Return to Homs: Filmmaker Bio

Talal Derki (Writer/Director), born in Damascus in 1977, is a Syrian filmmaker who studied film directing in Athens. He worked as an assistant director on Arabic feature films and was a director for various Arabic television programs from 2009 to 2012. He was also a freelance cameraman for CNN and Thomson Reuters. He made two short fiction films and a short documentary prior to his first feature-length documentary, Return to Homs. His films have screened at various festivals around the world. In 2014 he was a member of the feature-length documentary jury for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. On Dec. 14, 2014, he and producer Orwa Nyrabia were featured on 60 Minutes, which showed footage from Return to Homs. Derki, who is also a published poet, currently lives with his family in Berlin, where he is working on his next feature documentary.

Orwa Nyrabia (Producer) graduated from the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus in 1999 and worked as a columnist at the As-Safir newspaper for four years before he began working in film. He worked as assistant director on such high-profile fiction films as The Box of Life by Ossama Mohammed (Un Certain Regard selection, Cannes Film Festival 2002) and played a lead in Bab el shams (The Gate of Sun) by Yousry Nasrallah (an out-of-competition selection screened at the Cannes Film Festival 2004). Since he co-founded Proaction Film, Nyrabia has worked on a number of documentary and fiction films. A graduate of AFIC at the Sorbonne and the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, he got his start with the international co-production documentary Dolls: A Woman from Damascus by Diana El Jeiroudi. He is a co-founder and organizer of DOX BOX, an annual international documentary film festival in Syria.

In 2014, Nyrabia was one of the producers of the acclaimed documentary Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait, directed by exiled Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed in collaboration with young Kurdish activist Wiam Simav Bedirxan. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, screened at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and Toronto International Film Festival and won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary. Nyrabia currently lives in Berlin.

As commissioning editor for ZDF/ARTE and deputy program director for ARTE, Hans Robert Eisenhauer (Producer) produced more than 50 theatrical-length commissions for TV and cinema, including Oscar winners. Eisenhauer has served as director of the Berlin Film Fund and helped to create the European Film Academy. Since his retirement from ZDF/ARTE, he has been running Ventana-Film, a film and television production company in Berlin focused on international documentaries. He is currently working with Talal Derki on his next feature documentary.