Michael Winterbottom

Michael Winterbottom is hard to fit under one label. 24 Hour Party People is a sprawling, needling comedy of endless good humour that carries the Manchester music scene from the late seventies into the early nineties, while Welcome to Sarajevo is as intense as it can shout. Put side by side they look like the work of different directors. In This World he shot in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey with non-actors only, and the film is neither fiction nor documentary but a joining of the two. His improvised travel series The Trip he made three times with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. He has made literary adaptations besides, mostly from Thomas Hardy, though often moved to another time or place. In This World took the Berlinale's Golden Bear in 2003, and three years later The Road to Guantanamo won the directing Silver Bear, which the institution wrote jointly with the co-director Mat Whitecross. The same film found its answer at Independent Spirit a year later, winning the best documentary category at the 2007 ceremony, a category the institution awards to a documentary's director and producer.