Zigzag McQueen in "Cars" and Syndrome in "The Incredibles".

He has received many prestigious awards in Poland. In 2011 he was awarded the most popular Polish actor once again.

He is a fun of leading Polish political party. In 2010 he was in presidential committee    

Portugal:

Daniela Ruah

Ruah was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Portuguese citizens Dr. Moisés Carlos Bentes Ruah, and his wife, Katharina Lia Azancot Korn.

When Ruah was five years old, her father completed his residency and the family returned to Portugal, where her parents divorced and she attended an international, English-medium school.

Ruah started acting in Portuguese soap operas when she was a teen. Her first acting role came at the age of 16, when she auditioned for the soap opera Jardins Proibidos ("Forbidden Gardens") and won the role of Sara. Ruah kept working on diverse projects while she was finishing high school. At the age of 18, she moved to London to study at the London Metropolitan University, where she earned a First in Performing Arts. She got extremely good grades while in school, and became the best well known movie and sports star. Ruah returned to Portugal to pursue her acting career. She was the winner of the celebrity dancing competition Dança Comigo (the Portuguese version of Dancing with the Stars) and got main roles in television series, short films, and theatre. In 2007, she moved to New York to study at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

Ruah stars as Special Agent Kensi Blye in NCIS: Los Angeles, which first aired on September 22, 2009. Season 2 aired on September 21, 2010, and airs Tuesdays at 9:00 pm on CBS, following NCIS at 8:00 p.m. Season 3 aired on September 20, 2011. She later portrayed the character in a guest appearance on the series Hawaii Five-0.

In April 2013 Ruah made her debut at Hayworth Theatre in LA as Catherine in "Proof", a play by David Auburn.

           

Diogo Morgado

Diogo Miguel Morgado Soares is a famous Portuguese actor. He was born in Lisbon on 17th January 1981.

Morgado began his career at age fourteen as a model. His first television work was in Portuguese telenovelas and TV series such as Terra Mãe (1998), Diário de Maria (1998), A Lenda da Garça (2000) and A Febre do Ouro Negro (2000), Laços de sangue 2010, Morangos com açucar 2009 His name came into the limelight with his role as Miguel in the SIC produced TV film Amo-te Teresa (2000). He was later featured in the teen telenovela Floribella (2006), had a starring role in Vingança (2007), starred as the protagonist in the mini-series A Vida Privada de Salazar (2009), featured in Lua Vermelha (2010) and starred in the Emmy Award winning Laços de Sangue (2010).[2] Morgado had his first role outside of Portugal in the Brazilian telenovela Revelação (2008) and also appeared alongside Rui Unas in the Spanish comedy Mapa (2009).

He is best known for his portrayal of Jesus Christ in History Channel's Emmy-nominated miniseries, The Bible, which was the highest rated cable show of 2013, and in 20th Century Fox's feature film Son of God, released on February 28, 2014. He also recently appeared in the 3rd season premiere of the hit ABC drama, Revenge as Dr. Jorge Velez in a recurring guest star role.[3] He also showcased his comedic ability in "O Crime do Padre Amaro," which received international attention from directors all over the world. Diogo is also a passionate theater actor and had lead roles in prestigious plays such as David Hare's "Skylight" and Peter Shaffer's "The Royal Hunt to the Sun."

Beyond Portugal, He has had lead roles in a few international films like Spain's "Dos Rivales Casi Iguales" and "Star Crossed," and Brazil's "Revelação" and "The Jungle". Diogo has also wrapped leading roles in two independent films in the U.S, – the gritty urban drama "Red Butterfly" and the action-filled adrenaline film "Born to Race: Fast Track." Diogo currently can be seen on Portuguese television, as "Eduardo" in the series "Sol de Inverno." His most recent lead film role was as Antonio Vega Jr. in the 2013 Hollywood production Red Butterfly.

Joaquim de Almeida

Joaquim António Portugal Baptista de Almeida, was born in Lisbon, on 15th March 1957, and he’s a Portuguese-American actor.

            He started his film career appearing on the 1982 action film The Soldier, and later achieved recognition for playing Andrea Bonanno in the 1987 Italian film Good Morning, Babylon. He achieved international fame with his portrayals of Félix Cortez in the 1994 thriller Clear and Present Danger and Bucho in the 1995 action thriller Desperado. Several years later, he became popular for playing Ramon Salazar on the Fox thriller drama series 24, between 2003 and 2004, and Hernan Reyes in 2011 street racing film Fast Five.

            Being fluent in several languages, Almeida has worked in several countries in Europe and the Americas, in many film and stage productions, winning some international awards in films like Retrato de Família, Adão e Eva and O Xangô de Baker Street. His other well-known films include The Honorary Consul (1983), Only You (1994), La Cucaracha (1998), One Man's Hero (1999), Behind Enemy Lines (2001), Whore (2004), The Death and Life of Bobby Z (2007), Che: Part Two (2008) and The Burning Plain (2008).

Maria de Medeiros

Maria de Saint-Maurice Esteves de Medeiros Victorino de Almeida was born in Lisbon, on 19th August 1965, is a Portuguese actress, director, and singer who has been involved in both European and American film productions.

            Maria de Medeiros was born in Lisbon, Portugal, the daughter of musician and composer António Victorino de Almeida. She played her first part on screen at the age of 15. At the age of 18, she moved to France to pursue her acting studies and was a student at the CNSAD. Medeiros speaks French fluently without an accent and has acted extensively on stage and on screen in French productions. She also acts in Spanish, German, and Italian productions. In 2008, Medeiros was nominated for the UNESCO Artist for Peace.

Among Medeiros' most memorable film appearances are three early 1990s roles. Her considerable resemblance to Anaïs Nin landed her the primary role in Henry & June (1990), in which she played the author. In 1990, she played the role of Maria in Ken McMullen's film about the rise of the Paris Commune, 1871. In 1994, Medeiros appeared in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, playing Butch Coolidge's (Bruce Willis) girlfriend, Fabienne.

In 2000, Medeiros directed the film April Captains (in which she also had a small role) about the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.[1]

In 2003, Medeiros appeared as a hairdresser in the movie My Life Without Me starring Sarah Polley. She has starred in the Canadian movie The Saddest Music in the World (2004) directed by Guy Maddin and co-starring Isabella Rossellini and Mark McKinney.

Turkey: Halit Ergenç

Halit Ergenç, born 30 April 1970 in İstanbul, Turkey, is a Turkish actor.

Halit Ergenç was born as the son of Yeşilçam-era actor Sait Ergenç on 30 April 1970 in İstanbul. He completed his secondary education at Beşiktaş Atatürk High School in 1989 and entered İstanbul Technical University to study Marine Engineering.^[1] He left after one year to study opera at Mimar Sinan University and supported himself working as a computer operator and marketer. He briefly worked as a backing vocalist and dancer for Ajda Pekkan and Leman Sam.

In 1996 he met Mabel, Ergenç began acting at the Dormen Theatre and had his first leading role in the musical The King and I. He established himself on television with his part in the series Kara Melek. He continued working in theatre with such plays as Kiss Me, Kate, Tatlı Charity, Beni Seviyor, Kral ve Ben, Amphitrion 2000, Evita, Hayalet and Ötekiler and Şarkılar Susarsa. Following appearances in the series Köşe Kapmaca and Böyle mi Olacaktı, he went to New York and acted in the musical The Adventures of Zak.

In 2000, he acted in the films Hiç Yoktan Aşk and Ölümün El Yazısı and then the series Dedem, Gofret ve Ben and Zerda where she starred opposite Ece Uslu. Then, he had appearances in a number of plays such as ''Bugün Git Yarın Gel, Popcorn, Arapsaçı and Sevgilime Göz Kulak Ol. In 2004, he starred in the series Aliye with Sanem Çelik and Nejat İşler.

In 2005 and 2006, Ergenç acted in the films Babam ve Oğlum directed by Çağan Irmak, The Net 2.0, Tramway and İlk Aşk. Beginning in 2006, he starred as Onur Aksal in the hit series Binbir Gece which was on air until 2009. During this period he also had roles in the films Devrim Arabaları and Acı Aşk. Ergenç also starred as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the film Dersimiz Atatürk. In 2011 he starred as Suleiman the Magnificent in the hit series Muhteşem Yüzyıl until 2014.

Ergenç's mother is of Albanian descent. He is married to actress Bergüzar Korel with whom he has a son. He has stated that he likes Zeki Demirkubuz's style and Ferzan Özpetek's emotion, but prefers to work the most with Reha Erdem and Çağan Irmak who he describes as both young and talented directors.

Songül Öden

Songül Öden (born February 17, 1977) is a Turkish actress. Her first name literally means "the last rose," and thus she is known as "the rose of Turkey" due also to her soft and feminine physical features.

Born in Diyarbakır, Songül's father moved to Ankara where she spent her childhood. She graduated from the Turkish Academy of Theatrical Arts.

Songül has been acting on TV since 1999 when she did a TV series entitled Ferhunde Hanımlar. After that, she acted in five other TV series Vasiyet (2001), Havada Bulut (2002), Gümüş (2005–2007), Vazgeç Gönlüm (2008) and Mükemmel Çift (2010).

In 2005, She landed the title role in the series "Gümüş" ("Silver") where she acted side by side with Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ. The series lasted for 2 and a half years.

Gümüş, also known by its Arabic title "Noor", became an obsession for many Arabs and it is believed that 85 million viewers watched the translated Turkish sudser throughout the Arab World when it aired in 2008 by MBC.

Gümüş was adored by Bulgarian viewers when it was broadcast in Bulgarian as "Перла" in 2009. The Bulgarian private TV channel bTV recently aired the show dubbed into Bulgarian with the title "Perla" ("Pearl"). Songül was invited to visit Bulgaria to meet her fans and for interviews with some Bulgarian programs.

Her other series Vazgeç Gönlüm ("Abandoned Heart"), in which she played the leading role "Ezra" in the second season was made in late summer/fall of 2008.

"Acı Aşk" ("Bitter Love") her film which she co-stars with Halit Ergenç, Cansu Dere and Ezgi Asaroğlu is her first-ever cinematic performance was released on December 18, 2009.

Songül Öden returned to television in 2011 with the series Umutsuz Ev Kadınları.

On 19 November 2011, due to the popularity of her series Gümüş, she was invited to host Kënga Magjike 2011 Final in Albania alongside Ardit Gjebrea.

Afife Jale

Afife Jale (1902 – July 24, 1941) was a Turkish stage actress, best known as the first Muslim theatre actress in Turkey.

She was born 1902 as Afife in Istanbul to Hidayet and his wife Methiye. She had a sister Behiye and a brother Salâh.

Afife was studying at the Girls Industry School in Istanbul; however, she wanted to be an actress. In the Ottoman Empire, Muslim Turkish women were not allowed to play on stage by a decree of the Ministry of the Interior. Only non-Muslim women of Greek, Armenian, or Jewish minorities were eligible for being cast.

Afife's father was against a theatre career of her because he considered it unsound. For this reason, she ran away from her parent's house. She entered as a trainee the theatre of the newly established city conservatory (Ottoman Turkish: Darülbedayi). The Conservatory had opened up a course to train Muslim women actresses with the rationale to play for women audience only.

Afife debuted on stage in 1920, acting as "Emel" in the theatre play "Yamalar" written by Hüseyin Suat. The role had become vacant as the Armenian Eliza Binemeciyan had gone abroad. She took the stage name Jale for this play, and was called from then on as Afife Jale. Performing at "Apollon Theatre" in Kadıköy, Afife Jale became the first ever Muslim Turkish stage actress in the country. She had to be hidden at least twice by her non-Muslim co-actors during police raids in the middle of the play. The management of the conservatory was warned of the restriction that led to her discharge from the theatre in 1921. She then played in some other theatre companies under various stage names.

She found herself in financial trouble, and began suffering acute headache. She became addicted to morphine after her doctor applied a morphine based therapy to her.

In 1923, Mustafa Kemal, the founder of the newly proclaimed Republic, lifted the Ottoman-era ban on stage acting by Muslim women. This led to the end of Afife's fears. She joined the theatre again, and toured in Anatolia. However, her drug addiction caused the worsening of her health that ultimately led to her retirement from the theatre.

Afife Jale became impoverished after leaving her acting career. In 1928, she met Selahattin Pınar (1902–1960), a tambur virtuoso, at a Turkish classical music concert she attended. The couple married in 1929, and moved to an apartment in Fatih district of Istanbul. The marriage life did not go well, and the couple divorced in 1935 when Afife's morphine addiction affected their marriage negatively. Selahattin Pınar composed a number of musical pieces, which later became classical, referring to his relationship with her wife during their marriage.

