Kustendorf Film and Music Festival

He started to work as a screenwriter at a very early age and then made his directorial debut with La Bella Vita, premiered at Venice in 1994, straightway displaying an unmistakable style, a mix of melancholy, irony and social drama. It can be said that Virzì has created, with his fourteen films peopled by starry-eyed antiheroes and vulnerable outsiders eager for redemption – at  time characterized by the breezy energy of the comedy, at others with the darker tints of the film noir – a  kaleidoscopic, affectionate and at the same time biting mosaic of Italian society over the last thirty years. In some of his works, such as Hardboiled Egg, Grand Jury Special Prize at the 54th Venice Film Festival and The First Beautiful Thing, his stories are immersed in the atmosphere of the working class area of Livorno where he was born. But he has also ventured onto the road, exploring the East Coast of the USA in The Leisure Seeker, a film shown in competition at the 74th Venice Film Festival and starring Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren, who was nominated at the Golden Globes for the Best Performance by an Actress for this film. His most recent movie, Magical Nights is a loving and irreverent evocation of the mythology of great Italian cinema, as Virzì encountered it when he first arrived in Rome as a young man. He has won numerous prizes, including seven David di Donatello and eight Nastri D’Argento awards. He has twice been on the shortlist of five nominations for Best European Director at the EFA and has twice represented Italy at Oscars. He amuses himself drawing funny portraits of the people he meets and has three children: Ottavia, Jacopo and Anna.

Tonino Benacquista is a novelist (Saga, Someone else, The Thursday night men). He also wr­ites graphic novels and films scripts (The beat that my heart skipped and Read my lips, by Jacques Audiard). Some of his books have been adapted for the screen, such as Malavita, by Luc Besson, with Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Tommy Lee Jones. He lives in Paris.

Vladislav Tkachiev was born on November 9, 1973 in Moscow. He started playing chess in Kazakhstan in the spring of 1984. By 1992 he had won every single chess award in the newly independent Republic of Kazakhstan. In 1996 Tkachiev moves back to Moscow and soon after that to Cannes, France, since he had started playing for the local Chess Club ACE. In 2006 he was naturalized as a Frenchman, to then become Champion of France in 2006 and 2009. Since then Tkachiev has played many times for the French national team. In the 2012 Olympiad in Istanbul he won the Gold Medal on 5-th board. Other achievements include being quarter-finalist of the World’s Championship in New Dehli (2000) as well European Champion in 2007 (Classical Chess and Blitz). Tkachiev retired from competitive chess in 2016 and from that time on, has been coaching some of the best female and male chess players.

In 2004 he organized the 1st World Chess Beauty Contest on-line. From 2012 to 2013 he was chief-editor of one of the most popular chess websites: whychess.org

He is a great cinephile, most surely because he lives in Cannes, but he suspects that it’s probably the other way around.

Vilko Filač Award Jury

Michel Amathieu, director of photography, was born in 1955 in Crevecœur-en-Auge, France. He studied mathematics, obtaining a master’s degree in this field and practiced photography as a hobby. He taught mathematics in high school for two years before joining the evening classes at Louis Lumière film school and devoting himself to the art of cinematography. He worked on a number of short and feature films, before Dobermann (1996), directed by Jan Kounen, attracted the attention of public to his work. This was followed by a noted thriller Cousin (1997) directed by Alain Corneau, and I love L.A. (1998) by Mika Kaurismäki, in a slightly different vein. Michel Amathieu was then called to replace Thierry Arbogast at the end of Black Cat, White Cat (1998) shooting because of the delays: Thierry had engagements elsewhere. Since then, Michel followed Emir Kusturica on the No Smoking Orchestra tour, and took part in Super 8 Stories (2001). He returned to Serbia to work on Life is a Miracle (2003). More recently, Michel has worked as a director of photography on Volker Schlöndorff’s Diplomacy (2014) and Agnieska Holland’s Rosemary’s baby (2014). Along with his work on films, Michael Amathieu was a cinematographer on a number of commercials and TV series.