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Jessica Hausner

Biography

Jessica Hausner (born 6 October 1972; Vienna) is an Austrian filmmaker. She received international attention in 2001 when her film Lovely Rita, a portrait of a young girl who feels confined by family constraints, was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Three years later she returned to Cannes with her film Hotel. Her 2014 film Amour Fou was selected to compete in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. Jessica Hausner is the daughter of Viennese painter Rudolf Hausner, sister of costume designer Tanja Hausner and half sister of set designer and painter Xenia Hausner. She studied at Filmacademy Vienna. With fellow directors Barbara Albert and Antonin Svoboda and director of photography Martin Gschlacht, she founded the Viennese film production company coop99 in 1999. She was appointed a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2017.
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Zo Tipp

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Zo (pronouns: they, them, theirs) is a San Francisco born, Lenapehoking/NYC based, Jewish Japanese American queer neurodivergent performer. They were a recurring guest star on American Horror Story Season 12: Delicate (FX, Hulu), have appeared on Only Murders in the Building (Hulu, Disney+), Dickinson (Apple TV), and have starred in several independent films, including selections for screenings at Newfest and Outfest. In theater, they've worked on productions at INTAR, Playwright’s Horizons, Pan Asian Rep at Theatre Row, Cherry Lane Theatre, Westchester Broadway Theatre, Access Theatre, Frigid Fest, The American Museum of Natural History, and TheaterWorksUSA, and in workshops at Roundabout Theatre, NYTW, Breaking the Binary, The Playwright’s Realm, New Dramatists, CSC/Oregon Shakes Play On! festival, Rattlestick Theater, Red Bull Theatre, WP Theatre, The Movement Theatre, The Acting Company, The Lark, Faultline Theater, Huntington Theater Company, Playbill.com, and The Actors Fund. Zo has narrated articles for The New Yorker and New York Magazine on Apple News, and has been featured in dramatic podcasts, including Play On!/OSF’s collaboration with Next Chapter Podcasts. Zo has sung at Birdland Theater, in Times Square, at Spectrum NYC, and at the Joventuts Musicals Festival in Barcelona. They have performed operatic roles with Opera on Tap, Dell’Arte Opera, Underworld Productions Opera, Garden State Opera, and Manhattan Opera Studio. Zo has been described as “the biggest badass onstage,” “a gracefully athletic faerie,” and “endearingly twitchy,” portraying characters from Hamlet to Puck, from a frustrated tech genius to a sword-fighting kitsune spirit. Zo studied Meisner for 3 years with Paul Perez, scene study with Larry Singer for about a decade, and Lucid Body with Fay Simpson. With Gwendolyn Schwinke, Zo delved into Feldenkrais for actors, Linklater, and Viewpoints. Zo has taken intensives in Kinetic Awareness with Francis Becker, Peking Opera movement with Liu Mianzong and Zhang Yanhong, about 100 hours of yoga teacher training, has studied fundamentals of ballet, Cunningham, and tap dance, and has learned a variety of stage combat techniques on the job. Zo completed Improv 101, 201, and 301 at the Upright Citizens Brigade NYC Training Center taught by James III and Molly Thomas. Zo earned a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance with Highest Honors from SUNY Binghamton, completed coursework in the Master of Music programs at SUNY Binghamton and Hunter College, and studied classical singing with the legendary Benita Valente, as well as Carol Yahr, Mary Burgess, and Peyton Hibbitt. Zo currently studies with Sarah K Brown, and has coached contemporary and musical theater singing styles with Lilli Wosk. Zo also plays guitar, piano, ukulele, and a little drum and violin. Zo is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner. Zo completed the New York Feldenkrais Method Professional Training Program, directed by David Zemach-Bersin, concurrent with intensive Feldenkrais-based vocal and somatic studies with Maxine Davis. They are a proud member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors Equity.
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H. Lee Waters