Concerned about her substance dependence, Jale's friends from the conservatory took her to the Bakırköy Psychiatric Hospital for therapy. She spent her last years in the hospital, where she died on July 24, 1941. Her burial place was forgotten.

In 1987, journalist Nezihe Araz (1922–2009) wrote a theatre play titled "Afife Jale", which was played on stage and turned into a film.

Afife Jale's tragic life was depicted twice in the cinema, first in the 1987 movie Afife Jale directed by Şahin Kaygun, and later in Ceyda Aslı Kılıçkıran's 2008 movie Kilit, with Müjde Ar starring in both.

Premiering in December 1998, the "Modern Dance Company" of the Turkish State Opera and Ballet performed a contemporary ballet suite Afife composed by Turgay Erdener and choreographed by Beyhan Murphy. The two-act work dramatizes Afife's life in four scenes with the colors of gold (youth), red (struggle), purple (addiction), and silver (death). The ballet was performed again in 2012 at the Süreyya Opera House in Kadıköy.

The 2000 released music album Afife contains classical music song by soprano Selva Erdener accompanied by Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio.

A documentary movie "Yüzyılın aşkları: Afife ve Selahattin" by Can Dündar, depicting her marriage with Selahattin Pınar, was broadcast in 2004 on the channel CNN Türk.

At the Ortaköy neighborhood of the Beşiktaş district of Istanbul, a cultural center, the "Afife Jale Kültür Merkezi", and a theatre stage, the "Afife Jale Sahnesi", are named after her.

Since 1997, the Afife Jale Theatre Award, established by the insurance company Yapı Kredi Sigorta, is given to distinguished theatre actors annually in her honor.

Romania: Amza Pellea

Amza Pellea, 7 April 1931 – 12 December 1983, was a Romanian actor noted for playing Romanian national heroes on film.

He was born in Băilești, Oltenia, and attended the Carol I High School. He later played at the Craiova Theatre, then at the Small Theatre, Nottara Theatre, Comedy Theatre and the National Theatre Bucharest, being also a professor at the Academy of Theatre and Film in Bucharest.

Pellea played numerous comic and serious roles. In the cinema was most noted for his roles as historical leaders. His earliest leading roles were as Romanian national heroes, beginning with Decebalus in Dacii (1967) and Columna (1968). He also portrayed Michael the Brave in Mihai Viteazul (1971).

His most famous comic role was as "Nea Mărin" (Uncle Marin), a character representing the archetypal Oltenian peasant. Mărin first appeared in TV comedy sketches. The character graduated to the cinema in Nea Mărin miliardar (Uncle Marin, the Billionaire), in which Pellea played the dual role of the naive Marin and the American billionaire he is mistaken for. Nea Mărin miliardar is ranked 1 in the top most viewed Romanian films of all time.

He played other historical figures such as Vladică Hariton in Tudor din Vladimiri and Voivode Basarab in Croitorii cei mari din Valahia. He also appeared in Răscoala and Haiducii. In 1977 he won the award for Best Actor at the 10th Moscow International Film Festival for his role in The Doom.

In a 2006 poll conducted by Romanian Television to identify the "greatest Romanians of all time", Pellea came in 60th.

Maia Morgenstern

Emilia-Maia-Ninel Morgenstern, born 1 May 1962, is a Romanian film and stage actress,^[1] described by Florin Mitu of AMOS News as "a symbol of Romanian theater and film".^[2] In the English-speaking world, she is probably best known for the role of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. In Romania, she has been nationally known since her 1992 role as Nela in Balanţa, a film known in the United States as The Oak, set during the waning days of Communist Romania

Born in Bucharest, in a Jewish family, she graduated from the Film and Theatre Academy of Bucharest in 1985. She then played at Teatrul Tineretului (Youth Theater) in Piatra Neamţ until 1988, and at the Teatrul Evreiesc de Stat (State Jewish Theatre) in Bucharest 1988-1990. From 1990–1998 she was a member of the company of the National Theatre in Bucharest, and since 1998 of Teatrul Bulandra, also in Bucharest; in addition, she continues to act at the Jewish State Theatre and other Bucharest theaters and elsewhere in Romania. Among her notable stage roles in recent years, in a Romanian-language production of The Blue Angel (Îngerul Albastru in Romanian) at Bucharest's Odeon Theater, in 2001-2 she played, to great critical acclaim, Lola Lola, the character made famous by Marlene Dietrich. At the same time, she was also playing the role of Kathleen Hogan in a Romanian-language production of Israel Horovitz's Park Your Car in Harvard Yard at the State Jewish Theater.

Morgenstern has appeared in numerous films, primarily in Romanian language roles. In The Passion of the Christ, she performs a role in Aramaic, but like the other actors in the cast of that film, she simply memorized her lines phonetically.

Her surname, Morgenstern, means "Morning Star" in German, a title of the Virgin Mary, the character she played in The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson, a devout Traditionalist Catholic, thought this of great significance when casting her. In interviews, she has defended The Passion against allegations of antisemitism, saying that the high priest Caiaphas is portrayed not as a representative of the Jewish people, but as a leader of the establishment, adding that "Authorities throughout history have persecuted individuals with revolutionary ideas."

She has won several major awards as an actress:

• Best Actress for: Cei care platesc cu viaţa ("Those who pay with their lives", 1991), Romanian Filmmakers Union
• UNITER (Romanian theater association) Lucia Sturdza Bulandra Prize (1990) for her stage role as Medea in Trilogia antică (Ancient Trilogy), directed by Andrei Şerban.
• Best Actress for: Balanţa (1992), European Film Awards
• Best Actress for: Balanţa (1992), Cinéma Tout Ecran (Geneva Film Festival)
• Best Actress for: Balanţa (1992), Romanian Filmmakers Union^[9]
• UNITER best actress award (1993), for her role in Ghetto at the Romanian National Theatre.
• UNITER (1995) award for her performance in the stage production of Lola Blau.
• Best Film Actress for: The Passion of the Christ (2004), Ethnic Multicultural Media Awards (EMMA Awards), UK.

Marcel Iureș

Marcel Iureş, born August 2, 1951, is a Romanian stage and screen actor.

Iureş was born 2 August 1951 in Băilești, Dolj County and is one of Romania's most acclaimed stage and film actors. Iureş entered the Theatrical Arts and Cinematography Institute in Bucharest in 1974 and graduated in 1978. He has acted in films and on stage both in Romania and internationally, as well as playing at least ten roles on Romanian and British television. He has continued to explore new artistic challenges such as voiceovers for Disney and in the world of computer games. Iureş is the president and a judge of the Anonimul International Film Festival and also the president of Ideo Ideis Festival (an annual national theatre festival for teenagers).

In 2007 Iureş volunteered his help in the Verde 003 project, which aims to build a better environment for all Romanians by planting vegetation.

He made his stage debut at the Bulandra Theatre, Romania, in the 1975 production of Ferma, playing George. From 1978 to 1981 he acted at the National Theatre, Cluj, in numerous roles such as Beckman in the play Afară în faţa uşii and Conifeul in Persii. During the early 1980s, Iureş appeared at both the Bulandra and Odeon Theatres in Bucharest. Among his roles were the title roles in Shakespeare's were Hamlet, Henry IV and Richard III.

He is the president of Teatrul ACT (the first independent theatre in Romania) of which he was one of the founders in 1995. Iureş has starred there in various roles, including the title roles of Shakespeare's Richard II, Richard III (directed by Mihai Măniuţiu), and Hamlet (directed by Liviu Ciulei). He has also appeared in Fundaţia Teatrul ACT-staged shows such as Creatorul de Teatru (The Creator of the Theatre, directed by Alexandru Dabija), Cetatea Soarelui (Citadel of the Sun, directed by Mihai Măniuţiu), and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. Iureş also continues to perform with the Bulandra Theatre, for whom he played the lead in a 2005 production of Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV.

Iureş has received many accolades and nominations (in both Romania and abroad) throughout his career.

Iureş made his film debut portraying Franz Liszt in the 1978 Romanian film Vis de ianuarie (January Dream). From the early 1980s and into the '90s, Iureş continued to build a screen career, appearing in many minor and major roles in Romania^.

Iureş's international film career sprang from the UK tour in 1994 of Mihai Maniutiu's production of Richard III, where he played the eponymous hero. The role of Alexander Golitsyn in the 1996 film Mission Impossible was quickly followed by playing Dusan Gavrich in the 1997 film The Peacemaker, starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. Other film appearances include roles in Hart's War, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Goal!, Faimosul Paparazzo, Isolation, Vacanţa Cea Mare and Logodnicii Din America.

IV. Famous film directors

Spain: Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero, born 25 September 1949, is a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer.

Almodóvar is a successful and internationally known filmmaker. His films, marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture, popular songs, irreverent humor, strong colors and glossy décor. Desire, passion, family and identity are among Almodóvar’s most prevalent themes. His films enjoy a worldwide following and he has become a major figure on the stage of world cinema.

He founded the Spanish film production company El Deseo with his younger brother Agustín Almodóvar who has produced almost all of Pedro’s films. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001  and received an honorary doctoral degree in 2009 from Harvard University for his contribution to the arts.

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was born in Calzada de Calatrava, Spain, a rural small town of Ciudad Real, a province of Castile-La Mancha in the administrative district of Almagro. La Mancha is the windswept region of flat lands made famous by Don Quixote.

Asked to explain the success of his films, he says that they are very entertaining. "It's important not to forget that films are made to entertain. That's the key." He was heavily influenced by old Hollywood movies in which everything happens around a female main character, and aims to continue in that tradition.  He acknowledges, however, that his films are also very personal-"My films are very Spanish, but on the other hand they are capriciously personal. You cannot measure Spain by my films." In 2013, he was honoured for his European achievement to world cinema at the 26th European Film Awards.

¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (1984)

Almodóvar's next film, What Have I Done to Deserve This? (¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?) was inspired by the Spanish black comedies of the late 50s and early 60s. It is the tale of a struggling housewife named Gloria and her dysfunctional family: her abusive husband, who works as a taxi driver; her oldest son, a drug dealer; the youngest son, who sells his body to the local perverts; and the grandmother who hates the city and just wants to return to her rural village.

The theme of the downtrodden housewife coping with the travails of everyday life arises repeatedly in the director's work, as do other issues of female independence and solidarity. What Have I Done to Deserve This? is also a critique on consumerism and patriarchal culture. In one scene, the housewife trades her own son so she doesn't have to pay a dentist bill, and in another the only witness of a crime is a lizard, aptly named “Money.”

What Have I Done to Deserve This? was more successful than Almodóvar’s previous films and became his first with international distribution.

Matador (1986)

Almodóvar's subsequent films deepened his exploration of sexual desire and the sometimes brutal laws governing it. Matador is a dark, complex story that centers on the relationship between a former bullfighter and a murderous female lawyer, both of whom can only experience sexual fulfillment in conjunction with killing. The film offered up desire as a bridge between sexual attraction and death.

Written together with Spanish novelist Jesús Ferrero, Matador drew away from the naturalism and humor of the director’s previous work into a deeper and darker terrain. Almodóvar established the interrelation between sexuality and violence as seen in his cinematographic quotation of the final sequence from King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun. The violent elements of the film caused some controversy. Almodóvar justified his use of violence explaining "The moral of all my films is to get to a stage of greater freedom." Almodóvar went on to note, "I have my own morality. And so do my films. If you see Matador through the perspective of traditional morality, it's a dangerous film because it's just a celebration of killing. Matador is like a legend. I don't try to be realistic; it's very abstract, so you don't feel identification with the things that are happening, but with the sensibility of this kind of romanticism".

Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988)

Almodóvar’s next film was his first huge international success: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios), a feminist light comedy that further established Almodóvar as a "women's director" like George Cukor and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Almodóvar has said that women make better characters: “women are more spectacular as dramatic subjects, they have a greater range of registers, etc.”

The film, staged as a faux adaptation of a theatrical work, details a two-day period in the life of Pepa (Carmen Maura), a professional movie dubber who has been abruptly abandoned by her married lover and who frantically tries to track him down. In the course of her search she discovers some of his secrets, and realizes her true feelings.

Inspired by Hollywood comedies of the 1950s, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown became the stepping stone for Pedro Almodóvar's later work. This light comedy of rapid-fire dialogue and fast-paced action remains one of Almodóvar’s most accessible films. The film received public and critical acclaim worldwide, and brought Almodóvar to the attention of American audiences. Women was showered with many awards, and received an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film.

¡Átame! (1990)

Almodóvar's next film marked the breaking-off with his reference actress, Carmen Maura, and the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with another great actress of Spanish and European cinema: Victoria Abril. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (¡Átame!) was also the director's fifth and most important collaboration with Antonio Banderas.

In Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Ricky (played by Antonio Banderas), a recently released psychiatric patient, kidnaps and holds hostage an actress (played by Victoria Abril) in order to make her fall in love with him. “I’m 23 years old, I have fifty thousand pesetas and I am alone in the world. I will try to be a good husband for you and a good father for your children,” he tells her.

Rather than populate the film with many characters, as in his previous films, here the story focuses on the compelling relationship at its center: the actress and her kidnapper literally struggling for power and desperate for love. The film’s title line ¡Tie Me Up! is unexpectedly uttered by the actress as a genuine request. She does not know if she will try to escape or not, and when she realizes she has feelings for her captor, she prefers not to be given a chance.

La flor de mi secreto (1995)

Almodóvar changed gears with his next effort, 1995's The Flower of My Secret (La flor de mi secreto). It is an exploration of denial in its various forms, a film in which melodrama is treated more as theme rather than as plot line. The Flower of My Secret is the story of Leo Macias, a successful romance writer who has to confront both a professional and personal crisis. Estranged from her husband, a military officer who has volunteered for an international peacekeeping role in Bosnia and Herzegovina to avoid her, Leo fights to hold on to a past that has already eluded her, not realizing she has already set her future path by her own creativity and by supporting the creative efforts of others.

Starring Almodóvar regular Marisa Paredes, this psychological drama was hailed as his most mature film to date, and remains one of the director's humblest films. Leaving Almodóvar's usual choral exercises aside, the story centered on the love-torn writer. The Flower of My Secret has many common elements with All About My Mother and Talk to Her. The three films are about “loss, growth and recovery”.

The Flower of my Secret heralded a change in Almodóvar's filmography to a more mature period. It is the transitional film between his earlier and later style. It is worth noting, however, that many leading critics did not respond well to this film.

Todo sobre mi madre (1999)

Almodóvar then continued to work in more serious dramatic confines, directing All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre). The film grew out of a brief scene in The Flower of My Secret, telling the story of a mourning mother who, after reading the last entry in her dead son's journal about how he wishes to meet his father for the first time, decides to travel to Barcelona in search of the boy's father. She must tell the father that she had their son after she left him many years ago, and that he has now died. Once there, she encounters a number of odd characters - a transsexual prostitute, a pregnant nun, and a lesbian actress - all of whom help her cope with her grief.

The film revisited Almodóvar's familiar themes of the power of sisterhood and of family. Dedicated to Bette Davis, Romy Schneider and Gena Rowlands, All About My Mother is steeped in theatricality, from its backstage setting to its plot, modeled on the works of Federico García Lorca and Tennessee Williams, to the characters' preoccupation with modes of performance.

The comic relief on the film centers on Agrado, a pre-operative transsexual. In one scene, she tells the story of her body and its relationship to plastic surgery and silicone, culminating with a statement of her own philosophy: “The more you become like what you have dreamed for yourself, the more authentic you are”.

All About My Mother received more awards and honors than any other film in the Spanish motion picture industry. Its recognition includes an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a Golden Globe in the same category, Best Director Award and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury Award at Cannes; the French Cesar for Best Foreign Film, the Goya Award as best film of the year, best Actress in a Leading Role for Argentine actress Cecilia Roth and a twelfth Annual European Film Award.

Hable con ella (2002)

Two years later, Almodóvar hit another career high with Talk to Her (2002). Starring Javier Camara and Dario Grandinetti, the film revolves around two men who become friends while taking care of the comatose women they love, played by Leonor Watling and Rosario Flores. Combining elements of modern dance and silent filmmaking with a narrative that embraces coincidence and fate, in the film, Almodóvar plots the lives of his characters, thrown together by unimaginably bad luck, towards an unexpected conclusion. Talk to Her was hailed by critics and embraced by arthouse audiences, particularly in America. Almodóvar won numerous honors across the world for his film, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, a César Award for Best Film and both a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In addition, he garnered his first and yet only Best Director nod at the Oscars.

Mala educación (2004)

In 2004, Almodóvar followed with Bad Education, a richly baroque tale of child sexual abuse and mixed identities, starring Gael García Bernal and Fele Martínez. In the drama film, two children, Ignacio and Enrique, discover love, cinema and fear in a religious school at the start of the 1960s. Bad Education has a complex structure that not only uses film within a film, but also stories that open up into other stories, real and imagined to narrate the same story: A tale of child molestation and its aftermath of faithlessness, creativity, despair, blackmail and murder. Sexual abuse by Catholic priests, transsexuality, drug use, and a metafiction are also important themes and devices in the plot. Almodóvar used elements of film noir, borrowing in particular from Double Indemnity. The film's protagonist, Juan (Gael Garcia Bernal), was modeled largely on Patricia Highsmith’s most famous character, Tom Ripley, as played by Alain Delon in René Clément's Purple Noon. A criminal without scruples, but with an adorable face that betrays nothing of his true nature. Almodóvar explains : "He also represents a classic film noir character - the femme fatale. Which means that when other characters come into contact with him, he embodies fate, in the most tragic and noir sense of the word." Almodóvar worked over ten years on the screenplay for the film, which received the honor of opening in the 57th Cannes Film Festival in 2004, the first Spanish film to do so.

Volver (2006)

Volver (Return), a mixture of comedy, family drama and ghost story, is set in part in La Mancha (the director's native region). The film opens showing dozens of women furiously scrubbing the graves of their deceased, establishing the influence of the dead over the living as a key theme. The plot follows the story of three generations of women in the same family who survive wind, fire, and even death. The film is an ode to female resilience, where men are literally disposable.

Many of Almodóvar's stylistic hallmarks are present: the stand-alone song (a rendition of the Argentinian tango song "Volver"), references to reality TV, and an homage to classic film (in this case Luchino Visconti's Bellissima).

Volver started as a story of la España negra, or 'black Spain' - the rural, superstitious and conservative part of the country still often associated, the director says, with violence, tragedy, even backwardness: "It looks like they are living a century before. But I tried to demonstrate that the same Spain, in the same local places with the same local characters, could be called 'white Spain', because the neighbors are in complete solidarity, all the women join together and create a kind of family. The movie really talks about women who survive, women who fight fiercely.

The storyline of Volver appears as both a novel and movie script in Almodóvar's earlier film, The Flower of My Secret. The film reunited Almodóvar with Carmen Maura, who had appeared in several of his early films.

Los Abrazos Rotos (2009)

Almodóvar’s next film Broken Embraces (2009), a romantic thriller film starring Lluís Homar, José Luis Gómez as well as Volver stars Cruz and Portillo, became the director’s longest and most expensive feature. A four-way tale of dangerous love, it was shot in the style of a hard-boiled 1950s American film noir or its descendant, the neo-noir genre. The plot follows the tragic fate of a former film director, who was blinded in a car accident fourteen years before. The film has a fractured puzzling structure, mixing past and present and film within a film that Almodóvar explored previously in both Talk to Her and Bad Education. Broken Embraces was accepted into the main selection at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival in competition for the prestigious Palme d'Or, his third film to do so and fourth to screen at the festival. It was nominated for the 2010 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Almodóvar's sixth film to be nominated in this category and was nominated for the Satellite Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Italy: Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini, January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993, was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for his distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, and is widely revered. He won five Academy Awards including the most number of Oscars in history for Best Foreign Language Film. Fellini was born to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family’s vehement disapproval, she had eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola. A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later.Enrolled at the Ginnasio Giulio Cesare in 1929, he made friends with Luigi ‘Titta’ Benzi, later a prominent Rimini lawyer. In Mussolini’s Italy, Fellini and Riccardo became members of the Avanguardista, the compulsory Fascist youth group for males. He visited Rome with his parents for the first time in 1933, the year of the maiden voyage of the transatlantic ocean liner SS Rex (which is shown in Amarcord). The sea creature found on the beach at the end of La Dolce Vita (1960) has its basis in a giant fish marooned on a Rimini beach during a storm in 1934.

Although Fellini adapted key events from his childhood and adolescence in films such as I Vitelloni (1953), 8½ (1963), and Amarcord (1973), he insisted that such autobiographical memories were inventions: "It is not memory that dominates my films. To say that my films are autobiographical is an overly facile liquidation, a hasty classification. It seems to me that I have invented almost everything: childhood, character, nostalgias, dreams, memories, for the pleasure of being able to recount them."

In 1937, Fellini opened Febo, a portrait shop in Rimini with the painter Demos Bonini. His first humorous article appeared in the "Postcards to Our Readers" section of Milan’s Domenica del Corriere. Deciding on a career as a caricaturist and gag writer, Fellini travelled to Florence in 1938, where he published his first cartoon in the weekly 420. Failing his military culture exam, he graduated from high school in July 1938 after doubling the exam.

Rome (1939) - In September 1939, he enrolled in law school at the University of Rome to please his parents. Biographer Hollis Alpert reports that "there is no record of his ever having attended a class". Installed in a family pensione, he met another lifelong friend, the painter Rinaldo Geleng. Desperately poor, they unsuccessfully joined forces to draw sketches of restaurant and café patrons. Fellini eventually found work as a cub reporter on the dailies Il Piccolo and Il Popolo di Roma but quit after a short stint, bored by the local court news assignments.

Four months after publishing his first article in Marc’Aurelio, the highly influential biweekly humour magazine, he joined the editorial board, achieving success with a regular column titled Will You Listen to What I Have to Say? . Described as “the determining moment in Fellini’s life”, the magazine gave him steady employment between 1939 and 1942, when he interacted with writers, gagmen, and scriptwriters. These encounters eventually led to opportunities in show business and cinema. Among his collaborators on the magazine’s editorial board were the future director Ettore Scola, Marxist theorist and scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, and Bernardino Zapponi, a future Fellini screenwriter. Conducting interviews for CineMagazzino also proved congenial: when asked to interview Aldo Fabrizi, Italy’s most popular variety performer, he established such immediate personal rapport with the man that they collaborated professionally. Specializing in humorous monologues, Fabrizi commissioned material from his young protégé.Career and later life -  Early screenplays (1940–1943)  Retained on business in Rimini, Urbano sent wife and family to Rome in 1940 to share an apartment with his son. Fellini and Ruggero Maccari, also on the staff of Marc’Aurelio, began writing radio sketches and gags for films.

Not yet twenty and with Fabrizi’s help, Fellini obtained his first screen credit as a comedy writer on Mario Mattoli’s Il pirata sono io (The Pirate's Dream). Progressing rapidly to numerous collaborations on films at Cinecittà, his circle of professional acquaintances widened to include novelist Vitaliano Brancati and scriptwriter Piero Tellini. In the wake of Mussolini’s declaration of war against France and England on June 10, 1940, Fellini discovered Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Gogol, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner along with French films by Marcel Carné, René Clair, and Julien Duvivier. In 1941 he published Il mio amico Pasqualino, a 74-page booklet in ten chapters describing the absurd adventures of Pasqualino, an alter ego.

Writing for radio while attempting to avoid the draft, Fellini met his future wife Giulietta Masina in a studio office at the Italian public radio broadcaster EIAR in autumn 1942. Well-paid as the voice of Pallina in Fellini's radio serial, Cico and Pallina, Masina was also well-known for her musical-comedy broadcasts which cheered an audience depressed by the war.  In November 1942, Fellini was sent to Libya, occupied by Fascist Italy, to work on the screenplay of I cavalieri del deserto (Knights of the Desert, 1942), directed by Osvaldo Valenti and Gino Talamo. Fellini welcomed the assignment as it allowed him "to secure another extension on his draft order". Responsible for emergency re-writing, he also directed the film's first scenes. When Tripoli fell under siege by British forces, he and his colleagues made a narrow escape by boarding a German military plane flying to Sicily. His African adventure, later published in Marc’Aurelio as "The First Flight", marked “the emergence of a new Fellini, no longer just a screenwriter, working and sketching at his desk, but a filmmaker out in the field”.

The apolitical Fellini was finally freed of the draft when an Allied air raid over Bologna destroyed his medical records. Fellini and Giulietta hid in her aunt’s apartment until Mussolini's fall on July 25, 1943. After dating for nine months, the couple were married on October 30, 1943. Several months later, Masina fell down the stairs and suffered a miscarriage. She gave birth to a son, Pierfederico, on 22 March 1945 but the child died of encephalitis a month later on 24 April. The tragedy had enduring emotional and artistic repercussions

Neorealist apprenticeship (1944–1949)  After the Allied liberation of Rome on June 4, 1944, Fellini and Enrico De Seta opened the Funny Face Shop where they survived the postwar recession drawing caricatures of American soldiers. He became involved with Italian Neorealism when Roberto Rossellini, at work on Stories of Yesteryear (later Rome, Open City), met Fellini in his shop proposing he contribute gags and dialogue for the script. Aware of Fellini’s reputation as Aldo Fabrizi’s “creative muse”, Rossellini also requested he try to convince the actor to play the role of Father Giuseppe Morosini, the parish priest executed by the SS on April 4, 1944.

