Important European Director's working today (excluding French Director's)
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2.
Lars von Trier
Writer, Melancholia
Probably the most ambitious and visually distinctive filmmaker to emerge from Denmark since Carl Theodor Dreyer over 60 years earlier, Lars von Trier studied film at the Danish Film School and attracted international attention with his very first feature, The Element of Crime. A highly distinctive blend of film noir and German Expressionism with stylistic nods to Dreyer...
4.
Aleksandr Sokurov
Director, Russian Ark
He was born with a disability because of an anatomic defect of his leg, in 1951 in Podorvikha village in Siberian Russia. His father was a Red Army veteran of WW2. One of most important contemporary filmmakers, Sokurov worked extensively in television and later graduated from the prestigious film school...
5.
Ken Loach
Director, The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Unlike virtually all his contemporaries, Ken Loach has never succumbed to the siren call of Hollywood, and it's virtually impossible to imagine his particular brand of British socialist realism translating well to that context. After studying law at St. Peter's College, Oxford, he branched out into the theater...
6.
Nicolas Winding Refn
Director, Drive
Writer, director, and producer Nicolas Winding Refn was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1970, to Anders Refn, a film director and editor, and Vibeke Winding (née Tuxen), a cinematographer. At the age of eight, he moved to New York with his parents where he lived out his teenage years. New York quickly became his city and soon began to shape Nicolas's future...
9.
Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Producer, Two Days, One Night
After studying drama in the arts institute, Jean Pierre Dardenne and his brother Luc made some videos about the rough life in blue-collar small towns in the Wallonie. After their meeting with filmmaker Armad Gatti and cinematographer Ned Burgess, they decided to enter in the movie business. In 1978 they shot their first documentary...
16.
Werner Herzog
Self, Grizzly Man
Director. Writer. Producer. Has studied history, literature and theatre, but hasn't finished it. Founded his own production company in 1963. Has staged several operas, besides others in Bayreuth, Germany, and at the Milan Scala in Italy. Herzog has won numerous national and international awards for his films.
17.
Aki Kaurismäki
Writer, The Man Without a Past
Aki Kaurismäki did a wide variety of jobs including postman, dish-washer and film critic, before forming a production and distribution company, Villealfa (in homage to Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville) with his older brother Mika Kaurismäki, also a film-maker. Both Aki and Mika are prolific film-makers...
18.
Sergei Loznitsa
Director, My Joy
Sergei Loznitsa, Ukrainian film maker, was born on September, 5th 1964 in Baranovichi, USSR. He grew up in Kiev, and in 1987 graduated from the Kiev Polytechnic with a degree in Applied Mathematics. In 1987-1991 Sergei worked as a scientist at the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics, specializing in artificial intelligence research...
19.
Andrey Zvyagintsev
Director, Leviathan
Andrei Zvyagintsev is a Russian filmmaker and was born on Feb.6, 1964 in the northern city of Novisibirsk. He graduated from the Novosibirsk Actors School in 1984 and started to act on stage in provincial theatres. In the early 1990s he came to Moscow - the centre of the Russian film industry - with the ambition to star in movies...
22.
Yorgos Lanthimos
Director, Dogtooth
He is a well-known and one of the most talented directors (films, theatre) in Greece. He studied directing for Film and Television at the Stavrakos Film School in Athens. Through the 90's he directed a series of videos for Greek dance-theater companies. Since 1995 he has directed a large number of TV commercials...
23.
Fatih Akin
Director, Head-On
Fatih Akin was born in 1973 in Hamburg of Turkish parentage. He began studying Visual Communications at Hamburg's College of Fine Arts in 1994. His collaboration with Wueste Film also dates from this time. In 1995, he wrote and directed his first short feature, "Sensin - You're The One!" ("Sensin - Du Bist Es!")...
24.
Joachim Trier
Director, Oslo, August 31st
Joachim Trier is a Norwegian director and writer, born in Cophenhagen in Denmark in 1974 in a film family. Trier is son of Jacob Trier, which was the sound technician of Norway's most popular film ever "Pinchcliffe Grand Prix" Jacob Trier, and grandson of the important Norwegian film maker Erik Løchen...
