Was born at Karen in Kenya and grew up in England and Italy. At eighteen he hitch-hiked to Afghanistan and Nepal and has been an inveterate traveller ever since. He studied politics and philosophy at Oxford. Later he became a researcher for the BBC before joining AKA, a documentary film company where he made films about Max Frisch, Oscar Niemeyer and Melina Mercouri.

He began writing screenplays in 1969 and has collaborated amongst others with Jacques Demy, René Clément, Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci.

His principal credits include Antonioni’s The Passenger (1974) and The Last Emperor (1987) with Bernardo Bertolucci, for which he won the Golden Globe and an Academy Award.

As a writer-director he made a half hour fiction film Samson and Delilah (1985), nominated for a Bafta, then the feature Afraid of the Dark (1991), a psychological thriller with Fanny Ardant and James Fox.

In 1997 he made Victory from the novel by Joseph Conrad with Willem Dafoe and Irène Jacob, which was an official selection at the San Sebastian Festival.

With his sister Clare he wrote High Season (1987), Silver Shell at the San Sebastian Festival, and for Bertolucci he adapted The Sheltering Sky (1990) from the Paul Bowles novel, and worked on Little Buddha (1993).

He has written the script for Bertolucci’s next film based on the life of the 16th century Neapolitan composer Gesualdo da Venosa, and is presently developing an action-thriller called The Crew from a story by Antonioni.

Jannike Åhlund was director of the Göteborg International Film Festival (Sweden) from 2002 until April 2007.

As a journalist and film critic, she has worked for Swedish newspapers, television and radio. From 1990 until 1995 she was Editor-in-Chief of the Chaplin film magazine, a work earning her the National Journalism Award in 1994, the same year in which she also won the Ingmar Bergman Award.

She was a critic with the national TV show on current films, Filmkrönikan, for the three years preceding her position at the Göteborg International Film Festival.

As a writer, Jannike Åhlund is the author of En sagolik (film)historia (A book on Icelandic cinema) and the co-writer of En liten bok om Hasse (a book on the Swedish director Hasse Ekman, written with Leif Furhammar). Another of her specialised works, New Cinema in Sweden”, has been published and translated into several languages, including English, Spanish and Russian.

Since 2004, she has also been the director of the Bergman Week at Fårö, a six-day celebration of work by the recently deceased genius Ingmar Bergman (www.bergmanveckan.se). In 2006, Bergman himself participated enthusiastically in the Week, at which he met the actress Harriet Andersson and directors Josef Fares and Ang Lee.

Jannike Åhlund was a juror on the Un Certain Regard Jury at Cannes 2003, and at Venice (Opera Prima) the same year. She has participated in a number of Fipresci juries over the years. She currently lives in Stockholm.

Born in Santiago de Chile, she worked at the Palacio de La Moneda with Salvador Allende. Following the death of her partner, Miguel Enríquez, killed by soldiers, Carmen Castillo, who was pregnant at the time and injured in the event, was expelled from Chile and arrived in France as a political refugee.

She has directed several TV documentaries, especially for the French channels TF1 and FR3 and for the French-German channel Arte. The first was Los muros de Santiago (1983), followed by Estado de guerra: Nicaragua (1984). La Flaca Alejandra (1993) landed the Golden FIPA at Cannes, in addition to other awards at Geneva, Montecarlo, San Francisco and New York.

Carmen later directed La verdadera leyenda del Subcomandante Marcos (1995), Inca de oro (1996), El bolero, una educación amorosa (1999), First Prize at Annecy Festival, Viaje con la cumbia por Colombia (2000), María Félix, la inalcanzable (2000), El Camino del Inca (2001), El astrónomo y el indio (2002), First

Prize at the Scientific Film Festival in Paris, José Saramago, le temps d’une mémoire (2003), Mísia, la voz del fado (2003) and El país de mi padre (2004), Fidocs Second Prize at Santiago de Chile.

She also directed the feature film series for Arte, Tierras extranjeras, between 1994 and 1999.

Her latest work is Calle Santa Fé (2007), presented at Un Certain Regard at Cannes, to be screened in the Zabaltegi section at this year’s San Sebastian Festival. She also wrote the screenplays for Inca de oro and Color Habana, already made, and for Hasta luego and La montaña azul, currently at the pre-production stage.

Carmen Castillo has also published several books, including Un día de octubre en Santiago (1980), Ligne de fuite (1987) and Santiago/París, el vuelo de la memoria (2000), with Mónica Echeverría.

