Director, screenwriter and producer, Author of a number of films, including 66 Seasons, which Czech critics named Best Documentary of the year, and Cooking History, which won a lot of awards at renowned international festivals, such as the FIPRESCI Award at DOK Leipzig, Special Jury Award at Hot Docs in Canada, nomination for PRIX ARTE and others.

 

Peter Kerekes was born in 1973 in Košice, Slovakia. He studied film directing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava in the years 1991 – 1998.

 

He eventually ended up teaching the same subject at the same institution. Although he originally wanted to make feature films and managed to complete a university degree, he has fallen for documentary storytelling ever since his first documentary about the Slovakian poet Erik Groch.

 

In 2003, Peter Kerekes directed and produced his first feature documentary 66 Seasons, which premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2003 and became the Best Central European Documentary at Jihlava International Film Festival.

 

In 2004, Kerekes collaborated with filmmakers Pavel Lozinsky (Poland), Jan Gogola (Czech Republic), Robert Lakatos (Hungary), and Blijana Cekic-Veselic (Slovenia) on Across the Border, bringing together a series of meditations on the idea of the border.

 

Made in the production of Austrian director and producer Georg Misch, feature documentary Cooking History was based on 10 recipes used by military cooks, from WWII to Chechnya, from France to the Balkans. It was premiered at Nyon’s Visions du Réel and then awarded at many international festivals, such as Hot Docs and DOK Leipzig, and even nominated for the renowned Prix Arte 2009 European Film Award.

 

His latest film Velvet Terrorists is a Slovakian-Czech-Croatian co-production and was co-directed by Palo Pekarčík and Ivan Ostrochovský. The film won the FEDEORA Award at Karlovy Vary IFF 2013 and the Tagesspiegel readers prize at Berlinale in 2014.