Entitled Somewhere In California, but known as Coffee & Cigarettes III, this was the third of the original three vignettes that would become part of Jarmusch's collection centred around the partaking of coffee. Most are fairly forgettable but this and Cousins? stood out due to the cringe-inducing blurring of reality and fiction. It stars Iggy Pop and Tom Waits and won the Palme d'Or in 1993...
New Zealander Jane Campion is best known for her Oscar winning feature film The Piano and the more recent Bright Star, but She won the Cannes Palme d'Or with An Exercise in Discipline - Peel back in 1986. Peel is a claustaphobic short road movie with a father, his son, and his sister travelling in the antipodean heat as deeper family tensions spill over in a series of immature and ultimately pointless spats.
Co-written and co-directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Jonás Cuarón, and Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine is based on Klein's book of the same name, and would be turned into a full-length feature film in 2009. It looks into the idea of disaster capitalism, in which neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance.
Neill Blomkamp was born in Johannesburg (Joburg), South Africa, but emigrated to Canada when he was 18 and ended up working as a 3D animator in America. His life changed after making Alive In Joburg, which so impressed Peter Jackson (Lord Of The Rings, King Kong) that Blomkamp was invited to turn his short film into a feature film: District 9.