Espido Freire was born into a Galician family in Bilbao on 16th July 1974. She studied music from childhood, going on to take singing lessons and wrote her first literary texts in her early adolescence.

She graduated in English Literature from Deusto University, where she similarly passed a Diploma in Editing and Publishing. While at university, she attended a number of literary workshops, sparking her interest in the educational side of literary creation. She also founded and coordinated a number of magazines.

Espido debuted as an author with Irlanda (1998), winner of the Millepage Prize, followed a year later by Donde siempre es octubre (1999).

That same year, she landed the Planeta Prize for her work Melocotones helados, making her the youngest winner in its history.

After the essay Primer amor (2000), she returned to writing novels with La última batalla de Vincavec el bandido (2001), her only work for young readers, followed by El tiempo huye (2001), winner of the NH Short Stories Prize; a book of poems Aland la blanca (2001) and the novel Diabulus in musica (2001). She also has two books of short stories: Cuentos malvados (2003) and Juegos míos (2004), plus the essays Cuando comer es un infierno (2002) and Querida Jane, querida Charlotte (2004), about the life and work of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters.

Nos espera la noche (2003) continues the trilogy started with Donde siempre es octubre. In 2005 she published the novel La diosa del pubis azul with Raúl del Pozo.

Her last work published to date, the essay Mileuristas, la generación de los mil euros (Ariel), appeared on the shelves in October 2006.

Her latest novel, Soria Moria,winner of the Seville Ateneo Award 2007, is due to be published mid-October 2007.

In addition to her prolific literary production, she collaborates with different media. This year she has collaborated with Cadena Ser, the El Mundo newspaper, Cuatro, Romantic&Chic and Paramount Comedy. She currently continues to work with Onda Cero, Yo Dona, the ADN newspaper and the Psychologies review.

Jean-Claude Lamy, graduate in Political Sciences in 1961, started his career as a journalist with the Réalités, Jeune Afrique and Geo magazines. He went on to become editorial director at several publishing houses, including Hachette, Larousse and Nathan.

In 1994, he became cultural adviser to the Presidency of France Télévision. Three years later, in 1997, he was appointed head of France 3 Cinéma, dedicated to the coproduction of French and European films. In this function, he coproduced a number of international hits such as Amélie and Dancer in the Dark, also devoting his attention to detecting new talents like Erik Zonca (La vie rêvée des anges), Zabou Breitman (Se souvenir des belles choses), Michel Ocelot (Kirikou) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis).

Lamy made a biopic on Maurice Barrès for French television and has published several books: Dictionnaire mondial des films (Larousse, first published in 1988, revised 12 times), Lars von Trier, le provocateur (Grasset, 2005) and Larousse du cinéma (Larousse, 2006).

Dennis Lim is the editorial director at the Museum of the Moving Image, a contributing editor at Cinema Scope, and a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times.

Previously the film editor at The Village Voice, he is the editor in chief of the new film web site Moving Image Source (movingimagesource.us), which will launch in early 2008.

He is also the editor of The Village Voice Film Guide (2006) and is currently working on a critical biography of David Lynch.

Dennis Lim lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Born in San Sebastian in 1965, Pablo Malo wrote and directed the video shorts Tres minutos and Nora, the latter of which was awarded Second Prize by the Basque Department of Youth, before making his first work for the cinema, El ángel de mármol, winner of First Prize at the 18th San Roque International Short Film Festival (Cádiz).

Following the screenplays Tártalo el Cíclope and Anje, la leyenda del Pirineo, earning a Goya nomination for best animation film in 2002, he wrote and directed his latest short film to date, Jardines deshabitados, garnering thirteen awards at the over sixty national and international festivals in which it has participated since its release at the Gijón International Film Festival.

In 2003 he made a big-screen version of Frío sol de invierno, starring Unax Ugalde, Marisa Paredes and Javier Pereira, among others. Produced by Luis Goya (Zine 1), this film was selected for the Zabaltegi-New Directors section at the 52nd San Sebastian International Film Festival. It has won 15 prizes since its release, including the Goya for Best New Director in 2005 and a nomination for Best Editing, in addition to nominations by the Actors Union for the actresses Raquel Pérez and Marta Etura.

In 2006, once again with the Basque production company Zine 1, he shot the thriller La sombra de nadie, with José Luis García-Pérez and Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu. He is currently producing his latest screenplay, Las huellas del agua, a social drama about an increasingly more individualistic society.