Nino Kirtadze

Academy-award-winning director Nino Kirtadze is internationally renowned for her sensitive and compassionate approach to difficult issues and her intense visual sense. Her powerful feature-length documentaries deal with controversial subjects, always placing the accent on the human drama underlying her stories and creating deep insightful human portraits. Her camera turns the natural into the supernatural and back again, blending together the personal and the universal without black and white romanticism. Nino Kirtadze's films have won international acclaim and numerous prestigious awards at festivals worldwide, including World Cinema Best Director Prize at Sundance for her "Durakovo-village of fools" (2008) and European Film Academy Best documentary Prize for "Pipeline next door" (2005), also awarded by the Grand Jury Prize and the John Templeton Award at Visions du REEL, Switzerland. Other highlights include Germany's top documentary award, the Adolf Grimme Golden Prize, for "Chechen Lullaby" (2002) and the Golden Fipa, France's top creative documentary award and the Cinema du Reel Louis Marcorelles Prize for "Tell my friends that I'm dead"(2004). Her film "Something about Georgia" won the Idee Suisse TSR Prize at Visions du Reel 2010.

Nino Kirtadze was born in Tbilisi, Georgia. She holds a degree in literature. Her script for a full-length feature film ("Monday") won the best script award from the Georgian Union of Cinematographers in 1991. She began her acting career by playing the lead role in a "Chef in love" a film by Nana Djordjadze which was selected at Cannes in 1996 and nominated for an Oscar. During the troubles of the 1990s in the Caucasus, she worked as a war correspondent for AFP and for AP, covering the war in Chechnya and other armed conflicts in the region. Since 1997, Nino Kirtadze has lived in France, where she has worked with Peter Brook, Jean-Pierre Ameris, Philippe Monnier, Claude Goretta and Olivier Langlois. Kirtadze is member of the French writers' and directors' society La SCAM and a member of the European film Academy. Nino Kirtadze collaborates on a regular basis with different national and international organizations as a consultant, jury, lecturer, and tutor.