[ Auszeichnungen - Awards ]

Since Friday the Art Film Festival (17.6. - 25.6.) is being held in Teplice (Slovakia) and you can count yourself lucky if you have time to visit this extraordinary event. It offers a magnificent repertory of East and Central European films and of course a significant awards show. This year the laureates of the Golden Camera award are the Slovak cameraman TIBOR BIATH and Hungarian director MIKLÓS JANCSÓ.
 

Tibor Biath was born on the 12th of May 1925 in Prešov. After he had finished his secondary school studies, he started to study at Prague’s Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) (1946 – 1949) and he was among the first graduates from the camera department. He worked in Bratislava in the Studio of short films and he shot about 70 instructive, educative, propagation, popular-learning and documentary films. From the year 1960 he started to work in the Studio of feature films, where he shot with the director Dimitrij Plichta the medium length feature film Ivan (1960). Then followed the cooperation with Peter Solan on the internationally recognized film The Boxer and Death (Boxer a smrť, 1962) and The Case of Barnabas Kos (Prípad Barnabáš Kos, 1964). In the 70´s and 80´s he cooperated with Martin Ťapák and worked with Andrej Lettrich on TV films and TV series.

The screenwriter, director and occasional actor Miklós Jancsó was born on the 27th of September 1921 in Hungarian Vác. He studied law and ethnography in Cluj/Kolozsvár and finally direction at the Theater and Film High School in Budapest. In the beginning he was making reporting and documentary films. In 1958 he made the feature film The Bells Have Gone to Rome (A harangok Rómába mentek) about a group of secondary school students during the last days of the War. In 1965 he turned the international film public’s attention towards himself by the film The Hopeless Ones (Szegénylegények) about the dramatic suppression of the National Uprising in the 19th century. The most important successes he obtained in his work showing important periods of National History. Among his most important works are the films The Red and the White (Csillagosok, katonák, 1967), Silence and Cry (Csend és kiáltás, 1968) and Winter Wind (Téli sirokkó, 1969). In these he has fully developed his characteristic film language based on unusually long shots, vehement camera moves and strong visual picture composition.
In the 70’s he lived and worked in Italy. In 1972 he was awarded in Cannes Festival for directing the film The People Still Ask (Még kér a nép). Since the year 1975 he has also been working as a Theater director. He has managed to assert himself also in the changed conditions after the fall of the Soviet block. Since the year 1991 he has made 9 films.
He is a laureate of the Kossuth prize. His work has been awarded in film festivals in Cannes in 1979 and in Venezia in 1990 by Honorary Golden Lion. In 1988 he became a professor at the Theater and Film High School in Budapest. From 1990 to 1992 he was guest teacher at Harvard University.

There is a very new and nice Homepage of Miklós Jancsó in Hungarian language which is really worth visiting! In the menue LINKS (Linktár) you can also find some articles in English.