DOGTOOTH

Yorgos Lanthimos (1973) was born in Athens and descends from Ikaria. He is the son of former basketball player, Antonis Lanthimos who played for Pagrati BC and the Greek national basketball team. Initially, he followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a basketball player for Pagrati BC team. He started out studying Business Administration, but later abandoned it in favor of cinema. He studied Film and Television Directing at the Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos in Athens, and from 1995 onwards, he directed films, plays, videodance projects, music videos and a number of TV commercials. He was also a member of the creative team in charge of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. After directing two short films (The Rape of Chloe and Uranisco Disco) and his first feature film as a solo director (Kinetta), finally in 2009, he gained international recognition in 2009 when Dogtooth was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Un Certain Regard Award. The following year, it received one of the five nominations for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. A year later, in 2011, Yorgos Lanthimos was awarded the Best Screenplay Osella Award at the Venice International Film Festival for his film Alps. Continuing his career abroad, Yorgos Lanthimos was awarded the Jury Prize at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival for The Lobster, which was later nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Academy Award. In 2017, he won the Best Original Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival for The Killing of a Sacred Deer. In 2018, The Favourite earned him the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival and it was nominated by the American Film Academy for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actress, ultimately winning the Best Actress Award for Olivia Colman. In 2023, Poor Things won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival.