Juries

Born 1952 in Tokyo, Sakamoto debuted in 1978 with his solo album “Thousand Knives”. The same year he joined the pioneering electronic-music pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra. In 1983, Sakamoto scored the soundtrack for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, in which he co-starred with David Bowie. Since those early days he has released over a dozen solo albums, created art installations exhibited in various museums around the world, and composed more than thirty film scores for directors including Bernardo Bertolucci, Pedro Almodóvar, Brian De Palma, and more recently Alejandro González Iñárritu for whom he composed the music of The Revenant. His work has been recognized with accolades including an Academy Award, two Golden Globes, a Grammy, and more. Sakamoto has been a fervent defender of environmental and social causes and is particularly committed to reforestation and supporting the victims of the 3/11 earthquake, tsunami, and anti-nuke activism. In 2017, along with the release of his 16th solo album async and the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (Stephen Nomura Schible), Sakamoto continued composing film scores, presenting site specific performances, and created audio/visual installation work, IS YOUR TIME with Shiro Takatani.

Since 2015 Stephanie Zacharek has been the film critic at TIME, the renowned US news magazine. She was previously chief film critic at The Village Voice and Salon.com. Zacharek, who lives in New York, began her career in the 1980s. She has published articles and reviews in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and in magazines such as Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and Sight & Sound. In 2015 she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. Zacharek, who studied at Syracuse University, is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. She is a regular on international film festival juries, most recently at Tribeca, Mumbai, Busan, and the SXSW in Austin. Over the years Zacharek has also participated in many Berlinale Talents panel discussions and events.

Diogo Costa Amarante completed his Master of Fine Arts at New York University / Tisch School of the Arts in 2016 with his film Cidade Pequena, which celebrated its international premiere at the 67th Berlinale in 2017 and received the Golden Bear for Best Short Film. Amarante is a member of the widely acclaimed third generation of Portuguese filmmakers, whose works have established an impressive position for Portugal in the cinematic world. His first film Jumate/Jumate received accolades at many festivals, and in 2007 he received a scholarship for documentary film and cinematography at the School of Cinema and Audiovisuals of Catalonia (ESCAC). In 2009, he was a participant at Berlinale Talents, and shot his second documentary film In January, perhaps.

Filmmaker Jyoti Mistry is an Associate Professor and Deputy Head of Division at the Wits School of Arts in South Africa. She received the CILECT Teaching Award (The International Association of Film and Television Schools) in 2016 in recognition of her outstanding achievements in film pedagogy and film practice research. Her research areas include cultural policy, questions of identity, and multiculturalism. Her experimental film The Bull On the Roof (2010) celebrated its debut at the Durban International Film Festival and was presented at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, among other institutions. Her feature film Impunity (2014) celebrated its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and her most recent short film When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Black Man was a competition selection at the short film festival Winterthur in 2017. Her publications include “'we remember differently': Race, Memory, Imagination” (2012), “Gaze Regimes: Film and Feminisms in Africa” (2015) and “Places to Play – Practice, Research & Pedagogy” (2017) which was adapted for the screen.

Mark Toscano has functioned as curator and presenter of stand-out programmes for many noted institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, EYE Filmmuseum, Tate Modern, Los Angeles Filmforum, as well as for festivals in Rotterdam, London, Oberhausen, Zagreb and Bangalore. In addition, he lectures on experimental film and archiving at numerous universities. At the California Institute of the Arts, he is an instructor in the area of Experimental Animation. A distinguished filmmaker and curator, Mark Toscano has been a contributor to the conservation of cinematic heritage at the Academy Film Archive since 2003, where he specialises in the conservation of noteworthy films, maintaining exchange with over 100 international filmmakers.

