Nicolas Wadimoff

Born in 1964 in Geneva, Switzerland. After studying cinema in Montreal, Nicolas Wadimoff presented his first film, Le Bol , at Locarno in 1991. After The Golden Gloves of Akka , a portrait of a Palestinian boxer, which premiered at Locarno and made the festival circuit in 1992, he directed the feature-length drama Clandestins in 1997, which won numerous awards around the world. Since then, he has been working as both director and producer, attending and winning prizes at major international film festivals (Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto...). In 2003, he founded the production company Akka Films. In 2010, he shot the documentary Aisheen, still alive in Gaza in Gaza, which had its world premiere at the Berlinale. In 2012, he returned to fiction with Opération Libertad, which premiered at the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes. In 2015, Nicolas Wadimoff won the prestigious "Prix de Soleure" with his documentary Spartiates, an intense and luminous portrait of an MMA coach in Marseille's Quartiers Nord. A year later, the film Jean Ziegler, l'optimisme de la volonté made its world premiere at Locarno, before being released simultaneously in Switzerland, France, Austria and Germany. His latest cinema documentary, The Apollo of Gaza, opened the Critics' Week in Locarno in 2018. After a detour into teaching and the position of Head of the Film Department at HEAD-Geneva from 2019-2023, he returns to directing and is currently preparing his next feature-length fiction film, to be shot in Marseille, while continuing to produce projects that seem necessary and close to his heart.