In 1947, Fellini and Sergio Amidei received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of Rome, Open City.

Working as both screenwriter and assistant director on Rossellini’s Paisà (Paisan) in 1946, Fellini was entrusted to film the Sicilian scenes in Maiori. In February 1948, he was introduced to Marcello Mastroianni, then a young theatre actor appearing in a play with Giulietta Masina. Establishing a close working relationship with Alberto Lattuada, Fellini co-wrote the director’s Senza pietà (Without Pity) and Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po). Fellini also worked with Rossellini on the anthology film L'Amore (1948), co-writing the screenplay and in one segment titled, "The Miracle", acting opposite Anna Magnani. To play the role of a vagabond rogue mistaken by Magnani for a saint, Fellini had to bleach his black hair blond.

Early films (1950–1953)  - In 1950 Fellini co-produced and co-directed with Alberto Lattuada Variety Lights (Luci del varietà), his first feature film. A backstage comedy set among the world of small-time travelling performers, it featured Giulietta Masina and Lattuada’s wife, Carla del Poggio. Its release to poor reviews and limited distribution proved disastrous for all concerned. The production company went bankrupt, leaving both Fellini and Lattuada with debts to pay for over a decade. In February 1950, Paisà received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay by Rossellini, Sergio Amidei, and Fellini.

After travelling to Paris for a script conference with Rossellini on Europa '51, Fellini began production on The White Sheik in September 1951, his first solo-directed feature. Starring Alberto Sordi in the title role, the film is a revised version of a treatment first written by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1949 and based on the fotoromanzi, the photographed cartoon strip romances popular in Italy at the time. Producer Carlo Ponti commissioned Fellini and Tullio Pinelli to write the script but Antonioni rejected the story they developed. With Ennio Flaiano, they re-worked the material into a light-hearted satire about newlywed couple Ivan and Wanda Cavalli (Leopoldo Trieste, Brunello Bovo) in Rome to visit the Pope. Ivan’s prissy mask of respectability is soon demolished by his wife’s obsession with the White Sheik. Highlighting the music of Nino Rota, the film was selected at Cannes (among the films in competition was Orson Welles’s Othello) and then retracted. Screened at the 13th Venice International Film Festival, it was razzed by critics in "the atmosphere of a soccer match”. One reviewer declared that Fellini had “not the slightest aptitude for cinema direction".

In 1953, I Vitelloni found favour with the critics and public. Winning the Silver Lion Award in Venice, it secured Fellini’s first international distributor.

Beyond neorealism (1954–1960) Fellini directed La Strada based on a script completed in 1952 with Pinelli and Flaiano. During the last three weeks of shooting, Fellini experienced the first signs of severe clinical depression. Aided by his wife, he undertook a brief period of therapy with Freudian psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio.

Fellini cast American actor Broderick Crawford to interpret the role of an aging swindler in Il Bidone. Based partly on stories told to him by a petty thief during production of La Strada, Fellini developed the script into a con man’s slow descent towards a solitary death. To incarnate the role’s "intense, tragic face", Fellini’s first choice had been Humphrey Bogart but after learning of the actor’s lung cancer, chose Crawford after seeing his face on the theatrical poster of All the King’s Men (1949). The film shoot was wrought with difficulties stemming from Crawford’s alcoholism. Savaged by critics at the 16th Venice International Film Festival, the film did miserable box office and did not receive international distribution until 1964.

During the autumn, Fellini researched and developed a treatment based on a film adaptation of Mario Tobino’s novel, The Free Women of Magliano. Located in a mental institution for women, financial backers considered the subject had no potential and the project was abandoned.

While preparing Nights of Cabiria in spring 1956, Fellini learned of his father’s death by cardiac arrest at the age of sixty-two. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and starring Giulietta Masina, the film took its inspiration from news reports of a woman’s decapitated head retrieved in a lake and stories by Wanda, a shantytown prostitute Fellini met on the set of Il Bidone. Pier Paolo Pasolini was hired to translate Flaiano and Pinelli’s dialogue into Roman dialect and to supervise researches in the vice-afflicted suburbs of Rome. The movie won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 30th Academy Awards and brought Masina the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her performance.

With Pinelli, he developed Journey with Anita for Sophia Loren and Gregory Peck. An "invention born out of intimate truth", the script was based on Fellini's return to Rimini with a mistress to attend his father's funeral. Due to Loren’s unavailability, the project was shelved and resurrected twenty-five years later as Lovers and Liars (1981), a comedy directed by Mario Monicelli with Goldie Hawn and Giancarlo Giannini. For Eduardo De Filippo, he co-wrote the script of Fortunella, tailoring the lead role to accommodate Masina’s particular sensibility.

The Hollywood on the Tiber phenomenon of 1958 in which American studios profited from the cheap studio labour available in Rome provided the backdrop for photojournalists to steal shots of celebrities on the via Veneto. The scandal provoked by Turkish dancer Haish Nana’s improvised striptease at a nightclub captured Fellini’s imagination: he decided to end his latest script-in-progress, Moraldo in the City, with an all-night "orgy" at a seaside villa. Pierluigi Praturlon’s photos of Anita Ekberg wading fully dressed in the Trevi Fountain provided further inspiration for Fellini and his scriptwriters. Changing the title of the screenplay to La Dolce Vita, Fellini soon clashed with his producer on casting: the director insisted on the relatively unknown Mastroianni while De Laurentiis wanted Paul Newman as a hedge on his investment. Reaching an impasse, De Laurentiis sold the rights to publishing mogul Angelo Rizzoli. Shooting began on March 16, 1959 with Anita Ekberg climbing the stairs to the cupola of Saint Peter’s in a mammoth décor constructed at Cinecittà. The statue of Christ flown by helicopter over Rome to Saint Peter's Square was inspired by an actual media event on May 1, 1956, which Fellini had witnessed. The film wrapped August 15 on a deserted beach at Passo Oscuro with a bloated mutant fish designed by Piero Gherardi.

La Dolce Vita broke all box office records. Despite scalpers selling tickets at 1000 lire, crowds queued in line for hours to see an “immoral movie” before the censors banned it. At an exclusive Milan screening on February 5, 1960, one outraged patron spat on Fellini while others hurled insults. Denounced in parliament by right-wing conservatives, undersecretary Domenico Magrì of the Christian Democrats demanded tolerance for the film’s controversial themes. The Vatican's official press organ, l'Osservatore Romano, lobbied for censorship while the Board of Roman Parish Priests and the Genealogical Board of Italian Nobility attacked the film. In one documented instance involving favourable reviews written by the Jesuits of San Fedele, defending La Dolce Vita had severe consequences. In competition at Cannes alongside Antonioni’s L’Avventura, the film won the Palme d'Or awarded by presiding juror Georges Simenon. The Belgian writer was promptly “hissed at” by the disapproving festival crowd.

Art films and dreams (1961–1969) - A major discovery for Fellini after his Italian neorealism period (1950–1959) was the work of Carl Jung. After meeting Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Ernst Bernhard in early 1960, he read Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963). Bernhard also recommended that Fellini consult the I Ching and keep a record of his dreams. What Fellini formerly accepted as "his extrasensory perceptions" were now interpreted as psychic manifestations of the unconscious. Bernhard’s focus on Jungian depth psychology proved to be the single greatest influence on Fellini’s mature style and marked the turning point in his work from neorealism to filmmaking that was "primarily oneiric". As a consequence, Jung's seminal ideas on the anima and the animus, the role of archetypes and the collective unconscious directly influenced such films as 8½ (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Satyricon (1969), Casanova (1976), and City of Women (1980). Other key influences on his work include Luis Buñuel, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Roberto Rossellini.

Exploiting La Dolce Vita’s success, financier Angelo Rizzoli set up Federiz in 1960, an independent film company, for Fellini and production manager Clemente Fracassi to discover and produce new talent. Despite the best intentions, their overcautious editorial and business skills forced the company to close down soon after cancelling Pasolini’s project, Accattone (1961).

Condemned as a "public sinner" for La Dolce Vita, Fellini responded with The Temptations of Doctor Antonio, a segment in the omnibus Boccaccio '70. His first colour film, it was the sole project green-lighted at Federiz. Infused with the surrealistic satire that characterized the young Fellini’s work at Marc’Aurelio, the film ridiculed a crusader against vice who goes insane trying to censor a billboard of Anita Ekberg espousing the virtues of milk.

Giving the order to start production in spring 1962, Fellini signed deals with his producer Rizzoli, fixed dates, had sets constructed, cast Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, and Sandra Milo in lead roles, and did screen tests at the Scalera Studios in Rome. He hired cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo, among key personnel. But apart from naming his hero Guido Anselmi, he still couldn't decide what his character did for a living. The crisis came to a head in April when, sitting in his Cinecittà office, he began a letter to Rizzoli confessing he had "lost his film" and had to abandon the project. Interrupted by the chief machinist requesting he celebrate the launch of 8½, Fellini put aside the letter and went on the set. Raising a toast to the crew, he "felt overwhelmed by shame… I was in a no exit situation. I was a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers. And lo and behold, at that very moment everything fell into place. I got straight to the heart of the film. I would narrate everything that had been happening to me. I would make a film telling the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make".

Shooting began on May 9, 1962. Perplexed by the seemingly chaotic, incessant improvisation on the set, Deena Boyer, the director’s American press officer at the time, asked for a rationale. Fellini told her that he hoped to convey the three levels "on which our minds live: the past, the present, and the conditional - the realm of fantasy". After shooting wrapped on October 14, Nino Rota composed various circus marches and fanfares that would later become signature tunes of the maestro’s cinema. Nominated for four Oscars, 8½ won awards for best foreign language film and best costume design in black-and-white. In California for the ceremony, Fellini toured Disneyland with Walt Disney the day after.

Increasingly attracted to parapsychology, Fellini met the Turin magician Gustavo Rol in 1963. Rol, a former banker, introduced him to the world of Spiritism and séances. In 1964, Fellini experimented with LSD under the supervision of Emilio Servadio, his psychoanalyst during the 1954 production of La Strada. For years reserved about what actually occurred that Sunday afternoon, he admitted in 1992 that objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to my self. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.

Fellini's hallucinatory insights were given full flower in his first colour feature Juliet of the Spirits (1965), depicting Giulietta Masina as Juliet, a housewife who rightly suspects her husband's infidelity and succumbs to the voices of spirits summoned during a séance at her home. Her sexually voracious next door neighbor Suzy (Sandra Milo) introduces Juliet to a world of uninhibited sensuality but Juliet is haunted by childhood memories of her Catholic guilt and a teenaged friend who committed suicide. Complex and filled with psychological symbolism, the film is set to a jaunty score by Nino Rota.

Nostalgia and politics (1970–1980) - To help promote Satyricon in the United States, Fellini flew to Los Angeles in January 1970 for interviews with Dick Cavett and David Frost. He also met with film director Paul Mazursky who wanted to star him alongside Donald Sutherland in his new film, Alex in Wonderland. In February, Fellini scouted locations in Paris for The Clowns, a docu-fiction for television based on his childhood memories of the circus and a "coherent theory of clowning." As he saw it, the clown "was always the caricature of a well-established, ordered, peaceful society. But today all is temporary, disordered, grotesque. Who can still laugh at clowns?... All the world plays a clown now."

In March 1971, Fellini began production on Roma, a seemingly random collection of episodes informed by the director's memories and impressions of Rome. The "diverse sequences," writes Fellini scholar Peter Bondanella, "are held together only by the fact that they all ultimately originate from the director’s fertile imagination." The film’s opening scene anticipates Amarcord while its most surreal sequence involves an ecclesiastical fashion show in which nuns and priests roller skate past shipwrecks of cobwebbed skeletons.

Over a period of six months between January and June 1973, Fellini shot the Oscar-winning Amarcord. Loosely based on the director’s 1968 autobiographical essay My Rimini, the film depicts the adolescent Titta and his friends working out their sexual frustrations against the religious and Fascist backdrop of a provincial town in Italy during the 1930s. Produced by Franco Cristaldi, the seriocomic movie became Fellini’s second biggest commercial success after La Dolce Vita. Circular in form, Amarcord avoids plot and linear narrative in a way similar to The Clowns and Roma. The director's overriding concern with developing a poetic form of cinema was first outlined in a 1965 interview he gave to The New Yorker journalist Lillian Ross: "I am trying to free my work from certain constrictions – a story with a beginning, a development, an ending. It should be more like a poem with metre and cadence."

