New York, I Love You

Mira Nair is an Indian film director and producer based in New York. Her production company is Mirabai Films. She was educated at Delhi University and Harvard University. Her debut feature film, Salaam Bombay! , won the Golden Camera award at the Cannes Film Festival and also earned the nomination... for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. She used the proceeds of the film, to establish an organization for street children, called the Salaam Baalak Trust in India. She often works with longtime creative collaborator, screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, whom she met at Harvard. She has won a number of awards, including a National Film Award and various international film festival awards, and was a nominee at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, BAFTA Awards and Filmfare Awards. She was also awarded the India Abroad Person of the Year-2007, which was presented by Indra Nooyi, Chairperson and CEO, PepsiCo, Inc, and India Abroad Person of the Year-2006. In 2012 she was awarded India's third highest civilian award the Padma Bhushan by President of India, Pratibha Patil.
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Brett Ratner is an American film director, film producer, and music video director. He is known for directing the Rush Hour film series, The Family Man, Red Dragon, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Tower Heist. He was also a producer on the Fox drama series, Prison Break. Ratner was born in Miami Beach,... Florida. His mother, Marcia , was the daughter of Eastern European Jews who lived in Cuba before moving to Florida in the 1960s. His father was Ronald Ratner, the son of a wealthy Miami businessman. Ratner's parents married when he was in his senior year of high school, and his father died in 2006. Ratner told Aventura Business Monthly in a May, 2011, cover story interview that he "really didn't know" his biological father, and that he considers Alvin Malnik, who opened the famous Forge restaurant in Miami Beach, to be his dad, "the one who raised" him. Ratner attended high school in Israel and graduated in 1986 from Miami Beach Senior High School. He is a 1990 graduate of New York University. In 2010, he cited the 1980 boxing film Raging Bull as his inspiration to enter the world of film.
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Shekhar Kapur is an Indian film director and producer. A critically acclaimed director, he rose to popularity with the movie Bandit Queen. His historical biopics of Queen Elizabeth I garnered 7 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Cate Blanchett. Kapur was born... in India to Kulbhushan Kapur, a doctor who had a flourishing practice, and Sheel Kanta, a journalist and stage actress. The nephew of actors Vijay Anand and Dev Anand, he was discouraged to get into show business by his father. His schooling was at Modern School, New Delhi. He studied economics at St. Stephen's College. At 22, Kapur became a chartered accountant, having studied accountancy at the behest of his parents. Kapur started his career working with a multinational oil company. He moved to Great Britain in 1970, and spent several years working as an accountant and management consultant. He started his career as an actor in the movie Jaan Hazir Hai and later in Toote Khilone, in Bollywood.
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Shunji Iwai is a Japanese film director/video artist, writer and documentarian. Iwai was born in Sendai, Japan, Miyagi prefecture. He attended Yokohama National University, graduating in 1987. In 1988 he started out in the Japanese entertainment industry by directing TV dramas and music videos.... Then, in 1993, his TV drama, Fireworks, brought him critical praise and the Directors Guild of Japan New Directors Award for his portrayal of a group of children in the town of Iioka. In 1995 he went on to start his career in feature films, starting with the box-office hit Love Letter, in which he cast pop singer Miho Nakayama in challenging dual roles. Love Letter also launched the movie career of Miki Sakai who won a Japanese Academy Award as 'Newcomer of the Year' for her portrayal of Itsuki Fujii as a young girl. Iwai collaborated with cinematographer Noboru Shinoda to produce a film praised for its evocative winter cinematography. Love Letter made an impact in other east Asian countries too, notably South Korea where the film's success helped break down the post-World War II barriers to Japanese films being shown there.
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Fatih Akın is a Turkish-German film director, screenwriter and producer of Turkish descent. Akın was born in 1973 in Hamburg to parents of Turkish ethnicity. He attended the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg to study visual communications and graduated in 2000. Fatih... Akın has been married since 2004 to German-Mexican actress Monique Obermüller and lives in Hamburg-Altona. His brother, Cem Akın is an actor. Akın made his debut as director of a full length film as early as 1998 with Short Sharp Shock , which brought him the "Bronze Leopard" award at the Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland and the "Pierrot", the Bavarian Film Award for Best New Director in Munich the same year. Since then he has directed feature films such as Im Juli in 2000, We forgot to go back in 2001 and Solino' in 2002. His fourth work, Head-On , starring Sibel Kekilli, was a major success in 2004 and received several prizes, among them the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival and the "Best Film" and the "Audience Award" at the 2004 European Film Awards.
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Jiang Wen is a Chinese film actor and director. As a director, he is sometimes grouped with the "sixth generation" that emerged in the 1990s. Jiang is also well known internationally as an actor, having starred with Gong Li in Zhang Yimou's debut film Red Sorghum . He has a younger brother who is... also an actor, Jiang Wu. Born in Tangshan, Hebei, in a family of military personnel, Jiang relocated to Beijing at the age of ten. In 1980, he entered China's foremost acting school, the Central Academy of Drama, graduating in 1984. That same year, he started acting both on the stage and in films. After appearing in many television series and films, Jiang became renowned in China for his role in the 1992 television series A Native of Beijing in New York, which made him one of the most popular actors of his generation. In addition to these he also starred in Hibiscus Town , Black Snow , The Emperor's Shadow and The Soong Sisters . Apart from Red Sorghum, Jiang also collaborated with Zhang Yimou for the 1997 film Keep Cool.
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Yvan Attal is an Israeli-born French actor and director. Born in Tel-Aviv to French-Algerian Jewish parents, he grew up in the outskirts of Paris. His acting debut was in Éric Rochant's Un monde sans pitié , which earned him a César Award for Most Promising Actor. His first feature... film as director was Ma femme est une actrice , which co-starred Charlotte Gainsbourg, daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Attal's real-life partner. They have three children: son Ben and daughters Alice , and Joe . He also directed a couple of segments in the film New York, I Love You. He also acted in The Interpreter and Anthony Zimmer, and in Rush Hour 3 he played a French cab driver named George and dubbed the voice of Tom Cruise in the French versions.
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Joshua Jacob Marston is an American screenwriter and film director best known for the film Maria Full of Grace. Born in California, he graduated from Beverly Hills High School. Marston worked in Paris as an intern for Life, then for ABC News during the Gulf War. He returned to the United States... and earned a master's degree in Political science from University of Chicago in 1994 before earning a Master of Fine Arts in film at New York University. Marston also directed an episode of Six Feet Under. Marston directed a segment of the collective film New York, I Love You. His 2011 film The Forgiveness of Blood premiered in competition at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival and competed for the Golden Bear. Along with Andamion Murataj, Marston won the Silver Bear for Best Script.
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Natalie Hershlag , better known by her stage name Natalie Portman, is an actress with dual American and Israeli citizenship. Her first role was as an orphan taken in by a hitman in the 1994 French action film Léon, but mainstream success came when she was cast as Padmé Amidala in the Star... Wars prequel trilogy . In 1999, she enrolled at Harvard University to study psychology while still working as an actress. She completed her bachelor's degree in 2003. In 2001, Portman opened in New York City's Public Theater production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. In 2005, Portman received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture for the drama Closer. She won a Constellation Award for Best Female Performance, and a Saturn Award for Best Actress for her starring role in V for Vendetta . She played leading roles in the historical dramas Goya's Ghosts and The Other Boleyn Girl . In May 2008, she served as the youngest member of the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival jury.
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Allen Hughes is a film producer, screenwriter and film director.

Randall Balsmeyer is a film director and cinematographer.