About the Filmmakers of the Festival 2021

Uranium Film Festival New York with Filmmaker Adam Horowitz

Filmmakers of the International Uranium Film Festival Rio de Janeiro 2021

From May 20 to 30, 2021, online and free with the support of the Modern Art Museum Rio de Janeiro, Cinematheque
 
 
Adam Jonas Horowitz was born in Los Angeles, CA, and received dual Bachelor of Arts degrees, in Humanities and Journalism, cum laude, from the University of California, Berkeley. His work as a documentary filmmaker and conceptual artist has centered on issues surrounding human rights, free speech, and the environment. Adam’s first feature documentary film, released in 1990, told the story of a heroic protest and occupation by a Pacific Island chieftain at a top-secret U.S. missile test base in the Marshall Islands. The filmmaker returned to those islands decades later to produce his award-winning documentary “Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1.” His monumental public art installation titled “Stonefridge: a Fridgehenge,” was  built in Santa Fe, New Mexico as a satiric, 'anti-monument' to consumer society, hubris, and wholesale environmental destruction.  'Fridgehenge' became a lightning rod of public controversy, and also received international acclaim and was featured in dozens of national and international magazines, newspapers and television shows.

Alain Vézina 

Alain Vézina was born in 1970 in Quebec. Very young, he was already passionate about fantasy films. He started studying film in college in 1987 and continued his studies at Concordia University and Université de Montréal. He was a film critic for Séquences magazine for nearly ten years. In 1999, he wrote and directed his first film, a successful feature documentary on the sinking of the Empress of Ireland. In the wake of that film’s success Vézina wrote and directed The Sinking of the Princess Sophia in 2002. He also directed The Final Mission: The Story of the U-190 in 2006 and Dans le sillage du Titanic: l’histoire du CGS Montmagny in 2011. In addition to his work as a documentary filmmaker, Vézina published essays on literature and has been a professor of journalism and film studies at Collège de St-Jérôme since 1999.

Alessandro Tesei  

Alessandro Tesei is Italian reporter, filmmaker and photographer. He graduated in visual and multimedia arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata with a thesis on the social importance of documentary filmmaking. Inspired by directors such as Herzog, Pasolini, Ciprì and Maresco, Alessandro decided to take the path of the investigative documentary. Since 2011 his work is focused on enviromental tragedies, radioactive pollution and nuclear accidents. He has been filming and researching in Fukushima, Mayak, Karabash, Chernobyl, Magnitogorsk and Chelyabinsk. In addition, Alessandro founded in 2012 “Ascosi Lasciti”, to date one of the largest “urbex” communities (exploration of abandoned places) in Europe. 

Ayumi Nakagawa 

Ayumi Nakagawa has been directing documentaries for 18 years and focuses on the marginalized minorities’ life. For eg, Travelling Beekeepers, Romani band in Balkan Peninsula, Child defector from North Korea, the coming out of 1000 LGBTQ people in Japan. The film about Romani Band was theatrically released in 2007 and the film about her gay brother was screened at film festivals in Europe, Africa and Japan from 2010 to 2013. The Latest one on LGBTQ people got the Best Asian project award of Sunny Side of Docs, France. Also screened at the various film festivals in 7 counties. 

After the nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima, she focuses on the minorities inside of her own country. As Japanese government has been hiding important detas, informations of people’s health and lives, and the ostensible restorations is now underway. The minorities have been driven into the harsh life and TV cannot inform the realities in relations to sponsors and governments. 

Brittany Prater  

Brittany Prater is a New York-based filmmaker and artist. She received her MFA from Temple University her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute. Brittany grew up in Ames In Iowa and set her first two documentary features in her hometown. Her 2017 film Uranium Derby — which has screened around the world — offered an insightful and disturbing look at Ames’ significant role in the Manhattan Project, and the fallout from the secretive disposal of massive quantities of uranium in the city. In addition to her film work, she’s a visual artist whose tapestry depicting — in extraordinary detail — the history of atomic science was recently displayed at Sotheby’s. 

