Before moving to Taiwan to train as an artist and filmmaker, Midi Z was born and raised in Myanmar. His graduation short Paloma Blanca (White Dove) was screened at numerous film festivals. In 2009, he was selected as the leading screenwriter and director at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Academy organized by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, who also produced Midi Z’s short film, The Hua-Xing Incident. In 2011, he made his first feature-film Return to Burma, which was selected for screening at the Busan International Film Festival and premiered in Europe at the prestigious Tiger Awards Competition section of the 2012 International Film Festival of Rotterdam.

The Palace on the Sea (2013) led to another Tiger Award nomination in 2014. Midi Z’s Ice Poison (2014) won Best Film in Edinburgh and represented Taiwan at the Foreign Language Oscars. Jade Minders (2015), his first documentary, screened at the Taipei International Film Festival and at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, followed by City of Jade, which was selected at the Berlinale Forum 2016. He was awarded Outstanding Taiwanese Filmmaker in 2016 during the Golden Horse Awards as an acknowledgement of his excellence in both feature and documentary filmmaking, as well as to recognize that his achievements broaden the horizons of both Taiwanese cinema and the Taiwanese film industry.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien is a film director, screenwriter, producer and actor, and one of the leading figures in world cinema. Frequently associated with Taiwan’s New Wave cinema, his many awards include a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1989 for A City of Sadness (1989), and the Best Director award at the Cannes in 2015 for The Assassin (2015).

A graduate of the National Taiwan Academy of the Arts, Hou earned international recognition for his dramas dealing with the upheavals of Taiwanese (and Chinese) history of the past century. His storytelling is elliptical and his style marked by extreme long takes with minimal camera movement but intricate choreography of actors and space within the frame. He uses extensive improvisation to arrive at the final shape of his scenes and the low-key, naturalistic acting of his performers. Hou’s films have been awarded top prizes from Venice, Cannes, Berlin, Hawaii and other international film festivals. To date, six of his films have been nominated for the Palme d’Or (best film award) at Cannes and he was voted “Director of the Decade” in the 1990s by international film critics.

Café Lumière (2003) is Hou’s homage to Yasujirō Ozu, recalling some of the Japanese director’s principle themes: the tension between parents and children, between tradition and modernity, addressed in Hou’s typically de-centered manner. Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), shot in France, is the story of a French family as seen through the eyes of a Chinese student. The film is the first part in a series sponsored by the Musée d’Orsay, starring Juliette Binoche. Besides his work as a fiction director, Hou has also worked on animation, sound, and made numerous appearances as an actor.

Mr. Nicolas Seydoux serves as the President of Gaumont, one of the major film companies in France and the longest operating. Nicolas Seydoux is also Vice President of the supervisory board of Arte France. He holds degrees in Law and Economics from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (IEP) in Paris.

Combining production, distribution, park facilities and one of the most prestigious film catalogs in the world, Gaumont is a major player in the film industry. Its history is inseparably intertwined with the Seventh Art, and the company’s 120-year history give it a unique status, particularly thanks to its accumulated experience and ability to constantly innovate. In recent years, Gaumont has intensified its activity by producing, financing and distributing films and series globally, in both French and English.

Gaumont has the second richest catalog of films in France, with over 900 titles, including works by prestigious directors such as Luc Besson, Mathieu Kassovitz, Francis Veber, Jean-Jacques Beineix and classics by Federico Fellini, Maurice Pialat or Jean-Luc Godard. In 2003, the Gaumont and Pathé companies—two of the biggest film studio names worldwide—created the Gaumont-Pathé Archives and combined their extraordinary holdings. With more than 14000 hours of black & white and color films gathered and consolidated in once place since 1896, along with contributions from across the world continuously added to the collection, the Gaumont-Pathé Archives now offer one of the largest motion picture catalogues.