Late films and projects (1981–1990)

Organized by his publisher Diogenes Verlag in 1982, the first major exhibition of 63 drawings by Fellini was held in Paris, Brussels, and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. A gifted caricaturist, much of the inspiration for his sketches was derived from his own dreams while the films-in-progress both originated from and stimulated drawings for characters, decor, costumes and set designs. Under the title, I disegni di Fellini (Fellini’s Designs), he published 350 drawings executed in pencil, watercolours, and felt pens.

On September 6, 1985 Fellini was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 42nd Venice Film Festival. That same year, he became the first non-American to receive the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual award for cinematic achievement.

Long fascinated by Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Fellini accompanied the Peruvian author on a journey to the Yucatán to assess the feasibility of a film. After first meeting Castaneda in Rome in October 1984, Fellini drafted a treatment with Pinelli titled Viaggio a Tulun. Producer Alberto Grimaldi, prepared to buy film rights to all of Castaneda’s work, then paid for pre-production research taking Fellini and his entourage from Rome to Los Angeles and the jungles of Mexico in October 1985. When Castaneda inexplicably disappeared and the project fell through, Fellini’s mystico-shamanic adventures were scripted with Pinelli and serialized in Corriere della Sera in May 1986. A barely veiled satirical interpretation of Castaneda's work, Viaggio a Tulun was published in 1989 as a graphic novel with artwork by Milo Manara and as Trip to Tulum in America in 1990.

For Intervista, produced by Ibrahim Moussa and RAI Television, Fellini intercut memories of the first time he visited Cinecittà in 1939 with present-day footage of himself at work on a screen adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Amerika. A meditation on the nature of memory and film production, it won the special 40th Anniversary Prize at Cannes and the 15th Moscow International Film Festival Golden Prize. In Brussels later that year, a panel of thirty professionals from eighteen European countries named Fellini the world’s best director and 8½ the best European film of all time.

In early 1989 Fellini began production on The Voice of the Moon, based on Ermanno Cavazzoni’s novel, Il poema dei lunatici (The Lunatics’ Poem). A small town was built at Empire Studios on the via Pontina outside Rome. Starring Roberto Benigni as Ivo Salvini, a madcap poetic figure newly released from a mental institution, the character is a combination of La Strada's Gelsomina, Pinocchio, and Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Fellini improvised as he filmed, using as a guide a rough treatment written with Pinelli. Despite its modest critical and commercial success in Italy, and its warm reception by French critics, it failed to interest North American distributors. Fellini won the Praemium Imperiale, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the visual arts, awarded by the Japan Art Association in 1990.

Final years (1991–1993) - In July 1991 and April 1992, Fellini worked in close collaboration with Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew to establish "the longest and most detailed conversations ever recorded on film". Described as the "Maestro's spiritual testament” by his biographer Tullio Kezich, excerpts culled from the conversations later served as the basis of their feature documentary, Fellini: I'm a Born Liar (2002) and the book, I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon. Finding it increasingly difficult to secure financing for feature films, Fellini developed a suite of television projects whose titles reflect their subjects: Attore, Napoli, L’Inferno, L’opera lirica, and L’America.

In April 1993, Fellini received his fifth Oscar for lifetime achievement "in recognition of his cinematic accomplishments that have thrilled and entertained audiences worldwide". On June 16, he entered the Cantonal Hospital in Zurich for an "angioplasty on his femoral artery" but suffered a stroke at the Grand Hotel in Rimini two months later. Partially paralyzed, he was first transferred to Ferrara for rehabilitation and then to the Policlinico Umberto I in Rome to be near his wife, also hospitalized. He suffered a second stroke and fell into an irreversible coma. Fellini died in Rome on October 31 at the age of 73, a day after his fiftieth wedding anniversary. The memorial service was held in Studio 5 at Cinecittà attended by an estimated "70,000 people". At the request of Giulietta Masina, trumpeter Mauro Maur played the "Improvviso dell'Angelo" by Nino Rota during the funeral ceremony. Five months later on March 23, 1994, Giulietta Masina died of lung cancer.

Fellini, Masina and their son Pierfederico are buried in a bronze sepulchre sculpted by Arnaldo Pomodoro. Designed as a ship's prow, the tomb is located at the main entrance to the Cemetery of Rimini. The Federico Fellini Airport in Rimini is named in his honour.

Poland: Jerzy Hoffman

Jerzy Hoffman (born March 15, 1932) is a Polish film director and screenwriter.

Career

His 1965 film Three Steps on Earth was entered into the 4th Moscow International Film Festival where it won a Silver Prize. His 1969 film Colonel Wolodyjowski was entered into the 6th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1973 he was a member of the jury at the 8th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1981 he was a member of the jury at the 12th Moscow International Film Festival. In 1985 he was a member of the jury at the 14th Moscow International Film Festival.

Hoffman directed Battle of Warsaw 1920 in 2011, the first Polish 3D feature film, stating “The fact that Poles made a film in 3D is not a miracle

 

Personal life

Hoffman was born to Jewish parents Siegmund Hoffman and Maria Schmelkes. He is the father of early Macintosh development team member Joanna Hoffman.

 

Selected filmography

Jerzy Hoffman's star in Łódź

• Battle of Warsaw 1920 (2011)
• Ukraine - The Birth of a Nation (2008)
• An Ancient Tale (Stara Baśń, 2003)
• With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i mieczem, 1999)
• A Beautiful Stranger (Piękna nieznajoma, 1992)
• After Your Decrees (Wedle wyroków Twoich, 1983)
• The Quack (Znachor, 1981)
• To the Last Drop of Blood (Do krwi ostatniej, 1978)
• Leper (Trędowata, 1976)
• The Deluge (Potop, 1974) - nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar^[7]
• Colonel Wolodyjowski (Pan Wołodyjowski, 1968 )
• The Father (Ojciec, 1967)
• The Market of Miracles (Jarmark cudów, 1966)
• Three Steps on Earth (1965)
• The Law and the Fist (Prawo i pięść, 1964)

Portugal: Manoel de Oliveira

Manoel Cândido Pinto de Oliveira, born December 11, 1908) is a Portuguese film director and screenwriter born in Cedofeita, Porto. He first began making films in 1927, when he and some friends attempted to make a film about World War I. In 1931 he completed his first film Douro, Faina Fluvial, a documentary about his home city Porto made in the city symphony genre. He made his feature film debut in 1942 with Aniki-Bóbó and continued to make shorts and documentaries for the next 30 years, gaining a minimal amount of recognition without being considered a major world film director. Among the numerous factors that prevented Oliveira from making more films during this time period were the political situation in Portugal, family obligations and money.

In 1971 Oliveira made his second feature narrative film Past and Present, a social satire that both set the standard for his film career afterwards and gained him recognition in the global film community. He continued making films of growing ambition throughout the 1970s and 1980s, gaining critical acclaim and numerous awards. Since the late 1980s he has been one of the most prolific working film directors and continues to make an average of one film per year past the age of 100. In March 2008 he was reported to be the oldest active film director in the world, and is possibly the third oldest film director ever after George Abbott, who lived to be 107, and Spanish film director Miguel Morayta, who died at the age of 105 and 10 months in 2013. He is also the only filmmaker whose active career has spanned from the silent era to the digital age. Among his numerous awards are two Career Golden Lions from the Venice Film Festival.

Early life

Manoel de Oliveira was born in Porto, Portugal, on December 11, 1908, to Francisco José de Oliveira and Cândida Ferreira Pinto. His family were wealthy industrialists and agricultural landowners. His father owned a dry-goods factory, produced the first electric light bulbs in Portugal and built an electric energy plant before he died in 1932. Oliveira was educated at the Colegio Universal in Porto before attending a Jesuit boarding school in Galicia, Spain. As a teenager his goal was to become an actor. At 17, he joined his brothers as an executive in his father's factories, where he remained for the majority of his adult life when not making films. In a 1981 Sight and Sound article, John Gillett describes Oliveira as having "spent most of his life in business ... making films only when circumstances allowed."

From an early age, Oliveira was interested in the poverty of the lower classes, the arts and especially films. While he has named D. W. Griffith, Eric von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Max Linder, Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc and Sergei Eisenstein's The General Line as early influences, he was also disappointed to have virtually no Portuguese filmmakers to emulate. The Portuguese film industry was also highly censored and restricted under the fascist Salazar regime that lasted from the early 1930s until the mid-1970s. His later films, such as The Cannibals and Belle Toujours (a sequel to Belle de Jour), suggest an affinity with Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel. He has stated "I'm closer to Buñuel. He's a reverse Catholic and I was raised a Catholic. It's a religion that permits sin, and Buñuel at the very deepest is one of the most moralistic directors but he does everything to the contrary. I never say that I'm Catholic because to be Catholic is very difficult. I prefer to be thought of as a great sinner."

Film career

1927–1942: Early documentaries and first feature

His first attempt at filmmaking was in 1927 when he and his friends worked on a film about the Portuguese experience in World War I, although the film was never made. He enrolled in Italian film-maker Rino Lupo's acting school at age 20 and appeared as an extra in Lupo's film Fátima Milagrosa. Years later in 1933 he also had the distinction of having acted in the second Portuguese sound film, A Canção de Lisboa. Eventually Oliveira turned his attention back to filmmaking when he saw Walther Ruttmann's documentary Berlin: Symphony of a City. Ruttman's film is the most famous of a small, short lived silent documentary film genre: city symphony films. These films portrays the life of a city, mainly through visual impressions in a semi-documentary style, without the narrative content of more mainstream films, though the sequencing of events can imply a kind of loose theme or impression of the city's daily life. Other examples include Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures and Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. Oliveira has said that Ruttman's film was his "most useful lesson in film technique", but that he also found it cold, mechanical and lacking humanity.

The discovery of Ruttman's film prompted Oliveira to direct his own first film in 1931, a documentary short titled Douro, Faina Fluvial. The film is a portrait of his hometown Porto and the labor and industry that takes place along the cities main river, the Douro River. Rino Lupo invited Oliveira to show the film at the International Congress of Film Critics in Lisbon, where the majority of the Portuguese audience booed. However other foreign critics and artists who were in attendance praised the film, such as Luigi Pirandello and Émile Vuillermoz. Oliveira re-edited the film with a new soundtrack and re-released it in 1934. And again in 1994, Oliveira modified the film by adding a new, more avant-garde soundtrack by Freitas Branco. Over the next 10 years Oliveira struggled to make films, abandoning several ambitious projects and making a handful of short documentaries on subjects ranging from artistic portraits of coastal cities in Portugal to industrial films on the origins of Portugal's auto industry. One of these shorts was a documentary about the inauguration of the hydro-electrical plant that his father built, Hulha Branca. He also first met and befriended Portuguese playwright José Régio during this time period. Oliveira would go on to adapt four of Régio's plays as films.

Fifteen years after his first attempt at filmmaking, Oliveira made his feature film debut in 1942. Aniki-Bóbó is a portrait of Porto's street children and based on a short story by Rodrigo de Freitas. Oliveira used non-professional actors to portray the children. The story centers around two young boys who compete for the attention of a young girl. One of the boys in an extroverted bully, while the other is shy and innocent. The film was a commercial failure when it opened, and its merit only came to be recognized over time. Oliveira has stated that he was criticized for portraying children that lied, cheated and stole, which in his mind made them act more like adults. The poor reception of the film forced Manoel de Oliveira to abandon other film projects he was involved in, and to dedicate himself to a vineyard that his wife had inherited. In the early 1950s he and playwright José Régio attempted to submit a screenplay to the Estado Novo run Film Fund commission, but the commission refused to either accept or reject the film. Oliveira attributed this to his own well known dislike for the Salazar regime.

1955–1970: Return to filmmaking

In 1955 Oliveira traveled to Germany to study new techniques in color cinematography. He re-emerged onto the film scene in 1956 with The Artist and the City, a twenty six minute documentary short film shot in color. Much like his first film, The Artist and the City is a portrait of Porto, juxtaposing color shots of the city with paintings being created by local artist António Cruz. The film was shown in a number of festivals to positive reviews. In 1959, Portugal's National Federation of Industrial Millers commissioned O Pão, a color documentary on Portugal's bread industry.

In 1963, Rite of Spring (O Acto de Primavera), a partly documentary, partly narrative film depicting an annual passion play, marked a turning point for his career. The play is based on a 16th Century passion play by Francisco Vaz de Guimaraes and was actually performed by villagers in northern Portugal. Along with the performance of the play, Oliveira staged the actors rehearsals, spectators watching the actors and even himself and his crew preparing to film the performance. Oliveira has said that making the film "profoundly altered his conception of cinema" as a tool not to simulate reality, but merely represent it. O Acto de Primavera was called the first political film from Portugal by film critic Henrique Costa and gave Oliveira his first world wide recognition as a filmmaker. The film won the Grand Prix at the Siena Film Festival and Oliveira had his first film retrospective at the Locarno Film Festival in 1964.