Jonas Carpignano, who was born in 1984, grew up in New York City and Rome. His directorial debut, Mediterranea, premiered in the Semaine de la Critique at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015. Not only was it nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards, but it also won the Gotham Award for breakthrough director and a prize from the National Board of Review. His next feature film was also a huge success: A Ciambra, which had its premiere in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in 2017, received the Europa Cinemas Label Award for best European film. It was also voted best Italian film of the year by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists (SNCCI), earned Carpignano a nomination for best director at the Independent spirit awards and was chosen to represent Italy at the Oscars. Carpignano, who was a Berlinale Talent in 2012, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016. He continues to live and work in Southern Italy.

Born in Romania in 1975, Călin Peter Netzer emigrated with his family to Germany when he was eight. After finishing school in Stuttgart, he studied directing in Bucharest, where he graduated in 1999. After many of his short films had won prizes at international festivals, Maria (2003), his first full-length feature, premiered at the Locarno Festival, where it took home several awards. Its leading actress was also nominated for the European Film Award. Netzers second feature film Medal of Honour (2009) was presented at more than 30 film festivals and received several awards. In 2013 Netzer won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale for his family drama Child’s Pose. The film went on to win eight national Romanian film awards and a nomination for the European Film Award. With Ana, mon amour, he returned to the Berlinale Competition in 2017. For its editing, the film received the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution.

Noa Regev has been the executive director of the Jerusalem Cinematheque since 2013. This position also includes heading the Israel Film Archive as well as the Jerusalem Film Festival, which under her direction has grown in size and significance, both nationally and internationally. Regev completed her studies at the School of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University with a doctoral thesis on genre in cinema as exemplified by children's film. Since then she has lectured at many academic institutions all over Israel. Prior to taking up her duties in Jerusalem, she headed the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival and the Holon Cinematheque.

Born in Portugal, Cíntia Gil studied at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon Theatre and Film School) and holds a degree in Philosophy from the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Porto), where she has also taught seminars on aesthetics. Since 2012, Cíntia Gil and Davide Oberto have served as co-directors of the Doclisboa, Portugal’s most important and steadily expanding documentary film festival. Gil has curated a variety of contemporary and historical film series, retrospectives, and exhibitions. In addition, she has been a member of the executive board of Apordoc – Associação pelo Documentário, the Portuguese documentary film association since 2015. Gil, whose texts have appeared in numerous publications on philosophy and art, is also a regular guest at panel discussions and conferences, and on international festival juries.

By the 1970s Ulrike Ottinger had established herself as one of Germany’s most important and versatile directors. A Berliner by choice, her best known films, for which she also wrote the scripts and operated the camera, include The Enchantment of the Blue Sailors (1975); the “Berlin trilogy” - Ticket of No Return (1979), Freak Orlando (1981), and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984); as well as The Korean Wedding Chest (2008); and Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (1989), for which she received a German Film Award and the Audience Award at the Montréal Women’s Film Festival. Ottinger, who as an artist and photographer has participated in international exhibitions, is a regular at the Berlinale. Most recently, in 2011, she presented Under Snow; in 2016, the 12-hour documentary Chamisso’s Shadow, which opened the Forum and won the German Film Critics Award. Ottinger’s works have often been shown at renowned institutions, such as the Cinémathèque française, Centre Pompidou, New York’s MoMA, and the documenta in Kassel.

Eric Schlosser is an investigative journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker. His book “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal” (2001) became an international bestseller and contributed decisively to the growing rebellion against the industrialisation of food production. In 2014, his book “Command and Control” became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. As a producer, he worked on Richard Linklater’s screen adaptation of Fast Food Nation (2006), Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), and the Oscar-nominated documentary Food, Inc., which screened in the Berlinale Special in 2009. As co-director of the bomb, an experimental film on the history of the atomic bomb, Schlosser was invited to the Berlinale Special in 2017. His articles have appeared in, e.g., the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Vanity Fair.