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Born August 23, 1902 in Caroleen, North Carolina, Herbert Lee Waters spent the majority of his life in Lexington, North Carolina. As a teenager Waters worked alongside his family at the Erlanger textile mill, and developed a passion for photography, helping to run the projector at the local theatre and eventually apprenticing in the Hitchcock Studio at 118 ½ Main Street in downtown Lexington. In 1926, Waters bought the studio, and soon after married Mabel Elizabeth Gerald, who would become his partner in running all aspects of the H. Lee Waters Studio. In addition to commercial studio photography Waters also sought freelance work, and was hired to photograph the construction of High Rock Dam in 1927. During the Depression, when many couldn’t spare hard-won wages for a portrait but did allow themselves the luxury of going to the movies, Waters supplemented the family’s income by traveling across North Carolina and parts of Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina, to film the people of the region’s communities. Between 1936 and 1942, Waters collaborated with local movie theaters to screen his films, which he called Movies of Local People and billed with the phrase “See yourself in the movies!” As a filmmaker, Waters produced 252 films across 118 communities. In addition to selling tickets to the many people who appeared in his films, he also sold advertising space in his movies to local businesses. With the birth of the Waters’ third child and the entrance of the United States into World War II, Waters returned to Lexington and continued operating his photographic studio until his death in 1997. The Library of Congress listed Waters’ Kannapolis film on the National Film Registry in 2004.
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Julio Solórzano Foppa

Biography

Julio Solórzano Foppa is a producer, writer and director from Mexico City. His professional life has been centered mostly around organizing and producing international cultural and artistic events. He has organized several Performing Arts Festivals, among them "The International Festival of the Caribbean Culture” and “Human Rights for the Artistic and Cultural Perspective.” He has been the producer and artistic director of several records, the writer and director of many radio programs, and the producer of two feature films, “Cabeza de Vaca” and “Cronos.” In 2000, he was the first Latin American appointed as a board member of the International Society for the Performing Arts. His mother, Alaíde Foppa, a feminist, poet, art critic and university professor, was kidnapped and disappeared on December 19, 1980, by the Guatemalan Army.
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Edoardo Ballerini

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Edoardo Ballerini (born March 20, 1970) is an American actor, narrator, writer, and film director. On-screen he is best known for his work as junkie Corky Caporale in The Sopranos and the hotheaded chef in the indie film Dinner Rush (2001). Ballerini is a two-time winner of the Audio Publishers Association's Best Male Narrator Audie Award (2013, Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter; 2019 Watchers by Dean Koontz) and the co-author of the Audible Original "The Angel of Rome" (2021), with Jess Walter. His directorial debut, Good Night Valentino, premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.
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Seicho Matsumoto

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Seichō Matsumoto (松本 清張 Matsumoto Seichō, December 21, 1909 – August 4, 1992) was a Japanese writer. Seichō's works created a new tradition of Japanese crime fiction. Dispensing with formulaic plot devices such as puzzles, Seichō incorporated elements of human psychology and ordinary life. In particular, his works often reflect a wider social context and postwar nihilism that expanded the scope and further darkened the atmosphere of the genre. His exposé of corruption among police officials as well as criminals was a new addition to the field. The subject of investigation was not just the crime but also the society in which the crime was committed. From Wikipedia.
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Krystal Jung

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Jung Soo Jung (Hangul: 정수정; born October 24, 1994) but better known as Krystal, is an American-born South Korean idol singer and actress. Discovered by SM Entertainment in 2000, she began filming for commercials and music videos by 2002. She is currently a member of the Korean quintet girl group f(x), formed by SM Entertainment in 2009. Krystal was born in San Francisco, California, where her family from South Korea settled in the 1980s. During a family trip to South Korea in early 2000 when Krystal was five, she was spotted by talent agency SM Entertainment, which earned her a cameo appearance in Shinhwa's "Wedding March" music video. The agency saw potential in Krystal and offered her singing and dancing lessons, opting to professionally train her in a singing career. However, the offer was turned down by her parents, reasoning that Krystal was too young. Instead, her parents allowed her older sister Jessica Jung to join the agency, who debuted as a member of the girl group Girls' Generation in August 2007. In 2002, Krystal began appearing in television commercials. She first appeared in a Lotte commercial with Korean actress Han Ga In. In 2006, her parents allowed her to join SM Entertainment, and the agency enrolled her in dance classes, including hip hop and jazz. According to an exclusive media outlet report on August 18, Krystal has decided to part ways with her agency, SM Entertainment.
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Maged El Kedwany

