"THE great contemporary independent American filmmaker"
"Most people would find Jost's films like fingernails on a chalkboard"
"Watching a Jost film is like watching paint dry"
"Some critics consider Jost to be the father of American Independent film; being his usual ornery self, he himself disagrees"

• George Kuchar San Francisco USA
  
  
• Mike Kuchar Brooklyn, USA
  George Kuchar and Mike Kuchar started making films in there pre-teens in the early 1950s in New York City with his twin brother Mike. Their first films were low-budget send-ups of the melodramas and Grade Z Hollywood films of their time.
  
  
• Kennith Anger LA, USA
  More that any other filmmaker of his generation, Kenneth Anger is recognized by the public as a maker of underground, experimental cinema. His reputation rests on nine short films totaling only three hours' length. He was plagued by calamities that have included finance, threats, lost films, and seizure of footage by labs on grounds of obscenity. Anger's use of sound and image, rapid editing and evocative tableaux, are major influences on the commercials and music videos that permeate our culture today.
  
  
• Stan Brakhage USA
  Stan Brakhage completed his first film, Interim, in 1952 at the age of nineteen, and as of 1998 has completed 300 personal, independent works ranging in length from 9 seconds to four hours and incorporating a wide variety of innovative and uniquely expressive forms and techniques. He has, in addition, written several books, including Metaphors on Vision, A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book, The Brakhage Lectures, Seen, Film Biographies, The Brakhage Scrapbook, Film at Wit's End, I...Sleeping and The Domain of Aura.
  
  

• Yuri Zomorovich Kiev, Ukraine
  In 1987 Zmorovych was actually dismissed from Kiev Film studio for the film Safety is the Main. The film depicts the tragedy of two men, which suffered from the bureaucratic system and formal treatment of the safety condition. Well after the fall of communism in 1996 His film Portrait Without a Face was banned by the Ukraine government. Zmorovych is a filmmaker, musician, sculpture, painter, theatre director. From spontaneous moving theatre A -A ?A to Free Jazz from Kiev to Moscow Zmorovych has been a leading pioneer in the Avant Garde in Russia for 4 decades.
  
  
• Jorg Buttgereit Berlin, Germany
  German film director, Jorg Buttgereit, whose works Nekromantik, Nekromantik 2, and Der Todesking have already earned him a reputation as on of the most original, innovative and dangerous of all modern filmmakers - banned the world over. Embracing both horror and art-house film genres. Buttgereit's films deal explicitly with death, and feature graphic images of necrophilia, murder and suicide. Buttgerit film are possibly the ultimate testament to the obsession, paranoia, and politics of underground filmmaking.
  
  
• Joseph Kwick Katowice, Poland
  Jozef Klyk is best known for his Kelbasa western trilogy shot on location in Poland. Klyk started making films in Katavietsa Poland in 1960's. Klyk's character killed so many bad guys in Texas, that he had to return to Poland to kill nazis. Working with 8mm/16m stock Klyk is one of a few that has been making feature independently in Poland and is still working today.

• Lech Kowalski NYC (Paris) USA
  After graduating from The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan Lech Kowalski directed blue movies for a while. His first feature Sex Stars (1977) was a documentary about NYC porn actors. He filmed the Sex Pistols' tour of the US for the seminal D.O.A. (1981). The same year he began his long-running association with Thunders, filming him for a feature that never saw completion due to the implication of Thunders' manager in a murder and drug case. Gringo (1985) dealt with Manhattan's booming narcotics subculture and premiered at Rikers Island Penal Colony. He has recently completed The Cockney Underground Boot Factory which is released theatrically in France later this year.

• Nick Zedd NYC, USA
  Nick Zedd spearheaded the most controversial film movement of the 1980's, The Cinema of Transgression, directing twelve motion pictures starting in 1979 with They Eat Scum. Later films by Zedd include Police State (87) and War is Menstrual Envy (90). Nick Zedd has also acted in such films as Manhattan Love Suicide, Shadows in the City, We Are Not To Blame and most recently MTV's Joe's Apartment. His leading roles include No Such Thing As Gravity, Totem Of The Depraved, Stone Age Lament and King of Sex. After exhibiting his films and receiving awards at the 1986/89 Ann Arbor Film Festival, The International Poetry Festival In Gothenburg Sweeden (1989) and showcasing a retrospective of his movies at The Museum of Modern Art in 1989 and the Chicago Underground Film Festival in 1996, Zedd (Orion Jerico) edited and published The Underground Film Bulletin from 1984-1990.
  
  
• Richard Kern NYC, USA
  His sexually charged work has been alternately dismissed as "violent" and "offensive" by the mainstream press, but embraced by the underground as the perverse standard. Says Kern, "I've tried it all: crime thrills, drug thrills, sex thrills. Nowadays, I get most of my thrills by offending people with my films. I don't even have to be there. I can sit far away and think, 'Someone's watching my video right now and thinking, Yeeughh!'" - Other Suggestions
  
  
• Craig Baldwin
  Craig Baldwin began working with 'zines, film collage, altered billboards and mail art in the 1970's. Baldwin's work was influenced by the playful political agendas of the Surrealists and the Situationist International, as well as collage artists . Living in a projection booth above a porn theater, Baldwin recycled scraps of found porn into Flick Skin. Stolen Movie (1977) came into existence as he dashed into commercial cinemas pointing his camera at the screen, keeping the camera running as he ran out the rear (or often, presumably, was ejected). The film records this guerrilla art performance and at the same time intervenes against mainstream movies and viewing contexts. Raiding dumpsters outside editing houses and film labs, taping clips off TV, and buying forgotten small-format films from collectors, Baldwin has amassed a huge collection of pop culture source materials. Baldwin is best known for Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America and Sonic Outlaws.
  
  
• Martha Colburn Baltimore, USA
  Based in notorious Baltimore, Martha Colburn has made over twenty-five mind-altering short films in the four years since she first picked up a camera. Her "psycho spazzumentaries", a hyper-mix of hand-painted collages, manipulated found footage and lots of people with animal heads having sex, defy easy description. She works in close collaboration with "chaos poet" 99 Hooker and frequently uses soundtracks from Jad Fair and Colburn's now-defunct band, The Dramatics. She also produces collages on paper and has even made over 3,000 individual record covers for the Megaphone label.
  
  
• Todd Verow
  Todd Verow and his underground production company, Bangor Films, have become symbols of the do-it-yourself digital cinema age. Inspired by the works of Fassbinder, Cassavetes and Warhol and the ease of new digital cameras, Verow shoots intimate, improvised narratives that play like trashy, flashy cousins of Europe's Dogme 95 movement. Along with producer Jim Dwyer, Verow has traveled the world extensively with his actors, a devoted hipster crew affectionately dubbed "superstars." - Insound.com.
  
  
• Tom Palazzolo Chicago, USA
  
  
• Sadie Benning Chicago, USA
  
  
• Nicola Cirisola Bari, Italy
  
  
• Nanni Moretti Rome, Italy
  
  
• Pupi Avati Rome, Italy