This was shortly followed by The Hunt (A caça), a grim, surrealistic short narrative film that contrasted with the positive tones of his previous film. Due to censorship issues, Oliveira was forced to add a "happy ending" to the initial release of the film and was unable to restore his original ending until 1988. Because of this film and anti- Salazar comments Oliveira made after a screening of O Acto de Primavera, he was arrested by the PIDE in 1963. He spent 10 days in jail and was interrogated until finally being released with the help of his friend Manuel Meneres. His career again slowed down and he only completed two short documentaries in the next 9 years.

In 1967, the Cineclube do Porto sponsored a Week of Portuguese Cinema, where many filmmakers from the blossoming Cinema Novo movement screened films and discussed "the precarious situation of Portuguese cinema in the marketplace, and the decline of the film club movement." This resulted in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's creation of the Centro Portuges de Cinema, which would help to finance and distribute films in Portugal. The first film that the foundation chose to sponsor was Oliveira's next feature, and the early 1970s would come to be known as the Gulbenkian Years of Portuguese cinema.

1970–1989: Artistic breakthrough: Tetralogy of Frustrated Love and recognition

Since the 1970s, Oliveira has been at his most active, with the vast majority of his films having been made after his seventy-fifth birthday. Whether a late bloomer or a victim of unfortunate delays and political censorship, he has become Portugal's preeminent filmmaker during the later part of his long life. Film critic J. Hoberman has said "at an age when many men think of retirement, Oliveira emerged from obscurity as one of the 70s leading modernists, a peer of Straub, Syberberg and Duras." With a newfound artistic freedom after António de Oliveira Salazar's stroke in 1968 and the April 1974 Carnation Revolution, Oliveira's career began to flourish and receive international acclaim. Ironically the Carnation Revolution also resulted in his families factories being occupied by factions of the Left and subsequently going bankrupt. Due to this, Oliveira lost most of his personal wealth and his home of thirty-five years.

Oliveira's second return to filmmaking came in 1971 with Past and Present (O Passado e o Presente), a satirical black comedy on marriage and the bourgeoisie. With its lyrical surrealism and farcical situations, the film was a shift from his earlier work about lower-class people. Based on a play by Joao Cesar Monteiro, the film stars Maria de Saisset as Vanda, a woman who only falls in love with her husbands after they have died. Past and Present was the first of what has become known as Oliveira's "Tetralogy of frustrated loves". It was followed by Benilde or the Virgin Mother, Doomed Love and Francisca. Each of these films share the theme of unfulfilled love, the backdrop of a repressive society, and the beginning of Oliveira's unique cinematic style.

Benilde or the Virgin Mother (Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe) was based on a play by Oliveira's long-time friend and fellow Salazar regime dissident José Régio and released in 1975. This would be the first of many films that would examine the relationship between film and theater in Oliveira's work, and the film opens with roaming exterior shots of the Tobis Studios in Lisbon until reaching the constructed set of the film. In the film Benilde is a sleepwalking eighteen-year-old who mysteriously becomes impregnated and believes herself to have been chosen for immaculate conception, despite the angry and dismissive reactions of her bourgeoisie family and friends. Upon its release, the film was criticized for being irrelevant to the political climate of 1975 Portugal. However Oliveira defended its depiction of a moralistic and social repression on its characters as not being "in opposition to or in contradiction with our own times."

Doomed Love (Amor de Perdição) is a tragic love story based on the novel by Camilo Castelo Branco. The film depicts the doomed love affair of Teresa and Simao, who come from two rival wealthy families. Teresa is sent to a convent for refusing to marry her cousin Baltasar, and after Simao kills Baltasar he is sentenced to death and eventually sent into exile. Teresa dies after Simao is sent away, and Simao dies at sea. Oliveira made two versions of the film: a six-part television miniseries that was broadcast in 1978 to disastrous reviews, and a shorter theatrical film released in 1979, which received rave reviews and was profiled on the cover of Le Monde. Oliveira has stated that whereas most film adaptations of literature attempt to adapt the narrative to film, he wanted instead to adapt "the text" of Branco's novel, much like Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet's The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach was a film more about music itself than about its own story. He has stated that "in a novel where a lot happens, it would be a waste of time to show everything. Besides, the literary narration, the way of telling the story, the style, the sonorousness of the phrases and the composition are all just as beautiful and interesting as the events that unfold. Therefore, it seemed convienent for me to focus on the text, and that is what I did." The film achieves this idea by including extensive narration, characters that speak their thoughts or read letters aloud and shots of written text.

In 1981 Oliveira made Francisca, based on the novel by Agustina Bessa Luis. The film is a tragic love triangle detailing a real life relationship between Fanny Owen, Amor de Perdição author Camilo Castelo Branco and Branco's best friend Jose Augusto. Oliveira's wife was a distant relative of Owen and had access to private letter' s written by all three protagonists in the film. The film was screened to great acclaim at the Director's Fortnight at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival and furthered Oliveira's global recognition. In addition to Francisca, Oliveira has adapted six other novels or stories from author Augustina Bessa Luis, as well as collaborated on the screenplay for the documentary Visita ou Memórias e Confissões. This was also the first film which Oliveira made with producer Paulo Branco, who would go on to produce the majority of Oliveira's film, and with actor Diogo Dória.

Following the success of Francisca, Oliveira made three documentary films. Visita ou Memórias e Confissões is an autobiographical documentary about Oliveira's family history. After completing the film, he decided that it will not be released until after his death. He then made Lisboa Cultural and Nice... À Propos de Jean Vigo, a documentary for French television on the city of Nice, and also a tribute to French filmmaker Jean Vigo.

Oliveira then made his most ambitious film to that date, The Satin Slipper (Le Soulier de Satin), based on the notorious 1929 epic play by Paul Claudel, which is rarely performed in its entirety due to its length. The seven hour film took Oliveira two years to complete. It was Oliveira's first film in French, as well as his first film with actor Luís Miguel Cintra, who would go on to act in all of his films from then on. The story of The Satin Slipper is about the unrequited love of sixteenth century conquistador Don Rodrigue and nobelwoman Dona Prouheze with the backdrop of colonialism in Africa and the Americas. The film opens with a theater gradually being filled with an audience and an introduction to the film on stage. The film itself uses very theatrical set pieces, such as cardboard waves and backdrops. The film was never released theatrically, but was screened at both the 1985 Cannes Film Festival and the 1985 Venice Film Festival, where Oliveira received a special Golden Lion for his career up to that point. Later the Brussels Cinematheque awarded the film its L'Âge d'or Prize.

In 1986 Oliveira made one of his most experimental films, My Case (Mon Cas), partially based on José Régio's one act play O Meu Caso, although the film also takes inspiration from Samuel Beckett's Fizzles and the Book of Job. Oliveira takes a surreal and meta-narrative approach to examine the relationship between art and life. The film begins with a theater being filled with the audience and actors before a play is about to begin. A mysterious man play by Luis Miguel Cintra enters the stage and presents "his case" about the fallacies of theater and its illusions. One by one all of the play's actors and technicians state their cases about what bothers them about the play and its relation to their own lives. An audience member then takes the stage to make a case for what the collective audience wants. This is followed by three consecutive but very different versions of the one act play: the first is a straight forward farce, the second is presented as a slapstick silent movie, and the third is performed with the dialogue read backwards. The stage performance ends with video footage of war and disasters from around the world and Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica. The entire film then shifts to a retelling of the Book of Job, with Cintra as Job and Bulle Ogier as his wife. This sequence ends with a close-up of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. My Case opened the 1986 Venice Film Festival and was released in 1987.

Oliveira next made a satirical film in the tradition of Luis Buñuel, The Cannibals (Os Canibais) in 1988. The film is based on a short story by Álvaro Carvalhal and stars Luis Miguel Cintra, Leonor Silveira and Diogo Dória. José Régio first showed Oliveira the little known story, and Oliveira decided to make the film his only opera in collaboration with composer Joao Paes. The film also contains a demonic narrator Niccolo who appears and disappears from scenes magically. In the film, the beautiful young Margarida (Silveira) falls in love with the mysterious Viscount of Aveleda (Cintra), while rejecting the advances of the notorious Don João (Dória). On their wedding night, the Viscount reveals to Margarida that his great mystery is that he has no arms or legs and is "a living corpse". Margarida throws herself out of their bedroom window in horror and the Viscount attempts to drink poison but rolls into the fireplace instead, singing an aria as he burns to death. Just then Don João enters intending to murder the Viscount in jealously and witnesses the Viscounts death. The next morning, Margarida's father, brothers and family magistrate wake up and want to be served breakfast, but find an empty house. They look for the Viscount, but only discover a strange meat cooking in the fireplace, and conclude that it is a strange delicacy being prepared for them. The four men unknowingly eat the Viscount's body for breakfast with great delight. Suddenly they hear a gunshot and rush to the garden where they find Margarida's dead body and Don João sitting next to her with a self- inflicted gunshot wound in his chest. As Don João dies, he explains everything that has happened to the family and tells them they can find the Viscount in the fireplace. Horrified at their own cannibalism, the father and brother's decide to commit suicide until the magistrate points out that they are now the sole heirs to the Viscount's fortune. The father and brother's decide to live, and turn into rapid dogs and eat the magistrate, who has turned into a pig.^[30] The Cannibals was screened in competition at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival and won the Critics Special award at the 1988 São Paulo International Film Festival.

1990–present: Continued success as a filmmaker

Oliveira's work since the 1990s has been the most prolific of his entire career and he has made at least one film a year (usually feature narratives but sometimes shorts or documentaries) since 1990. During this period he established and consistently worked with a loyal troupe of regular actors including Luís Miguel Cintra, Leonor Baldaque, Ricardo Trêpa (Oliveira's grandson), Leonor Silveira, Diogo Dória, John Malkovich, Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli. He would also work with such international stars as Jeanne Moreau, Irene Papas, Bulle Ogier, Chiara Mastroianni, and Marcello Mastroianni in the actor's last film.

In 1990 Oliveira made No, or the Vain Glory of Command (Non, ou a Vã Gloria de Mandar), starring Luis Miguel Cintra, Diogo Dória and Leonor Silveira. The film depicts the military history of Portugal, focusing on its defeats more than its victories. The historical action include the assassination of Viriathus, the Battle of Toro, the Battle of Alcácer Quibir and the more recent Portuguese Colonial War. The one exception is the sequence that depicts the mythical Isle of Love, which celebrates Portuguese explorers and discoverers, not its military figures. The Isle of Love includes winged cupids, beautiful nymphs and the goddess Venus.^[31] The film was shown in competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Oliveira then made The Divine Comedy (A Divina Comédia) in 1991. Set in a mental institution, the film is not an adaptation of Dante Alighieri's famous work but is derived from stories in the Bible, José Régio's play A Salvacao do Mundo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, and Friedrich Nietzsche's Antichrist. Oliveira has stated that "all of the texts he uses deal in some way with the problem of sin and the possibility of redemption, and in this sense they all derive ultimately from the same source." The film stars Maria de Medeiros, Miguel Guilherme, Luís Miguel Cintra, Leonor Silveira and Diogo Dória and was shown in competition at the 1991 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Grand Special Jury Prize award.

Oliveira then returned to the works of Portuguese writer Camilo Castelo Branco with Day of Despair (O Dia do Desespero) in 1992. The film stars Mário Barroso as Branco, with actors Teresa Madruga, Luís Miguel Cintra and Diogo Dória playing both themselves and Ana Plácido, Freitas Fortuna and Dr. Edmundo Magalhães, respectively. The film was shot in the same house that Branco lived his final years and committed suicide and is both a documentary and a narrative film about the famous Portuguese writer. In 1993 Oliveira made Abraham's Valley (Vale Abraão), based on the novel by Agustina Bessa-Luís. Oliveira had wanted to film Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, but was dissuaded by producer Paulo Branco due to budgetary restraints. Oliveira then suggested to Bessa-Luís that she write an updated version of the novel set in Portugal, which resulted in the novel in 1991. Abraham's Valley is not a retelling of the Flaubert book, however Madame Bovary is both a subtext and a physical presence in the film. The film stars Leonor Silveira as Ema, a discontent Portuguese woman who wants a passionate life like the one she reads about in Flaubert's novel. Like Madame Bovary, Ema marries a doctor that she does not love and has many extramarital affairs before dying in an accident that may or may not be a suicide. Unlike Madame Bovary, there is no scandal in her love affairs, which are simply accepted by both her husband and the society that she lives in. The film won the Critics award at the 1993 São Paulo International Film Festival, as well as an award for Best Artistic Contribution Award at the 1993 Tokyo International Film Festival. In 1994 Oliveira made The Box (A Caixa), based on a play by Helder Prista Monteiro. The film stars Luis Miguel Cintra as a blind homeless man whose only means of support in a poor neighborhood in Lisbon is his official, government issued alms box. It was screened in competition at the 1994 Tokyo International Film Festival.

