Visiting Filmmakers

Merzak Allouache

Merzak Allouache (born 6 October 1944) is an Algerian film director and screenwriter. He has directed 18 films since 1976. His 1976 film Omar Gatlato was entered into the 10th Moscow International Film Festival where it won the Silver Prize. His 1996 Salut cousin! was submitted to the 69th Academy Awards in the category for Best Foreign Language Film.

His 2011 film Normal! won the award for Best Film at the 2011 Doha Tribeca Film Festival. In 2012, his film The Repentant was screened in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It won the FIPRESCI Award for Best Asian Film at the 17th International Film Festival of Kerala.

Please join us in welcoming Algeria’s foremost film director, Merzak Allouache, on Opening Night, Friday, February 5, 2016. Mr. Allouache will introduce and discuss his film The Rooftops at two screenings, 6:00 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. at the Hollywood Theatre, 4122 N.E. Sandy Blvd.

Shirley Neal

shirley2

Emmy-award-winning producer, writer, journalist, and President of Park Hill Entertainment, a Hollywood-based television production and media firm. Among her film credits are the documentaries, Passport to Sierra Leone, Inside TVLand: African Americans in Television, Remarkable Journey, and Tuskegee Airmen. Neal has filmed in more than twenty African countries including throughout Rwanda, where she produced the documentaries, Rwanda the Renaissance, Hooray for Hillywood, Inganzo: A Day of Art; and In Remembrance: Voices From Rwanda. Her dramatic, lifestyles, live event, and entertainment program- ming for U.S. television has been broadcast on NBC, CBS, A&E, TVLand, The Africa Channel, Spike TV, BET, The Travel Channel, and TVOne, as well as through syndication. INTORE is her second film collaboration with Kabera.

Yared Zeleke

Yared Zeleke, Ethiopia, director of “Lamb” was born in Ethiopia in 1978. He holds a bachelors degree in International Development from Clark University (United States) and studied cinema at New York University, majoring in writing and directing. He worked for a number of NGOs in the United States, Ethiopia, Namibia, and Norway, before embarking on a directing career.

Yared has written, produced, directed and edited several short documentaries (Allula) and fiction shorts (Housewarming). He has also worked with the director Joshua Atesh Litle on the documentary The Furious Force of Rhymes, which received a number of awards. In Ethiopia, his native country, he has edited documentary films for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. In 2015, Yared completed his first feature-length movie, called Lamb, filmed on the high plateaux of Northern Ethiopia.

Yared will be speaking after both screenings of Lamb:  12 noon on February 25th and 7 pm on February 26.