Claus Biegert  

Claus Biegert, born in 1947 in Bavaria, is a radio journalist, book author and documentary filmmaker. The situation of indigenous peoples in the nuclear age is the focus of his work in radio features, TV films and books. He does not see himself as a typical journalist. “If reporting is not enough for me, then I turn into an activist.” For many years he had his own radio program at the Bavarian Public Radio. In 1979/80 he collaborated with visual artist Rainer Wittenborn and the Cree in the multi-media exhibition “James Bay Project – A River Drowned by Water”, which traveled under the patronage of the Goethe Institute the world for almost ten years. Among his films are “The Secret and the Sacred – Two Worlds at Los Alamos”, “Winona LaDuke – Thunderbird Woman”, “Leonard Peltier: I am the Indian Voice” and “Exit 16 – Onondaga Nation Territory”. Biegert is also the initiator of the legendary World Uranium Hearing in  1992 in Salzburg. A week-long conference at which, for the first time in history, the indigenous peoples affected by the nuclear industry and uranium mining had their say. In 1998 he founded the Nuclear-Free Future Award which honours those who have dedicated themselves to a future free of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.

Daniel Abib 

Graduated in the Cinema and Audiovisual Course at the Federal University Fluminense (UFF), Daniel Abib is specialized in the area of editing and post-production with performance in several short films. "Small Object A" was his university project. 

 

 

Futoshi Sato 

Futoshi Sato was born in japan on March 19,1968, in Sendai. His birthplace Sendai was the nearest major city to the earthquake that hit japan 2011 and led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Sato is filmmaker, screenwriter and storyteller. Since 2005 he directed 9 movies and drama series. In 2015, he accepted the challenge of directhing the fiction movie “The Seal Of The Sun” based on the events of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima.

 

Greg Mitchell 

Greg Mitchell, born in 1947, is the author of a dozen books and co-producer of the acclaimed recent documentary, Following the Ninth, which has now been screened at over 200 venues. He has served as chief adviser to several documentaries, including Original Child Bomb, screened at Cannes and winner of the top prize at API/Silverdocs, and the Emmy Award-winning The Great Depression. His books include the 2016 bestseller „The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall“ and in 2020 „The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood–and America–Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.“ His previous books on the atomic bombings were „Hiroshima in America“ (with Robert Jay Lifton) and „Atomic Cover-up“. His earlier book „The Campaign of the Century“ won the Goldsmith Book prize and in 2019 was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of five greatest books ever written about an American campaign. 

José Herrera Plaza 

José Herrera Plaza, born in 1955 in Almería, has dedicated his entire life to the image in his different manifestations. He works with Canal Sur TV in different professional categories. Since 1986, as writer and filmmaker, he is dedicated to remember and to follow up the nuclear bombs accident of Palomares that happend in his native region in 1966. He directed the documentary „Operación Flecha Rota - Accidente Nuclear en Palormares“ in 2007 and is co-author of the book of the same name and co-organizer of exhibitions at the Andalusian Center of Photography about the accident.

Katherine Aigner 

Katherine Aigner is a historian, filmmaker and ethnologist. Katherine Aigner has spent 15 years working with indigenous peoples across Australia and abroad.

Her experience in ethnographic films began when she was 21 years old and lived with the Dyak indigenous people in central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Katherine also lived and worked in Rome and Berlin. She was assistant curator at the National Museum of Australia and collaborated with the Vatican Ethnological Museum, studying its indigenous collections.

KeIko Courdy  

Keiko Courdy is a French filmmaker and media performance director, who has spent much of her life in Japan and speaks fluent Japanese. She has a Doctorate from the University of Tokyo and has taught media-performance at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. When the earthquake struck in March 2011, she was working in France for the Japanese media, and on HALO Station, an autonomous in energy interactive art installation. Profoundly moved by the situation in Japan, she took her camera and left immediately for the northern coast affected by the tsunami and nuclear accident. She didn’t know then, that she was starting launching a 10 years project.