In 1995 Oliveira's reputation had grown and his films were internationally acclaimed. That year he made his first of many films starring international movie stars: The Convent (O Convento), starring John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve. The film is based on the novel As Terras Do Risco by Agustina Bessa-Luís and examines the Faustian theme of good versus evil. In the film Malkovich plays an American writer who travels to Portugal with his wife (Deneuve) to research his theory that William Shakespeare was really Jacques Perez, a Jewish Spaniard who fled his native country to avoid the Spanish Inquisition. The couple stay in a monastery a with strange, demonic- looking staff and they eventually end up having affairs with two staff members. The film was screened in competition at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival and won the Prize of the Catalan Screenwriter's Critic and Writer's Association at the 1995 Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival. In 1996 Oliveira worked with French star Michel Piccoli and Greek film star Irene Papas in Party. The film was co-written by Oliveira and Agustina Bessa-Luís from an original idea by Oliveira. In the film, a married couple played by Leonor Silveira and Rogério Samora have a dinner party that includes a famous Greek actress (Papas) and her lover (Piccoli) and the film consists of conversations between these four characters at parties over the course of five years. The film was screened in competition at the 1996 Venice Film Festival and won Oliveira the award for Best Director at the 1996 Portuguese Golden Globe Awards.

In 1997 Oliveira made Voyage to the Beginning of the World (Viagem ao Princípio do Mundo), which was the final film of Italian film star Marcello Mastroianni. In the film Mastroianni plays an aging film director named Manoel who travels on a road trip across Northern Portugal with French film actor Afonso (Jean-Yves Gautier) and two other young companions, Judite (Leonor Silveira) and Duarte (Diogo Dória). Afonso wants to see the Portuguese village that his father grew up in and see the relatives that he has never met. On the way, Manoel stops at several locations on the road that he remembers from his childhood, only to find them much different than he had remembered. The film is autobiographical in that the locations on the road are real locations from Oliveira's childhood. The film is also based on the experiences of actor Yves Afonso, whose father had immigrated from Portugal to France and who had met his long lost relatives during a French-Portuguese co-production in 1987. The film was screened out of competition at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI Prize and a Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury. It won other awards at the 1997 Haifa International Film Festival and the 1997 Tokyo International Film Festival.

Oliveira then made Anxiety (Inquietude) in 1998. The episodic film contains three short films based on literary works by Helder Prista Monteiro (Os Immortais), António Patrício (Suzy) and Agustina Bessa-Luís (Mãe de Um Rio). In Os Immortais a 90-year-old man (José Pinto) concludes that old age is horrible and attempts to convince his middle aged son (Luís Miguel Cintra) to commit suicide. In Suzy, an aristocrat (Diogo Dória) has an affair with a beautiful young cocotte (Leonor Silveira), but social class differences prevent him from having a deep, meaningful relationship with her. In Mãe de Um Rio, Leonor Baldaque plays a discontent small town girl who yearns for a more exotic life and seek advice from the Mother of the River (Irene Papas). The film won Oliveira another award for Best Director at the 1998 Portuguese Golden Globe Awards. In 1999 Oliveira made The Letter (La Lettre), based on the 17th century French novel The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette. Oliveira had wanted to make a film from the novel since the late 1970s, but had initially thought that it was too complicated to be filmed. The film updates the novel to modern day and stars Chiara Mastroianni as Catherine de Clèves, Antoine Chappey as the husband that she does not love, Leonor Silveira as her childhood friend who has become a nun and her confidant, and Portuguese rock star Pedro Abrunhosa playing himself in the role of the dashing Duke of Nemours, whom Catherine is in love with. Abrunhosa also wrote some original songs for the film. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.

In 2000 Oliveira made the film Word and Utopia (Palavra e Utopia), a biography of the Portuguese Jesuit priest Padre António Vieira based upon letters and sermons that the priest wrote between 1626 and 1695. Vieira is played by Oliveira's grandson Ricardo Trêpa as a young man, Luis Miguel Cintra in middle age and Lima Duarte as an old man. The film chronicles Vieira's missionary work in South America, testimony before the Spanish Inquisition and work as a trusted advisor to Queen Christina of Sweden (Leonor Silveira). The film was shown in competition at the 2000 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Film critica "Bastone Bianco" Award. It also won Oliveira his third award for Best Director at the 2000 Portuguese Golden Globe Awards. In 2001 Oliveira made two feature films at the age of 92. I'm Going Home (Je rentre à la maison) stars Michel Piccoli as Gilbert Valence, an aging stage actor that never achieved great success who deals with the sudden deaths of his wife, daughter and son-in-law after a car accident, turning down undignified roles in commercial TV shows and raising his 9-year-old grandson. Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich, Antoine Chappey, Leonor Baldaque, Leonor Silveira and Ricardo Trêpa also co-star.^[44] The film was shown in competition at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, won awards at the Haifa International Film Festival and the São Paulo International Film Festival, and won the award for Best Film at the 2001 Portuguese Golden Globe Awards. Later that year Oliveira made the autibiographical, partially documentary film Porto of My Childhood (Porto da Minha Infância). The film includes archival footage of Douro, Faina Fluvial and Aniki-Bóbó, reenactments of parts of Oliveira's childhood and documentary footage of Porto in the early 20th Century. Oliveira's grandsons Jorge Trêpa and Ricardo Trêpa portray Oliveira at different ages of his life. The film was screened in competition at the 2001 Venice Film Festival, where it won the UNESCO Award.

Oliveira made The Uncertainty Principle (O Princípio da Incerteza) in 2002. The film is based on the 2001 novel O Princípio da Incerteza:Joia de Familia by Agustina Bessa-Luís, which won the Grand Prize from the Portuguese Writer's Association. In the film, Leonor Baldaque plays Camila, who marries a man (Ivo Canelas) to help alleviate her family's financial difficulties instead of her boyfriend (Ricardo Trêpa). Camila's husband begins an affair with Vanessa (Leonor Silveira), which Camila is indifferent about. This infuriates Vanessa who proceeds to do everything she can to make Camila suffer. In then end Vanessa and Camila's husband become involved with an illegal deal with some gangsters, which Camila refuses to help them with. The film was screened in competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. This was followed by A Talking Picture (Um Filme Falado), starring Leonor Silveira, Filipa de Almeida, Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich, Irene Papas and Stefania Sandrelli in 2003. In the film Silveira takes her young daughter (Almeida) on a cruise to Bombay to meet her father's family and teaches her about the history of the places that they pass through along the way. These sights include such places as Ceuta, Marseilles, Athens, Naples and Pompeii. They also meet and learn about three successful women (Deneuve, Papas and Sandrelli) from certain location and have long conversations with the ship's captain (Malkovich), often dealing with the conflicts between Christianity and Islam. The film was screened in competition at the 2003 Venice Film festival, where it won the SIGNIS Award.

In 2004 Oliveira made The Fifth Empire (O Quinto Império - Ontem Como Hoje), a highly political film based on the play El-Rey Sebastiao by José Régio. The film chronicles the history of King Sebastian I of Portugal, and at a screening at the 2004 Venice Film Festival Oliveira acknowledged that US President George W. Bush had "a "Sebastianist" inclination in his expressed desire to spread democracy and freedom around the globe in his own version of the Fifth Empire." In the film King Sebastain (Ricardo Trêpa) contemplates pursuing his crusade in the Middle East that would lead to the Battle of Alcácer Quibir (where he would eventually die) and the counsel that he seeks from a variety of advisors, friends and family members. The film portrays King Sebastian as obsessed with his place in history and with his own myth of himself, while creating violent situations all around him. The film was screened at Venice out of competition as part of Oliveira's Career Golden Lion award. Oliveira followed this film with Magic Mirror (Espelho Mágico) in 2005. Based on the novel A Alma dos Ricos by Agustina Bessa-Luís, the film stars Leonor Silveira, Ricardo Trêpa, Luís Miguel Cintra, Leonor Baldaque and Michel Piccoli in a cameo, but was produced by José Miguel Cadilhe instead of Paulo Branco. In the film, Silveira plays a wealthy woman who is determined to see a real apparition of the Virgin Mary with the help of Trêpa, who has recently been released from prison.

In 2006 Oliveira made Belle Toujours, a sequel to Luis Buñuel's 1967 film, Belle de Jour. The film stars Bulle Ogier as Séverine Serizy and Michel Piccoli reprising his original role of Henri Husson. In the film, Séverine reluctantly agrees to see Henri for the first time in forty years out of curiosity to know if her former blackmailer told her dying husband about her secret life as a prostitute. Ricardo Trêpa and Leonor Baldaque also appear in supporting roles.

Oliveira's 2007 film Christopher Columbus - The Enigma (Cristóvão Colombo - O Enigma) was shot partly in New York and starred Ricardo Trêpa. In 2009 Oliveira made Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl (Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura), based on a short story by Eça de Queirós. The film starred Ricardo Trêpa and Catarina Wallenstein, who won Best Actress at the 2009 Portuguese Golden Globe Awards. Oliveira's 2010 film The Strange Case of Angelica starred Spanish actress Pilar López de Ayala and was entered into the Un Certain Regard section of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

Oliveira's latest film, Gebo and the Shadow, was released in 2012 and premiered at the 69th Venice International Film Festival. The film stars Michael Lonsdale, Jeanne Moreau, Claudia Cardinale, Leonor Silveira, Ricardo Trêpa and Luís Miguel Cintra and is based on the play The Hunchback and His Shadow by Raul Brandão.

Manoel de Oliveira has said that he directs movies for the sheer pleasure of it, regardless of critical reaction. He maintains a quiet life away from the spotlights.

Honors and decorations - In 2008, Oliveira was awarded a doctorate degree honoris causa by the University of the Algarve. He has also been awarded the Order of St. James of the Sword by the President of Portugal. In addition, he has received multiple honours such as those of the Cannes, Venice and Montréal film festivals. He has been awarded two Career Golden Lions, in 1985 and 2004, and a Golden Palm for his lifetime achievements in 2008. In 2002, Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura completed "Cinema House" in Porto, which was designed to commeneorate the work of Oliveira.  In November 2012 Oliveira was honored with a week-long tribute and retrospective at the 16th Citéphilo in Lille, France. In March 2013 Oliveira attended a screening of Aniki-Bóbó at the International Film Festival of Porto, which commemorated the 70th anniversary of the film.

Turkey: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Nuri Bilge Ceylan, born in Bakırköy on 26 January 1959 in Istanbul) is a Turkish photographer, screenwriter, actor, and film director. He is married to filmmaker, photographer, and actress Ebru Ceylan with whom he co-starred in Climates.

Life

Ceylan's love of photography started at the age of 15, and he developed an interest in cinema at 22. While studying at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, he participated in cinema and photography clubs and he took passport-style photos to make pocket money. After graduating from university with a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering, he went to London and Kathmandu, Nepal, to decide what to do in life. Then he went back to Ankara, Turkey, to do military service. When he was in the army, he found out how to give shape to the rest of his life "cinema".

Nuri Bilge Ceylan spent his childhood in Yenice, his father's hometown in the North Aegean province of Çanakkale. His father, an agricultural engineer, had been working at the Agricultural Research Institute in Yeşilköy, Istanbul. But when, with idealistic aspirations, he requested a transfer to Çanakkale, the family uprooted and moved to Yenice. Nuri Bilge was just two at the time.

For Nuri Bilge and his older sister Emine the move meant a childhood of freedom roaming the Yenice countryside. It was only to last, however, until his sister finished middle school. Since there was no high school in Yenice in those years, the family was forced to return to Istanbul in 1969, as a result of which Nuri Bilge spent the fifth grade of primary school, as well as his middle and high school years at state schools in Bakırköy. All the same, he generally chose to go back to Yenice for at least some of the summer holidays.

In 1976, having graduated from high school, he began studying chemical engineering at Istanbul Technical University. These, however, were turbulent times; and lectures were constantly interrupted by boycotts, clashes and political polarization. His course was based at the university's Maçka campus, where incidents were at their most intense, and two years slipped by with little opportunity for study: circumstances simply didn't allow. In 1978, he re-sat the university entrance exams and switched courses to electrical engineering at Boğaziçi University, where there was relatively little trouble at the time.

