Verzió16

Jonas Mekas was born in 1922, in the farming village of Semeniškiai, Lithuania. He and his brother Adolfas were taken by the Nazis in 1944 to a forced labor camp in Elmshorn, Germany. After the war he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz. At the end of 1949, the UN Refugee Organization brought Jonas and Adolfas to New York City, where they settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Two months after his arrival in New York, he borrowed money to buy his first Bolex camera and began to record brief moments of his life. He soon became deeply involved in the American Avant-Garde film movement. In 1954, together with his brother, he started Film Culture magazine, which soon became the most important film publication in the US. In 1958 he started his legendary “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice. He founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative in 1962, and two years later, in 1964, the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives—one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde cinema. During this time he continued to write poetry and make films. He published more than 20 books of prose and poetry, which have been translated into over a dozen languages. His Lithuanian poetry is now considered classic Lithuanian literature, and his films can be found in leading museums around the world. He is largely credited for developing the diarist form of cinema. Mekas has also been active as an academic, teaching at the New School for Social Research, the International Center for Photography, Cooper Union, New York University and MIT.

Dmitri Vologdin was born in Russia in 1988. He graduated from the St. Petersburg State University of Film and Television with a degree in Film and TV Directing, and studied at the Cinema School of Krzysztof Zanussi in Warsaw.

Zuzana Piussi is a Slovak director, documentary filmmaker, producer and actress. She graduated from the Department of Directing, at the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. From 1992 until 2000, she worked with the Stoka Theater, and was subsequently involved in the theater project, SKRAT.

Fredrik Gertten is an award-winning Swedish director and journalist. In 1994, Gertten founded the production company, WG Film. He had previously worked as a foreign correspondent and columnist for radio, TV and press in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe. Today he combines filmmaking with a role as creative producer at WG Film. In October 2017, Gertten was named Honorary Doctor at Malmö University’s Faculty of Culture and Society for his work as a documentary filmmaker.