The Dutch director and screenwriter Paul Verhoeven began his directing career in 1969 with the successful Dutch television series Floris. After his feature film debut Business is Business in 1971, came the erotic thriller Turkish Delight in 1973, a big hit in the Netherlands that also garnered a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1974 Academy Awards. Following his international breakthrough Soldier of Orange (1977) and The Fourth Man (1983), Paul Verhoeven moved to Hollywood to focus on an evolution of style in his work. Large productions featuring lots of action and special effects, like RoboCop (1987), and especially Total Recall (1990), were big box-office hits that revolutionised the science fiction film genre while maintaining credibility as auteur films. The provocative, erotic thriller Basic Instinct (1992), which was nominated for two Academy Awards, saw Paul Verhoeven return to themes prevalent in his Dutch works. In 1997 and 2000, he once again focused on science fiction with Starship Troopers and Hollow Man. After nearly 20 years in Hollywood, Paul Verhoeven returned to the Netherlands in 2006 to film Black Book (2006). Starting in 2007, he moved his attention to writing. In 2016 he returned to the screen with Elle, which not only won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture in the category Foreign Language, but also earned Isabelle Huppert the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama.

Tunisian producer Dora Bouchoucha Fourati is something of an institution in the film world. The English literature graduate started off as a teacher and translator of screenplays. In 1992, she launched the Carthage Film Festival “Projects' Workshop” to assist Arabs and Africans in developing their scripts and the follow-up initiative “Takmil” to support post-production in 2014. In 1995, she founded her own production company Nomadis Images. The many fiction and documentary features, and short films she has produced and co-produced include: Raja Amari’s multiple award-winning Satin Rouge (2002), Barakat! (dir: Djamila Sahraoui, Berlinale Forum 2006), Raja Amari’s Buried Secrets (2009) and Foreign Body (Berlinale Forum 2017). She produced all of Mohamed Ben Attia’s short films and his full-length debut Hedi, which screened in the Berlinale Competition in 2016 and won the Best First Feature Award and Silver Bear for Best Actor (Majd Mastoura). Dora Bouchoucha also founded the screenwriting workshop SUD ECRITURE for Arab and African scripts in 1997 which has launched many award winning films to date. She was festival director of the Carthage Film Festival in 2008, 2010, and 2014. She was appointed president of the Fonds Sud Cinéma of the CNC in 2010; and president of the follow-up institution, Aide aux Cinemas du Monde, in 2014.

Born in Denmark of Icelandic parentage, Olafur Eliasson quickly garnered international attention after completing the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He participated in the Berlin Biennale in 1998 and the Venice Biennale in 2003, and his piece “The weather project”, which was installed in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, attracted over two million visitors. Today, with his sculptures, installations, paintings, photographs and films that often focus on physical phenomena in nature as well as climate change, he has become one of the world’s most important contemporary artists. Eliasson, who founded his studio in Berlin in 1995, has received countless awards. Besides being involved in art, he is the founder of a global sustainable energy project and social business called Little Sun, as well as the international architectural firm Studio Other Spaces. His latest artworks include a number of installations at the Palace of Versailles in 2016.

Celebrated American actress Maggie Gyllenhaal is one of the outstanding talents of her generation. After studying literature at Columbia University in New York and acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, she became known for her roles in Donnie Darko (dir: Richard Kelly, 2001) and in Spike Jonze’s Berlinale Competition entry Adaptation (2002). Her big breakthrough came when she played the lead in the film Secretary (dir: Steven Shainberg, 2002). For it she received her first Golden Globe nomination and won several awards, including an IFP/Gotham Award for Breakthrough Performance. She went on to star in, e.g., Mike Newell’s Mona Lisa Smile (2003), Marc Forster’s Stranger than Fiction (2006), Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006), Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008), Sam Mendes’s Away We Go (2009), and Roland Emmerich’s White House Down (2013). For her role in Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart (2009) she was nominated for an Oscar. In 2014 she headlined the British TV series The Honourable Woman, for which she garnered a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy nomination. Gyllenhaal, who in recent years has performed on Broadway, is currently cast to star in The Deuce, a new HBO series that she is also producing.