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Régis Wargnier is a French film director, producer and screenwriter. He started his career as an assistant director in 1972 with La femme en Bleue directed by Michel Deville. Several collaborations for the cinema and television followed with different directors such Claude Chabrol, Francis Girod and Patrice Leconte. In 1986, he directed his first feature film La femme de ma vie, the story of a violonist whose life begins to spiral down with alcohol. The film was nominated five times at the César’s and won the prize for best debut feature.

In 1991, after directing Je suis le seigneur du chateau, Régis Wargnier released his most successful and critically acclaimed film to date, Indochine. Set in French Indochina during the politically turbulent 1930s, the film stars Catherine Deneuve as a plantation owner who becomes involved in a love triangle between a handsome French soldier and her beloved adopted Asian daughter. The film was a hit at the French Box Office and won Best Foreign Language Picture at the 65^th Academy Awards in 1993. Deneuve and Wargnier collaborated again in 1999 on his fifth feature film, East/West, a romantic drama paying tribute to the victims of Soviet Stalinism. In 2005, Wargnier directed Man to Man starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Joseph Fiennes, a controversial historical drama about anthropologists who hunt and capture pygmies for study back in Europe. In 2014, he returned to South-East Asia, this time Cambodia, with Le temps des aveux (The Gate). Set during the Khmer Rouge dictatorship, the film relates the real-life story of François Bizot, a French ethnologist working in the ruins of Angkor, who is imprisoned by the regime.

Catherine Deneuve is an iconic French actress of international repute. She gained recognition for her portrayal of aloof, mysterious beauties for a number of directors, including Luis Buñuel and Roman Polanski. A 14-time César nominee, she won awards for her performances in François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980) and Régis Wargnier’s Indochine (1992), for which she received an Academy Award. She also won the 1998 Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for Place Vendôme, and the 2002 Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival for 8 Women. Other films include Scene of the Crime (1986), My Favourite Season (1993) and Potiche (2010). Her English-language films include The April Fools (1969), Hustle (1975), The Hunger (1983) and Dancer in the Dark (2000).

Deneuve made her film debut in 1957 and first came to prominence in Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, before going on to star for Polanski in Repulsion (1965) and for Buñuel in Belle de Jour (1967) and Tristana (1970). A star of wide international recognition, Deneuve has worked with some of France’s top filmmakers such as André Téchiné, Agnès Varda, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Corneau, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Philippe de Broca, Philippe Garrel, and Benoît Jacquot. European collaborations include work with Manoel de Oliveira, Raoul Ruiz, Marco Ferreri, Dino Risi, Mario Monicelli, Lars von Trier, and across the Atlantic she has worked with Terence Young, Tony Scott, and Robert Aldrich. Deneuve’s career intersects with a new generation of filmmakers such as Gaël Morel, François Ozon, Marjane Satrapi, Christophe Honoré, Arnaud Desplechin, and Emmanuelle Bercot.

Socially engaged, Catherine Deneuve supports a variety of causes including women’s rights, abolishing the death penalty, and aiding war refugees. An ambassador for the preservation of film heritage at UNESCO, she has been a distinguished guest of Memory! International Heritage Film Festival since 2014. In October this year, she received the prestigious Lumière Award for lifetime achievement and contributions to the cinema industry.

Davy Chou is a French-Cambodian filmmaker and producer born in 1983. He is the grandson of Van Chann, a leading film producer in Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2009, he established a filmmaking workshop in Phnom Penh and founded a collective for young Cambodian filmmakers. Golden Slumbers (2011), a documentary about the birth of Cambodian cinema in the 60’s and its subsequent destruction by the Khmer Rouge was his first feature-length film and was very well received at the Berlinale Forum and the Busan International Film Festival.

In 2014 in Phnom Penh, Davy Chou directed the short film Cambodia 2099, selected for the 2014 Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight. This film garnered a number of awards including the Great Prize of Curtas Vila do Conde. Adapted from this short film, Chou has just completed his first feature film, Diamond Island, which premiered in the International Critics’ Week section of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and won the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD) Award.

Davy Chou recently founded the company Anti-Archive, which aims to produce independent Cambodian films. He was part of the 1^st edition of the Memory Festival in 2013 which took place in Cambodia, and his enthusiasm for the local film industry has been instrumental in generating interest among younger generations of Cambodian filmmakers and filmgoers.