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Maged El Kedwany is an Egyptian film and television actor. In 1967, he was born in Shubra in Cairo, but lived in Kuwait up until age 18. He began his professional career while studying design at the Faculty of Fine Arts. He began acting in a number of amateur plays, which led to him being cast in various TV shows like "Qanfad" (Hedgehog) and "Nahnu al Nazre el-Shook." He's worked on dozens of films, among them are some of the most well-known films of the 1990s, like "Afareet el-Asphalt" (Asphalt Ghosts) in 1996 and "Saidi fe Gaea al-Amrikeya" (Saidi at the American University in Cairo) in 1998. His other films include "Harameya Ki-Gi-To" (Ki-Gi-To Thieves), "Harameya fe Thailand" (Thieves in Thailand), "Al-Ragel al-Abyad al-Motawast" (Average White Guy), and "Khaly min Kolesterol" (Cholesterol-Free). In 2012, he appeared in two high-profile movies, "Hafla Montasif al-Leil" (Midnight Party) and "Saaa we Nos" (Hour and a Half). studied in the (design) division of the faculty of fine arts. Thereafter he enrolled in the Institute of Theatrical Arts and graduated in 1995. Amongst the theatrical productions that he has performed in are “Pallo” and “Diwan Al Baqar”. Maged has also made several television appearances, which include roles in “Nahnu la Nazra Al Shawk”, “Al Farar Men Al Hob”, “Al Shara’a Al Jadeed”, “Zayzenia” and “Arabesque”.
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Sepideh Farsi

Biography

Sepideh Farsi (Persian: سپیده فارسی) is an Iranian filmmaker, born in 1965 in Tehran. Born in 1965 in Tehran, to a father working in civil engineering and an unemployed mother, Sepideh Farsi participated in numerous demonstrations and photographed them. She was arrested at the age of 16 for hiding a political dissident and imprisoned for eight months in Machad. Upon her release, she was banned from university and went into exile in France. She arrived in Paris in 1984 and studied mathematics. At 19, she was ultimately more drawn to the visual arts. She began creating photographs before making her first short films. One of her first films was a documentary about the Iranian diaspora, The World Is My Home. She continued her work in 2000 with a portrait of an Indian filmmaker, simply titled Homi D. Sethna, Film-maker, which received the FIPRESCI Prize at the Bombay Film Festival. In 2001, she directed Men of Fire, a work of fiction devoted to the Tehran firefighters. In 2003, she directed a work of fiction on the theme of identity, Maryam's Journey, a film somewhere between fiction and reportage that follows the journey of a young Iranian woman living in Paris who returns to search for her father in the streets of Tehran. With a yellowed photo in hand, she interviews passersby and shopkeepers. In 2007, she shot a new documentary, Harat. In the spring of 2008, once again wandering around Tehran, she made a film with a cell phone (due to government restrictions on filming). This film depicts various aspects of life in the Iranian capital: taxi drivers, women in a hair salon, young men talking about drugs, an Iranian rapper, and more. In 2009, she was a member of the jury for Best First Film at the Locarno International Film Festival. In 2014, she shot a new fiction film in Greece with Iranian actors; Red Rose broke the taboos of Iranian cinema by including sex scenes and evoking the relationships between the young, protesting generation and the generation that had challenged the Shah's regime. In 2025, Sepideh Farsi released the documentary "Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk," which recounts her year of correspondence with Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, who was assassinated during an Israeli army raid on April 16, 2025, while she was scheduled to attend the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025.
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Kim Tae-ri

Biography

Kim Tae-ri (김태리) is a South Korean actress. Kim started her career appearing in theater productions and modelling in TV adverts. She made her feature film debut in Park Chan-wook's film The Handmaiden (2016) where she was chosen from among 1,500 candidates who auditioned for the role. Park's first impression of Kim reminded him strongly of his first meeting with actress Kang Hye-jung, who had her career breakthrough in Park's film Oldboy (2003). Kim also starred in 1987: When the Day Comes (2017) and Little Forest (2018).
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