Since 2011, she has been filming every year in the region of Fukushima, making two feature films „Beyond the Cloud“, „The Invisible Island“, and a short film called „A Safe Place“.  

Kim Mavromatis  

Kim Mavromatis is a Multi-Award Winning AR Mixed Media Content Creator, Producer, Filmmaker, Cinematographer and drone operator from Australia with more than 45 years experience in TV and Film Production. He has received 64 global, international, national and state film awards and 16 international and national awards for documentary. Together with Aboriginal filmmaker Quenten Agius he directed and produced several films about the indigenous peoples of Australia. Kim Mavromatis is also director of the documentary „Save the Flinders“, shown 2020 at the Uranium Film Festival in Berlin.

Larbi Benchiha  

The Franco-Algerian Journalist and filmmaker Larbi Benchiha was born as son of a family of sheep herders roaming the pastures in the highlands of western Algeria. The outbreak of  revolutionary war of the FLN (National Liberation Front) against France has put an end to this traditional way of life. Larbi had to live for years in refugee camps in Algeria. He left the camps at the end of the 1970s to Besançon in France and worked in various sectors such as metallurgy and industrial cleaning all while studying philosophy. Later he became a helper for disabled people for six years and at the same time, studied film at the University of Rennes. In the early 90s, Larbi moved to study journalism and became a freelance journalis for the French TV channels like Arte Info, France2, France3 and the German ZDF. Until today he directed a dozen documentaries on social topics, such as social exclusion, hip hop culture and the Israel-Palestinian conflict. For more than ten years he is dedicated to the topic of Atomic Bomb tests and radioactive pollution.

Loic Barché 

Loïc Barché (born in Tours in 1987) studied cinema in Preparatory Class and then at university. After several self-produced projects, in 2016 he directed the short film GOLIATH, with Swann Arlaud and Phénix Brossard, produced by Punchline Cinéma, pre-selected for the César 2018 and presented in numerous international festivals. ATOMIC ADVENTURE is his second short film. His first feature film FEU DE PAILLE, currently in the development phase, was selected at the Résidence Émergence in 2019.

Miguel Silveira  

Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Miguel Silveira lives and works as a filmmaker and arts educator in New York City. He has taught narrative and documentary film production at Columbia College Chicago, Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión in Cuba, and Columbia University in the City of New York. 

Silveira’s early work includes award the winning short films “Namibia, Brasil” and “Rooftop Wars” and the feature-length documentary "I Am a Visitor in Your World“.  Silveira's graduate thesis from Columbia University, a political thriller titled "Devil's Work", received a Sloan Foundation Production Grant, was a Caucus Foundation Grantee, was awarded Best Film at both The Tyre Film Festival (Lebanon) and The Uranium International Film Festival (Brazil), won a DGA award (East Coast), and was a semi-finalist for a Student Academy Award. After completing his MFA, Silveira co-founded NoPORT Films and began directing "American Thief", a narrative fiction and documentary hybrid filmed and scripted around true events in New York City between 2015-2018.   

Peter Anthony  

Peter Anthony, born May 19 in 1971, is a Danish director, screenwriter, set designer, architect and graphic designer. Graduating from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Anthony first started his professional work within architecture, art direction and graphic design. Anthony worked as an architect and art director. Later, he, also a skilled painter, was drawn to direction and the art of storytelling. Getting more and more involved in theater, documentary filmmaking and feature short films as a producer, director and screenwriter. In 2001, he used his talents as a set designer on Denmark’s Radio’s interactive flagship program, ROFL, which won an Emmy. Anthony now has more than twelve years of experience working on various national and international film productions. He also produced the music video for Danish rapper LOC, which was a Grammy® nominee for Best Music Video.