After finishing her studies at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, Julia Jentsch, who was born in Berlin, began her career on the stage. In 2002 “Theater heute” magazine rated her the best female debut of the year. Her breakthrough on the screen was in The Edukators (2004, dir: Hans Weingartner) and in Sophie Scholl – The Final Days (Berlinale Competition 2005), for which she won not only the Berlinale’s Silver Bear, but also both the German and European Film Awards. The film itself, which was directed by Marc Rothemund, was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Since then Julia Jentsch has starred in a number of works, including 33 Scenes from Life by Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska, Hannah Arendt by Margarethe von Trotta, and I Served the King of England by Jiří Menzel. With Effie Briest (Berlinale Special 2009, dir: Hermine Huntgeburth) and 24 Weeks (Berlinale Competition 2016; dir: Anne Zohra Berrached), Jentsch was again invited to the Berlinale. Most recently she performed in front of the camera in Hans-Christian Schmid’s mini-series Das Verschwinden, which will be released in 2017.

Diego Luna’s breakthrough role came with Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también, for which he shared the Marcello Mastroianni Award with Gael García Bernal at the Venice Film Festival in 2001. His feature film acting credits include Frida (dir. Julie Taymor, 2002), The Terminal (dir: Steven Spielberg, 2004), Rudo y Cursi (dir: Carlos Cuarón, 2008), Milk (dir: Gus van Sant, Berlinale Panorama 2009), Contraband (dir: Baltasar Kormákur, 2012) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (dir: Gareth Edwards, 2016). Next fall he will star in Flatliners (dir: Niels Arden Oplev). Luna’s directorial debut, titled Abel, premiered at the film festival in Cannes in 2010. This was followed by César Chávez (Berlinale Special 2014) and Mr. Pig, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016. He and Bernal co-founded “Ambulante” in 2005, a charity organization dedicated, among other things, to promoting documentary film. Luna is also a member of the board of the Washington Office on Latin America.

The director and screenwriter trained first as an actor before he turned to filmmaking. After studying at the Beijing Film Academy, Wang Quan'an, who was born in Yan'an in Shaanxi province, presented his debut film Lunar Eclipse in 1999. It screened in the Berlinale's Forum section in 2002 after making various award-winning appearances at festivals around the world. He was selected with Tuya's Marriage for the Competition in 2007 and, as the third Chinese filmmaker in the festival's history, won the Golden Bear. Three years later, Apart Together was chosen as the Berlinale's opening film and went on to win the Silver Bear for Best Script, which Wang co-wrote with Jin Na. He returned to the Berlinale Competition in 2012 with White Deer Plain, an adaptation of the historical novel of the same name, where his director of photography, Lutz Reitemeier, won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution.

Kimberly Drew is a curator, writer and the social media manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her blog “Black Contemporary Art”, founded in 2011, and her Instagram channel “museummammy” are among the most influential digital platforms for African and African-American art worldwide. She has been awarded the AIR Gallery Feminist Curator Award and the Gold Rush Award by the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation for her curatorial work. Kimberly Drew studied art history and African-American studies with an emphasis on museum studies at Smith College in Northampton, USA.

Jankowski works in the area of concept and media arts using film, video, photography and performance, as well as painting, sculpture and installations. His special focus is on the performative interaction between the artist and an audience far removed from the professional art world. His works are exhibited in numerous museums and collections, and have been shown at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2013, among other events. In 2016, he curated the European Biennial of Contemporary Art in Zurich, “Manifesta 11”. Christian Jankowski also holds a professorship in sculpture at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design.

Festival programmer and film producer Carlos Núñez is the co-founder and artistic director of SANFIC, the Santiago International Film Festival, an important forum for Chilean and Latin American film. In addition, he is the director and co-founder of the production and distribution company Storyboard Media. Among other films, he has co-produced La Mujer de Barro by Sergio Castro San Martín, which screened in Forum at the 2015 Berlinale. Carlos Núñez is also a university lecturer and a member of Cinema23, a platform for the promotion of film culture in Latin America, Spain and Portugal.

