Nino Kirtadze

European Film Academy-award-winning director Nino Kirtadze was born in Tbilisi, Georgia. She is one of the few Georgian directors who made her cinematic debut in France and quickly established herself as one of the best documentary directors worldwide.

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), European Film Academy Best documentary Prize for Pipeline next door ( 2005), the Adolf Grimme Gold, for Chechen Lullaby (2001) and the Cinema du Réel award for Tell My Friends That I’m Dead and Something about Georgia. Her films have been presented at top world festivals, including Cannes, Toronto, Sundance, IDFA and RIDM.

Nino Kirtadze is also a scriptwriter and actress. During the troubled years in the Caucasus in 1990s, she also worked as a war correspondent for the AFP and for the AP, covering the war in Chechnya and other armed conflicts in the region. Since 1997, Nino Kirtadze has been living in France and working with Peter Brook, Ben Gazzara, Vittorio Gassman, Jean-Pierre Ameris, and Claude Goretta. She works on a regular basis with different national and international organizations and film schools as a consultant, jury member, lecturer, and tutor. Her film ‘Don’t breathe’ which was premiered in Toronto IFF 2014 extends the borders of documentary and places this dark comedy between fiction and documentary. Her next title ‘I Invite You to My Execution’ is film focused on the incredible story of the Nobel Prize-winning novel ‘Doctor Zhivago’ and its transformation into a cold war missile. She underlines in her film the tragic story of the novel’s author, Boris Pasternak, as he desperately tries to publish the forbidden book and is prepared to give his life for it.