The Man Who Saved the World is Anthony's international debut as a feature-length film director. In addition to serving as the film’s director, Anthony also contributed as a scriptwriter, co-editor, set design consultant and graphic designer. Anthony’s inspiration emanated from a fascination with Petrov’s unique story, driving Anthony to create a spectacular and epic piece about a crucial time of history. 

Peter Greenaway  

Peter Greenaway, born in 1942 in Newport, Wales, and based in Amsterdam and London is a painter, artist, philosopher and one of the great film directors of our time, an innovative curator, and a challenging philosopher of cinema. Considered to be an avant-gardist who has made forays into mainstream cinema, Peter Greenaway’s unique visual language reveals a strong influence from his training as a painter, as well as structural linguistics and philosophy. In 1980, Peter Greenaway made his feature film debut with a mockumentary in ninety-two parts entitled „The Falls“.  Greenaway’s critical breakthrough occurred in 1982 with the seventeenth century drama „The Draughtsman’s Contract“.  In 2003, Peter Greenaway completed his multimedia project The Tulse Luper Suitcases, encompassing three feature films, a TV series, ninety-two DVDs, and several CD-ROMs and books. Tulse Luper (“the wolf on your pulse”) is a recurring off-stage character in Greenaway’s early films, and can be seen as a sort of alter ego, a professional writer whose life has been reconstructed from the objects found in his ninety-two suitcases, ninety-two being the atomic number of uranium.

Quenten Agius 

Quenten Agius is a knowledgeable storyteller and traditional owner of Adjahdura / Narungga and Ngadjuri country. He is a direct descendant of the Adjahdura / Narungga and Ngadjuri people who have lived on Yorke Peninsula and Mid North regions of South Australia for over 50 thousand years. Quenten Agius is also producer and film director, known for King's Seal (2014) and Sacred Ground (2007). He has been working together with Filmmaker Kim Mavromatis for over 20 years on a number of Aboriginal films (including Bobby Brown Homelands), art, tourism, heritage and other projects. Together they have won 88 global, international, national and state awards.

Ranga Yogeshwar  

Ranga Yogeshwar was born in Luxembourg in 1959 as the son of an Indian engineer and a Luxembourg artist. He spent most of his early childhood in India. After graduating from high school in Luxembourg, he studied experimental elementary particle physics and astrophysics and worked at the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research (SIN), at CERN in Geneva and at the Jülich Research Center.  Ranga Yogeshwar began his journalistic career in 1983, first with various publishers, then in radio and television. In 1987 he became an editor at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne and later headed the science department. Today he is one of Germany's leading science journalists and has developed and hosted numerous TV programs. Yogeshwar has received over 60 specialist prizes and numerous awards, such as the honorary doctorate from the University of Wuppertal, the Federal Cross of Merit of the FRG, the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the "Ordre de Mérite du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg".

Reinhart Brüning 

Science journalist Reinhart Brüning was born on August 17, 1965 in Schleswig-Holstein, Northern Germany. He studied physics and philosophy at the Phillips University of Marburg and did his doctorate in the field of philosophy of science at the University of Konstanz on the topic: "Creativity in the research process". Since 1997 he has been working for public German television stations like "Deutsche Welle", SWR and WDR. For his television reports, he received the "Dietrich Oppenberg Media Special Prize" in 2003, the "Ernst Schneider IHK Media Prize" in 2006 and the journalism prize of the GSK Foundation in 2009 in recognition of outstanding journalistic work on the subject of biomedicine.

Robert E. Frye 

Robert E. Frye is an Emmy award-winning producer of network news programs and independent documentaries for over five decades. He was born in Syracuse, NY USA, and studied political science and history at Hobart College. In 1958 he joined the U.S. Army. Frye worked on nuclear weapon planning while serving in Germany. The experience fostered a lifelong interest, which led him to create "The Nuclear World Project“. Starting in the '60s the Emmy and Peabody Award winner worked in New York City; Toronto; Washington, D.C.and London. His credits at ABC News include Executive Producer of "Good Morning America" and "ABC World News Tonight" with Peter Jennings; senior Producer at CBC's Weekend, and as an independent producer of several films for public television which include "In My Lifetime"  At the age of 81, Frye said, the obligation of his generation is to tell the story of nuclear weapons, to make clear the indescribable damage they have caused and their potential to end life on the planet entirely. More Info: The Nuclear World Project.