In 2015 with his debut feature, Ixcanul, Jayro Bustamante was the first Guatemalan director invited to participate in the Competition of the Berlinale. Cast with amateur actors from the region of the Kaqchikel Maya, the film won the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize. Ixcanul went on to screen at 60 other film festivals, including those in Karlovy Vary, Jerusalem, Telluride, Toronto, Biarritz, Cartagena, Mumbai, Guadalajara, Ghent, and San Sebastián, and took home 52 awards. What is more, Ixcanul was the second Guatemalan movie ever submitted for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Jayro Bustamante, who had previously studied in Paris and Rome, as well as directed commercials for Ogilvy & Matter, has also made a variety of short, documentary, and animated films. Currently he is working on his next two full-length feature films: Temblores and Los tenis de barrondo.

Clotilde Courau began her acting career at 16 and performed on stage while still at acting school. For her screen debut in Jacques Doillon’s The Little Gangster, which ran in the Berlinale Competition in 1991, she received the European Film Award and her first nomination for a César. Ever since, Clotilde Courau has been an established star of French cinema. She is known for films such as Elisa (dir: Jean Becker, 1995); The Bait (dir: Bertrand Tavernier, 1995); the opening film of the Berlinale 2007, La vie en rose (dir: Olivier Dahan); and In the Shadow of Women (dir: Philippe Garrel, 2015). She has also starred in international productions, e.g. in Paul Mazursky’s The Pickle (1993) and Rod Lurie’s Deterrence (1999). Courau regularly performs on the stage: recently she played in “Piaf, l’être intime”, which she also directed. Her latest film Le Ciel attendra by Marie Castille Mention-Schaar will open in German cinemas in 2017.

Born in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) in 1983, author, director and producer Mahmoud Sabbagh presented his debut feature, Barakah Meets Barakah, in the Berlinale’s Forum section in 2016. There this remarkably humorous film won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. It went on to be screened at, e.g., the Toronto International Film Festival, and ultimately entered the race – only the second Saudi Arabian film ever to do so – for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. For some years now, Sabbagh, who has a degree in documentary filmmaking from New York’s Columbia University, has been considered one of the pioneers of a new independent generation of filmmakers in his country. Among other works, he has directed and penned a documentary on the controversial poet Hamza Shehata as well as the highly-regarded online TV series Cash.

Born in Mexico City, Daniela Michel is a film critic and founding director of the Morelia International Film Festival, an annual event launched in 2003 to support a new generation of Mexican filmmakers. After studying filmmaking she received a degree in English Literature. She has curated retrospectives of Mexican cinema in and outside Mexico. Michel has also served on the Jury for the “Un Certain Regard” and “La Semaine de la Critique” sections of the Cannes Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Locarno International Film Festival, the San Sebastian International Film Festival, the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the Sarajevo Film Festival, among other festivals, as well as the Rockefeller Foundation’s Media Arts Fellowships and the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.

Laura Poitras, who was born in the USA, first studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and then The New School in New York. Her work crosses the boundaries of documentary film, journalism, and art. In 2006 she began her 9/11 Trilogy with the film My Country, My Country, for which she received her first Oscar nomination. This was followed by The Oath (2010), which like My Country, My Country, was shown in the Berlinale’s Forum section. With CITIZENFOUR, the third part of her trilogy, Poitras won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2015. With this film about Edward Snowden, she also took home awards from the German Film Prize, the Director’s Guild of America, and BAFTA. Her reporting on NSA surveillance has appeared in Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and the Washington Post, and received a Pulitzer Prize and the Nannen Prize for Press Freedom. In 2016, she mounted her first solo museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is co-creator of the visual journalism project, Field of Vision.