His interest in the art of photography, kindled during his time at high school, blossomed at the Boğaziçi University photography club, where he also took passport-style photos to earn some pocket money. As well as photography, he also became involved with the mountaineering and chess clubs. The university's extensive library and music archive played a significant role in fuelling his passion for the visual arts and classical music in particular. Meanwhile, the elective film studies course he took with Üstün Barışta and the film club's special screenings did much to reinforce his love of cinema, which had taken root earlier during showings at the Cinémathèque in Istanbul's Taksim. These were the years before DVD and video when films had to be watched at the cinema.

Having graduated in 1985, Nuri Bilge started contemplating the question of what he should do in life first in London, then in Kathmandu. His travels in the east and west lasted months and on return to Turkey he put the agony of indecision to rest by resolving to do his military service. And during those 18 months in the army in Mamak, Ankara, he found out how to give shape to the rest of his life. Through cinema...

With military service over, he set about putting the decision into practice. And while studying film at Mimar Sinan University, he took commercial photographs as a means of livelihood. But at 30-something, he was the university's oldest student and in a hurry to make a career for himself. After two years he abandoned the course.

He began by acting in a short film directed by his friend Mehmet Eryılmaz, but at the same time participating in the entire technical process from beginning to end, thus building on the knowledge he already had. He later bought the Arriflex 2B camera that had been used to shoot that film in order to make his own short film. In those days, video cameras were not yet an option.

Towards the end of 1993, he began shooting the short film KOZA (Cocoon), using a combination of negative he brought back in a suitcase from Russia and some stock long past its expiry date that he was given by the state broadcaster TRT. The film was screened at Cannes in May 1995 and became the first Turkish short to be selected for competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Three full-length feature films followed that could be cast in terms of a sequel to KOZA; they have also been described by some as his 'provincial trilogy': KASABA (The Small Town, 1997), MAYIS SIKINTISI (Clouds of May, 1999) and UZAK (Distant, 2002). In all of these films, Ceylan enlisted his close friends, relatives and family as actors and took on just about every technical role himself: the cinematography, sound design, production, editing, writing and direction...

When UZAK, the final film of the trilogy, won the Grand Prix at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Ceylan suddenly became an internationally recognized name. Continuing on the festival circuit after Cannes, UZAK scooped a total of 47 awards, 23 of them international, and so became the most award-winning film in the history of Turkish cinema.

Next to follow in 2006 was İKLİMLER (Climates), which again premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, this time scooping the FIPRESCI Prize. The lead roles in this film were shared by Nuri Bilge and his wife Ebru Ceylan.

Competing at the 61st Cannes Film Festival with his 2008 film ÜÇ MAYMUN (Three Monkeys), Nuri Bilge won the Best Director award. ÜÇ MAYMUN later went on to become the first Turkish film to make the Oscar shortlist in the Academy Awards Foreign Language Film category.

In 2009, the director returned to Cannes, this time as a member of the main competition jury.

In 2011, his film "ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA" won the Grand Prix again at Cannes Film Festival.

At the end of 2003, in the course of location scouting for 'Climates', Nuri Bilge returned to photography for the first time since military service. From this point on, he began devoting his time to both cinema and photography.

Films

Koza (Cocoon) (Short Film)

Ceylan's first short film Koza (Cocoon) was screened in the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, which was nominated for a Palme d'Or for Best Short Film there.

Kasaba (1997)

He received many awards with his 1997 debut feature Kasaba ("Small Town" or "The Town"), including the Caligari Film Award at the 1998 Berlin International Film Festival, the FIPRESCI prize, the Special Prize of the Jury at the 1998 Istanbul International Film Festival, and the Silver Award at the 1998 Tokyo International Film Festival.

Clouds of May (1999)

His second feature film was Clouds of May (1999), which won a Golden Orange for Best Director at the Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival in 1999 and where Ceylan won a FIPRESCI Award at the 2000 European Film Awards.

Uzak (2002)

His third feature Uzak ("Distant") (2002) received many awards including the Grand Jury Prize or the Grand Prix and the Best Actor Prize at Cannes (and Ceylan also won at 2004 Cannes a France Culture Award for "Foreign Cineaste of The Year"), Best Director, Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor at the 2002 Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, a Silver Hugo/Special Jury Prize at the 2003 Chicago International Film Festival, Best Turkish Director, Best Turkish Film, and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2003 Istanbul International Film Festival, the FIPRESCI Film of the Year at the 2003 San Sebastian International Film Festival, and was praised internationally.

Iklimler (2006)

His fourth film, Iklimler ("Climates"), won the FIPRESCI Movie Critics' Award at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and received international praise by critics and experts. The film won five awards at the 2006 Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival, bringing him the "Best Director" title. He also starred in the film alongside his wife, Ebru Ceylan. During the preparation of this movie, Ceylan turned his attentions to photography again. From this point on, he began devoting his time to both cinema and photography. "Turkey Cinemascope" is a book of Panoramic Photographs of Turkey by Nuri Bilge Ceylan between the years 2003 and 2009.

Üç Maymun (2008)

He won the best director award in the 2008 Cannes Film Festival for his fifth film Üç Maymun ("Three Monkeys"). At the end of his speech, Ceylan stated, "I dedicate this award to my beautiful and lonely country, which I love passionately". Ceylan has also been selected as a juror for the International Competition in 2009 Cannes Film Festival. He won the 2008 Asia Pacific Screen Award for Achievement in Directing. It was the first Turkish-language film which made the January short list in Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film category.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)

His sixth film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia premiered in Competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize or Grand Prix award there, and has also been selected as Turkey's official submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Style

Ceylan's films have often been described as high art. He deals with the estrangement of the individual, natural existentialism, monotonous real human lives, and fundamental details of life. He uses static shots and long takes, usually in natural ambience, as well as menacing silences along his "stream-of-consciousness aesthetics". He is known for filming his protagonist from behind, which, in his view, leaves the audiences to speculate on the brooding emotions of characters whose faces are obscured. Having started his career as a photographer, Ceylan makes films on an extremely low budget. His casts generally consist of amateur actors, most of which are his family members, including his mother and father. The characters in Ceylan's movies appear to be people from everyday life.

Romania: Sergiu Nicolaescu

Sergiu Florin Nicolaescu, 13 April 1930 – 3 January 2013, was a Romanian film director, actor and politician. He was best known for his historical films, such as Mihai Viteazul (1970, released in English both under the equivalent title Michael the Brave and also as The Last Crusade), Dacii (1966, Les Guerriers), Razboiul Independenţei (1977, War of Independence), as well as for his series of thrillers that take place in the interwar Kingdom of Romania, such as Un comisar acuză (1973, A Police Inspector Calls). Beautiful and talented Joanna Pacuła, starred in his film Ultima noapte de dragoste (The Last Night of Love) in 1979 before eventually emigrating to the U.S. where she went on to very successful career. He died following surgical complications of peritonitis which led to cardiac arrest.

Early life and education

Sergiu Nicolaescu was born in Târgu Jiu, but grew up in Timişoara, where his family moved when he was 5 years old. He graduated from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest as a mechanical engineer. After graduation he started to work as a camera operator. He was hard-working, well-organized, curious, intelligent and keen of learning. During these years he acquired many of the skills that have proved so useful when making his later movies.

Film director, writer and actor

Mr. Sergiu Nicolaescu was considered during his lifetime, as he is now, the most popular, loved and prolific Romanian movie director. His overwhelming film career spanning well over 50 years, leaves us today his legacy of some 60 movies, for the making of which he used to act at times, simultaneously, as film director, as an actor, and the writer/screenplayer. In his native Romania he is remembered as a superstar for his patriotism, the high praise he gained as a film director, and his charismatic and strong personality.

Nicolaescu's debut as a director was in 1962 with the short film Scoicile nu au vorbit niciodată (Shells Have Never Spoken). His first feature film was the 1967 French-Romanian co-production Dacii (Les Guerriers). The film was entered into the 5th Moscow International Film Festival. Nicolaescu continued his film-making career by both directing a large number of movies and starring in many of his own films. His 1971 film Mihai Viteazul was entered into the 7th Moscow International Film Festival. As an anecdotal detail, in Steven Spielbergs' ET (original version only), the young boy, Elliot, watches this movie on TV - Mihai Viteazul in the US version - the scene with the battle of Calugareni. His 1976 film The Doom was entered into the 10th Moscow International Film Festival.

Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave) ruled the Romanian-speaking principalities (Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania), a union he accomplished under his reign for a very brief period (1600–1601). It was initially planned that Sergiu Nicolaescu would produce the Mihai Viteazul with Hollywood superstars playing the lead characters. The communist authorities of the time drastically ruled for an all Romanian cast. The obstacle, eventually, was circumvented by means of casting, in the lead role of Mihai Viteazul the actor Amza Pellea who achieved a masterful rendition of the hero. Sergiu Nicolaescu was able, throughout his career, to select the best actors available for the characters they had to portray.

Most of Nicolaescu's films are built around figures and events in Romanian history, and although showing superior mastery, in the (imposed) realistic approach they somewhat follow the patterns of historical movies from the Communist governed countries. During the Communist period, some of these movies were seen as ground-breaking through either their way of publicly presenting Romanian history, or the masterful depiction of the heroical dimension of its history. For instance, the movie "Războiul independenţei" was the first picture made during the Communist-era in Romania to describe a Romanian king (namely Carol I) in a positive fashion. On the other hand, Mircea (1989, also known as Proud Heritage) was considered by some critics as being a less artistically fulfilled endeavour. Nevertheless, Mircea was officially blocked from distribution, until the Romanian Revolution of 1989 ("All I've done was to present a different state leader than Nicolae Ceauşescu. He understood and stopped the movie [from premiere]"). Yet, when Mircea was finally released to the public the film was very well appreciated.

Sergiu Nicolaescu produced impeccable renderings of the historical battles and costumes. For instance in Mihai Viteazul the Battle of Călugăreni and in Mircea the Crusade of Nicopole and the Battle of Rovine Sergiu Nicolaescu shows a brilliant command of his craft, masterfully directing a huge acting crew (actors, extras, etc.) towards the rendering of accurate details, by these means forging widely successful movies. For instance, when making Mihai Viteazul, Sergiu Nicolaescu successfully managed a 5000 members crew, actors and extras and, despite the obvious technical limitations of the communication means in the seventies (no mobile phones were available at that time, for instance), he imposed a strict discipline during of every cannon fire and every attack scenes, thus helping everything to fall in place under his unique order.

His movie Mihai Viteazul was considered the best of the Romanian historical movies and is one of the most appreciated world-wide of this kind.

While creating such historical movies he was supported by the Romanian's Minister of Defence with large numbers of extras and war equipment. He documented his historical movies meticulously, to this end seeking the advice of military consultants and distinguished historians of the Romanian Academy. Regardless these films have aesthetic qualities too, and are the expression of Mr. Sergiu Nicolaescu's vision as both a film director and a writer.

His 1985 film The Ring was entered into the 14th Moscow International Film Festival. For this movie Mr. Nicolaescu performed a very intensive box training with a former European box champion. The intensity of his training for this movie was similar to what the Romania's olimpic box team at that moment performed. At that time Mr. Nicolaescu was 50 years old and its box matches and the hits during this movie are real and against strong opponents.

His huge work capacity was widely admired by his colleagues and crew. Another merit of his filmmaking is considered to come from his taking huge - yet, still well-calculated - risks while filming. For instance, for the war scenes, he was using real dynamite and trotyle as well as real blood. In such situations there was always a high likeliness of the actors or the camera operators being afraid to fulfill their tasks. It was a big merit of Mr. Sergiu Nicolaescu that, for all difficult or very risky tasks, he was able to show in detail to any actor or camera operator exactly what they had to do before they did it. In such circumstances, during his 50 years career as film director and actor, Mr. Sergiu Nicolaescu experienced several accidents or illness: still he went on performing and finished his movie projects with courage and sometimes at great personal cost (e.g., during producing Mihai Viteazul).

After Mircea, Nicolaescu expands on historical themes, directing films that shed positive light on Ion Antonescu, Romania's Axis-aligned dictator in the World War II period (his Începutul adevărului, also known as Oglinda), or glorified the World War I heroine Ecaterina Teodoroiu (Triunghiul morţii, "Triangle of Death").

An accomplished battle scenes director, Mr. Nicolaescu, as legend has it, would have been able to film some 70–80 meters of useful shots in the same amount of time that the average director would need in order to produce 12–15 meters.

Although his last films were not as popular as his earlier productions, he continued to direct new films, such as Orient Express (2004) or Cincisprezece (2005), a love story set during the Romanian Revolution of 1989, "Supravietuitorul" (2008), "Carol I" (2009) and "Poker" (2010).

When asked to nominate three movies he made that he most liked Sergiu Nicolaescu chose Mihai Viteazul (also known as "Michael the Brave"), Osanda (also known as "The Doom") and Atunci i-am condamnat pe toti la moarte (also known as "Then I Sentenced Them All to Death").