Pascale Ferran attended the IDHEC (National Film School, Paris) in 1980 where she met Arnaud Desplechin and Pierre Trividic, with whom she would later regularly collaborate. She then alternated between assistant director and scriptwriter, and also herself directed a number of short films including the renowned Le Baiser (The Kiss) in 1990. Petits arrangements avec les morts (Coming to Terms with the Dead) obtained the Caméra d’Or for best first feature at Cannes Film Festival in 1994. L’Age des possibles followed, written for the apprentice actors at the Ecole du Théâtre National de Strasbourg (France), which won the Fipresci Award at Venice Film Festival.

In 1999, she directed the dubbing of the French version of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. In 2007, her adaptation of Lady Chatterley, based on D.H. Lawrence’s novel, garnered numerous awards including the Louis Delluc Prize and five Césars (including Best film). This same year, Ferran became president of the Un Certain Regard’s jury at Cannes. Socially engaged, Ferran doesn’t hesitate make her views known, in particular in a famous speech at the 2007 César Ceremony, during which she argued that the French film industry was losing its capacity to support films de milieu, midrange productions, that were historically the domain of commercial auteurs such as Jean Renoir, François Truffaut and Alain Resnais among others.

Her latest film, Bird People, was presented in Cannes in 2014 in the Un Certain Regard section. It was also screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2015, Pascale Ferran co-created and launched LaCinetek, a VOD platform dedicated to heritage films. In 2016, she co-wrote the screenplay The Red Turtle, an film directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit, which premiered at the Cannes film festival and competed in the Un Certain Regard section

Before directing feature films, Michel Hazanavicius began working in television, at Canal+, where he directed commercials until his first TV film, La Classe américaine (1993). In 1997, Hazanavicius directed his first short film, Echec au capital, followed by his first theatrically released feature, Mes amis. In 2006, his career reached a milestone with his hugely popular second feature, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, a spy parody that garnered success at the French box office. The sequel, OSS 117: Lost in Rio, followed in 2009 to an equally enthusiastic reception.

Michel Hazanavicius came to the attention of international audiences with The Artist, a black and white film without dialogue which takes place in Hollywood on the verge of the transition to sound. First screened at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, The Artist was eventually released to international acclaim. The film earned nominations for three Academy Awards, winning Best Director at the 84th Academy Awards in 2012 and the first French film to ever win Best Picture. In 2014, Hazanavicius directed The Search, a story of a westerner who helps a lost child during the Chechen War. Michel Hazanavicius is currently shooting a Paris-set comedy chronicling the tumultuous romance between iconic French-Russian actress (and princess) Anne Wiazemsky and director Jean-Luc Godard, set against the backdrop of May 1968 riots.

So far, Myanmar filmmaker Wyne has scripted and directed twelve features for the local market, including Adam, Eve & Dasa, Let Pan, Satan’s Dancer, At Your Command and New Rainbow, which were some of the top grossing  films at the Myanmar box office at the time of their release.

In 2011, Wyne became known internationally for his short film Ban That Scene, which premiered at the Freedom Film Fest in Singapore and won the Audience Award. In 2013, he won the Myanmar Motion Picture Organization award for Best Director with Satan’s Dancer. In 2014, he directed his first mini-series for television entitled Anytime, Anywhere with 18 episodes that commemorate the golden jubilee of the Myanmar Police Force, which enjoyed a popular reception with viewers. Most recently, he has been working on a second television series project 191.

Phway Phway is a Myanmar actress and model and recipient of two Myanmar Academy Awards: in 2012 for Let Pan and three years later for I am Rose Darling. Both film were directed by ‘Academy’ Wyne. Phway Phway graduated from the University of Foreign Languages, Yangon, with a Bachelor of Arts in Korean Studies in 2008, at which time she was already pursuing a modelling career, which opened the door to appearances in music videos, TV commercials, and an impressive number of direct-to-video films.