27.
Nanni Moretti
Producer, The Son's Room
Nanni Moretti was born on the 19th of August, 1953. He lives in Rome, where since he was a kid he devotes himself to his two passions: cinema and water-polo. In 1970 he also played in water-polo first division in Italy, and in the junior National team. In those years he was also very committed in politcs...
28.
Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway trained as a painter and began working as a film editor for the Central Office of Information in 1965. Shortly afterwards he started to make his own films. He has produced a wealth of short and feature-length films, but also paintings, novels and other books. He has held several one-man shows and curated exhibitions at museums world-wide.
31.
Thomas Vinterberg
Self, The Hunt
With Last Round (Last Round), his graduation short from The National Film School of Denmark, he got an early taste of critical success. He received the Jury's and Producers' Awards at the International Student Film Fest in Munich and won the 1st Prize at the Tel Aviv Film Fest. Popular success followed with his breakthrough short fiction film...
33.
Pedro Almodóvar
Writer, Talk to Her
The most internationally acclaimed Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel was born in a small town (Calzada de Calatrava) in the impoverished Spanish region of La Mancha. He arrived in Madrid in 1968, and survived by selling used items in the flea-market called El Rastro. Almodóvar couldn't study filmmaking because he didn't have the money to afford it...
34.
Roman Polanski
Director, The Pianist
Roman Polanski is a Polish film director, producer, writer and actor. Having made films in Poland, Britain, France and the USA, he is considered one of the few truly international filmmakers. Roman Polanski was born in Paris in 1933. His parents returned to Poland from France in 1936, three years before World War II began...
35.
Álex de la Iglesia
Director, The Day of the Beast
A cult director, his work is reminiscent in tone and style to that of Guillermo del Toro. At one point, scheduled to shoot the Doom (based on the video game) movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but it fell through. His films have a kind of comic edge to them that is very similar to the early films of Peter Jackson...
36.
Christopher Nolan
Writer, The Dark Knight
Best known for his cerebral, often nonlinear story-telling, acclaimed writer-director Christopher Nolan was born on July 30, 1970 in London, England. Over the course of 15 years of film-making, Nolan has gone from low-budget independent films to working on some of the biggest blockbusters ever made...
37.
Wim Wenders
Director, Wings of Desire
Wim Wenders is an Oscar-nominated German filmmaker who was born Ernst Wilhelm Wenders on August 14, 1945 in Düsseldorf, which then was located in the British Occupation Zone of what became the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany, known colloquially as West Germany until reunification)...
38.
Emir Kusturica
Director, Underground
A Serbian film director. Born in 1954 in Sarajevo. Graduated in film directing at the prestigious Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague in 1978. During his studies, he was awarded several times for his short movies including Guernica (1978), which took first prize at the Student's Film Festival in Karlovy Vary...
45.
Julio Medem
Director, Sex and Lucia
Julio Medem was born in San Sebastian in northern Spain. As a teenager Medem made short movies with a super-8 camera owned by his father. Some of those films are "El ciego" (1976), "El jueves pasado" (1977) and "Fideos" (1979.) Wanting to know more about the darkest corners of the human mind, Medem studied psychiatry...
46.
Pavel Lungin
Writer, Taksi-Blyuz
Pavel Semyonovich Lungin (born July 12, 1949) is a Russian film director. He is sometimes credited as Pavel Loungine (as in the American release of Tycoon). Born 12 July 1949 in Moscow, Lungin is the son of a scriptwriter and linguist. He later attended Moscow State University from which he graduated in 1971...
48.
Oliver Hirschbiegel
Director, Downfall
Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1957. In his teens he left high school and worked as a cooker in a boat. Then he studied painting and graphism in the Academy of arts in Hamburg where he also started experimenting with video and photography. Those experimental movies attracted the attention of some producers of the German TV...