Prix VIsionica

PRIX VISIONICA - Jury

Agnieszka Holland

Poland / France

Agnieszka Holland graduated from the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague in 1971. After returning to Poland, she collaborated with Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, and in the mid '70s she began making her own films. Her debut film – Provincial Actors – was awarded the FIPRESCI prize at the Cannes Film Festival.  After directing Fever and A Lonely Woman Holland left Poland; since 1981 she has been working in the West, initially in Germany and France and later in the USA. She has also directed a number of documentaries and commercials.

A multiple award winner at many international film festivals, Holland has twice been nominated for an Oscar: in the Best Foreign Language Film category for Angry Harvest in 1985, and in the Best Adapted Screenplay category for Europe, Europe  in 1991. In 2001 she was honoured with the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta for her contribution to Polish culture and received a Polish Academy Special Award for her artistic achievements in Poland and abroad. She was also given an award for her creative achievements at the 1997 Las Vegas Film Festival.

Holland's films feature the most prominent Polish and international actors, and she has  collaborated with famous Polish composers including Tomasz Stańko, Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz, Zbigniew Preisner and Jan A.P. Kaczmarek.  She wrote screenplays for several films by Andrzej Wajda (such as Rough Treatment, 1978, Danton, 1982, A Love in Germany, 1982 and Korczak, 1990) and worked as a script consultant for the trilogy Three Colours by Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Agnieszka Holland currently lives in Bretagne, France.

Slawomir Grünberg

USA / Poland

 

Sławomir Grünberg is a producer of documentaries, director, cinematographer and film editor. A graduate of the cinematography department of the National Film, Television and Theatre School in Łódź, since 1981 he has been living and working in USA.  In 1987 he founded Log-In Productions, which collaborates with television providers around the world, which collaborates with television providers around the world, including the American public station PBS, the Lifetime Cable Network, NHK in Japan and NOS in the Netherlands.

Grünberg won an Emmy Award for his film School Prayer: A Community at War and has twice been nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Cinematography for Legacy and Sister Rose’s Passion. His film Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet won the Grand Prix at the 1996 International Nature & Environmental Film Festival in Grenoble. In 1997 the film Shtetl, for which Grünberg was cinematographer and second producer, received a DuPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for Excellence in Radio/Television Journalism, as well as the Grand Prix at the Cinema du Reel Film Festival in Paris. In 1998, From Chechnya to Chernobyl was awarded the Grand Prix at the International Environmental Film Festival in Prague and the prestigious Golden CINE Award in the USA.

 

To date Grünberg has directed, shot and produced over 50 television documentaries. His recent productions and collaborations include Exiles (2005), Saved by Deportation: An Unknown Odyssey of Polish Jews (2006), Burning Man (2006) and Portraits of Emotion: The Story of an Autistic Savant (2007).

 

Olaf Grunert

ARTE, Germany

Olaf Grunert is an experienced producer and commissioning editor for both ZDF and ARTE.  After completing his university studies in Germany, Iceland, Denmark and Finland, Grunert  began work for the German public TV station ZDF, first as a freelancer in the entertainment department and later as a commissioning editor in the department of classical music and theatre. In 1990 he was made the head of ZDF's central editing staff for culture; a year later he also took on the position of chief commissioning editor for ARTE's documentary section.

At that same time Grunert developed the idea for the thematic evening series Theme Nights, which to this day remains a highly successful programme.  In 1998, Grunert became the head. of ZDF's new unit for the programming and production of documentaries for Theme Nights.

Aleksander Własow

Telekanal Kultura, Russia

Aleksander Własow is a scriptwriter, producer and creator of documentaries. He graduated from the Faculty of Economics of Moscow University and received his PhD from the Economics Institute at the USSR Academy of Sciences. During his career he has worked at the USSR Academy of Sciences, as a TASS correspondent,  as editor-in-chief of Risk Film Studio and as a publicist.

Własow's filmography includes The Revolution Continues (1987, scriptwriter); the Channel 4 documentary The Red Empire  (1992, scriptwriter), Mr Zimov's Summer (1993, director) and the BBC documentary A Hard Choice, (1995, director).  

Since 1997 Własow has been director of the GTRK Kultura Documentary Film Studio, which under his management has twice been honoured with TEFI awards – for the film series Islands  and the programme Documentary Camera – as well as a Laurel Branch at the Moscow Documentary Festival for a non-feature film.

Henk van der Meulen

NPS / IMZ, Netherlands

Henk van der Meulen is a musician and composer of numerous theatre and television compositions and ballets.  A pupil of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, he is also a lecturer, a  producer and a personal music advisor of Queen Beatrix.

Since 1995 van der Meulen has been the head of the Department of Music and Dance of the Dutch broadcasting company NPS.  He served as chairperson of the Music and Dance Experts Group for the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) from 1996 to 2000, and as its vice-chairperson from 2000 to 2006.

An initiator and executive producer of the World Music Screen Festival in Maastricht, van der Meulen has served as an advisor and jury member at numerous music and television festivals including the Holland Festival and Golden Prague, and as a member of international awards committees such as Prix Italia and the Erasmus Award. Since 2000 he has been president of the International Music + Media Centre in Vienna, an association for  public broadcasters, television producers, composers and performers of music.  

Jerzy Kapuściński

TVP Film, Poland

Jerzy Kapuściński graduated from the Polish Literature Department of Warsaw University with a specialization in film. A prominent television expert, editor and a producer of numerous documentaries and short forms, he is especially involved in the promotion of feature film debuts.  Among his productions are such films as I'm Looking at You, Mary  by Łukasz Barczyk and Polish Scrounger by Łukasz Wylężałek; he also established the Generation 2000 series aimed at presenting the works of young Polish filmmakers on TVP.

Since 1991 Kapuściński has been working for TVP as a commissioning editor and producer, and as  head of TVP2's Art, Culture and Entertainment Department.  Since February 2005 he has also been deputy manager for programming at TVP Kultura; and he is currently coordinating the launch of a new thematic channel: TVP Film.