HOMO SAPIENS

Nikolaus Geyrhalter is a director, producer, and cameraman, born in Vienna in 1972. In 1994, when he was 22 years old, he founded his own production company Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion which focuses on documentaries and amateur fiction. He made his first film, Eisenerz, in 1992. Two years later, he shot his first documentary, Washed Ashore (1994) narrating a story about the river Danube and often strange idiosyncrasies of the people who live along its banks. Geyrhalter’s static-camera, well-paced observational films tackle their subjects head-on, whether it’s exploring the terrain in Chernobyl, Ukraine (Pripyat, 1999), tracing the route of the Dakar Rally (7915 KM, 2008), or investigating the production of processed foods (Our Daily Bread, 2005). In 2003, he received the Austrian State Award for Film Art and in 2008 his film Our Daily Bread won the Grimme Prize. Throughout the years, his films were nominated for and won numerous other awards in the world’s most renowned festivals, including (among others) IDFA, the Berlinale, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, IndieLisboa, DocSheffield, Cinéma du Réel, Diagonale, and, most recently, Locarno.