Maria Augusta Ramos (Brazil)
Maria Augusta Ramos was born in Brasilia (1964) but has lived in Holland for 20 years, becoming an odd-woman-out in Brazilian cinema since she belongs to none of the regional groups that make up the Latin American giant’s identity. Though a musician by training, her films have never had a music soundtrack, unless her use of direct sound recorded on location counts as music. Her previous films are Brasilia, um dia em fevreiro and the award-winning Justiça.
Yulene Olaizola (Mexico)
Yulene Olaizola (1983) was still a student at Mexico's Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica when she made her incredibly assured debut feature, Intimidades de Shakespeare y Víctor Hugo, winner of best film awards at the Lima and Buenos Aires film festivals. She was awarded the National Fund for Culture and Arts scholarship in 2005 and is currently writing a new feature film called Paraísos artificiales.
Miguel Gomes (Portugal)
Despite its modest output (no more than a dozen films produced per year), Portugal has come of late to the forefront of world cinema. Straddling documentary and fiction on a parallel route to that of his fellow countryman Pedro Costa, Miguel Gomes (Lisbon, 1972) broke new ground with his second feature, Aquele querido mês de agosto. The film made a great impact at Cannes and won the best film award in Buenos Aires.
Susana Barriga (Cuba)
As a student at the International Film School at San Antonio de los Baños, Susana Barriga made several shorts which reveal a remarkably original cinematic personality: Como construir un barco, Patria and, her graduation thesis, The Illusion, which obtained the DAAD Prize for Best Short Film at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival. Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1981, she has been widely hailed as the brightest new talent to emerge from the island in many years. She is currently working on a new project in Berlin, on a grant from the festival.
Vivi Tellas (Argentina)
A figure of the Buenos Aires underground scene of the 1980s, Vivi Tellas (Buenos Aires, 1955) has subsequently broken with many conventions of the stage. As director, she has explored the limits of theater in her series of plays labelled Teatro Malo and, lately, in the documentary theater of Proyecto Archivos. Her recent plays include Mi mamá y mi tía, Cozarinsky y su médico, Escuela de Conducción, Mujeres guía and Disc Jockey. She has also played a significant role as curator, creating the documentary theater series Biodrama at the Teatro Sarmiento in Buenos Aires.