Samir was born in Bagdad and moved with his family to Switzerland when he was seven years old. In the 1980s, after studying at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and training to be a typesetter, he began working as a cameraman, director, and screenwriter. Over the years he has made more than 40 short and full-length films. In 1994, he – and documentary filmmaker Werner Schweizer and producer Karin Koch – took over Dschoint Ventschr (spoken like Joint Venture) Filmproduktion, which concentrates on promoting young Swiss talents. Samir has directed both fiction and documentary films for the cinema and television – including Snow White (2005), which received multiple awards – as well as many stage productions. His documentary Iraqi Odyssey was screened in the Berlinale Panorama in 2015 and submitted by Switzerland for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Meryl Streep has appeared in over 40 films and is considered one of the world’s most talented and versatile actresses. She has received countless awards and nominations, including three wins among her unprecedented 19 Oscar nominations. She was honoured with a Golden Globe eight times and nominated an additional 20 times. Meryl Streep’s international breakthrough came in the late 1970s with the TV series Holocaust and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978, her first Oscar nomination), as well as the couples drama Kramer vs. Kramer (D: Robert Benton, 1979), for which she garnered her first Oscar statuette. She won further Academy Awards for her compelling performance in Sophie’s Choice (D: Alan J. Pakula, 1982) as well as her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (D: Phyllida Lloyd, 2011). Meryl Streep has been a guest at the Berlin International Film Festival on a number of occasions. In 1999, she was awarded the Berlinale Camera and, in 2003, she shared the Silver Bear with Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman for their performances in The Hours (D: Stephen Daldry). In 2006, she could again be seen in the Berlinale Competition in Robert Altman’s ensemble comedy A Prairie Home Companion. The 2012 Berlinale Homage was dedicated to Meryl Streep and she was also awarded an Honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement. Most recently, Meryl Streep excelled in films such as the historical drama Suffragette (D: Sarah Gavron, 2015), Ricki and the Flash (D: Jonathan Demme, 2015) and the musical Into the Woods (D: Rob Marshall, 2014). She will next be seen in Stephen Frear’s Florence Foster Jenkins. As president of the Berlinale 2016 jury, Meryl Streep takes on the role of a juror at a film festival for the first time in her longstanding career.

Lars Eidinger is one of Germany’s most accomplished actors. He alternates between stage, screen and television roles without difficulty. Since 1999, he has been a member of the ensemble at Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre, where he has also directed plays. His most outstanding performances on the stage include Thomas Ostermeier’s production of “Hamlet”, which Eidinger has played nationally and internationally over 250 times since 2008.
His breakthrough on the screen was in Maren Ade’s Everyone Else, which won the Jury Grand Prix (Silver Bear) at the Berlinale in 2009. He participated in the Berlinale Competition again in 2012 with Home for the Weekend (D: Hans-Christian Schmid), and in 2015 with Sworn Virgin (D: Laura Bispuri). In that same year he was also in the Panorama section with Dora or the Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents (D: Stina Werenfels). Eidinger, who has received many prizes, such as the Grimme Award and the German Film Critics’ Award, has played in international cinema productions, including most recently the period drama Matilda (D: Alexey Uchitel). Now, after Clouds of Sils Maria, he is working with Olivier Assayas again, as well as with Philipp Kadelbach in London, on the BBC series SS-GB starring Sam Riley.

Nick James is an internationally renowned film critic, author and programmer from the United Kingdom. In the late 1980s he began to write articles about film for “City Limits” magazine, where he soon became head of the film section. Since 1997 he is editor of the internationally celebrated film magazine “Sight & Sound”. His articles on film, art and literature have been published in, for instance, “The Guardian”, “The Observer”, “The Independent”, “Vogue”, the “London Review of Books” and “The Literary Review”. In 2002 “Heat”, his book about Michael Mann’s film of the same name, was published. In 2010 he received the title of Chevalier de L’ordre des arts et des lettres from the French Ministry of Culture. Since 2012 he has curated the “Deep Focus” film series, which is put on twice a year by the British Film Institute at BFI Southbank.