Roberto Fernández  

Screenwriter, producer, editor and director, graduated in Cinema at T.C.C. (Taller de Cine Contemporáneo), in Argentina, in 1992. He is living in São Paulo since 2006. Roberto has reported and rescued untold stories of the survivors of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His documentaries about the survivors of the atomic bombs, are the fruit of a work of 12 years with the Hibakusha Brasil for Peace Association, formed by atomic bomb survivors that reside in Brazil. These documentaries received institutional support from the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, the Association for the Commemoration of the Japanese Immigration Centennial in Brazil, the Historical Museum of Japanese Immigration in Brazil, the Hiroshima Cultural Center, the Hibakusha Brazil for Peace Association, Sukiyaki Grocery and the Japan Foundation. 

Shinpei Takeda  

1978 Born in Osaka, Japan, Shinpei Takeda Shinpei Takeda is a visual artist and filmmaker. He lives and works in Tijuana (Mexico), Düsseldorf (Germany) and Vienna (Austria). His works involve a wide range of themes regarding memories and history. Shinpei uses multi-media installations, sound interventions, documentary films, large-scale photography installations, and collaborative community projects in various public contexts. As a filmmaker he works on films with diverse topics including pre-WWII Japanese immigration to Tijuana, Mexico and the atomic bomb survivors living in the Americas (Atopus Studio). As a performance artist, he directs Ghost Magnet Roach Motel, a noise performance unit from Tijuana, Mexico.

Tamotsu Matsubara 

Producer and director Tamotsu Matsubara, born in 1959 in Osaka, Japan, has more than 30 years Documentary and media experience. He is president of the film company Power-I and produces independent documentaries highlighting crisis-stricken traditional cultures in Japan and abroad. 

Matsubara has been reporting on the situation in post-tsunami Fukushima already since May 2011 and started to research for „Nuclear Cattle“ one month later.  At the same time, Matsubara proposed his „Nuclear Cattle“ film project to NHK (Japan’s National Broadcaster) and to oversea broadcasters. But no broadcaster dared to finance the documentary.

Tineke van Veen  

Tineke van Veen is a visual artist working in the field of film, photography and installations. She studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and in 2015 she received a master’s degree in Film and Photographic Studies from Leiden University. She is a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Den Bosch and Breda, committee-member of the Municipality of The Hague Art Department and co-founder of Wonders On Work. Tineke van Veen researches and visualizes in her practice the concept of safety. Feeling save related to vulnerable situations in a personal and in a broader intercultural context. What kind of different cultural values open new perspectives? Van Veen visualizes the concept of safety in objects, installations, film and photography or a combination of these practices. At the one hand the work is self-reflective at the other hand it invites the spectator to reflect on his own position.  In her ongoing photopraphy-project WORLD CITIZENSHIP she addresses the complexity of the concept to open up the dialogue. Her latest work concerns the concept of safety related to the disturbed relationship between man and nature, the changed perspective of landscape by nuclear contamination in Fukushima, Japan and Vaujours in France.

All films will be shown on the Vimeo platform of the MAM Rio Cinematheque listed under the names of the filmmakers from May 20th to 30th, free of charge! Nevertheless we welcome any contribution. The festival team thanks its supporters in Rio de Janeiro: The Museum of Modern Art Cinematheque (MAM Rio) and Cachaça Magnífica de Faria

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International Uranium Film Festival
Rua Monte Alegre 356 / 301
Santa Teresa / Rio de Janeiro / RJ
CEP 20240-195   /  Brasil
Email: info@uraniumfilmfestival.org