Ursula Meier

Ursula Meier (born 24 June 1971) is a French-Swiss film director and screenwriter. Career A native of Besançon, the capital of the Franche-Comté region in eastern France, near the Swiss border, Ursula Meier graduated from Belgium's Institut des Arts de Diffusion [Institute of Visual Arts] and served as assistant director to the Swiss auteur, Alain Tanner, on his films Fourbi (Gear) (1996) and Jonas et Lila, à demain (Jonas and Lila, 'Till Tomorrow) (1999). She won her first major film award for the 1998 short, Des heures sans sommeil (Sleepless), which received the Special Jury Prize at the Festival International du Court-Métrage de Clermont-Ferrand as well as the International Grand Prize at the 1998 Toronto International Film Festival and a Best Short Fiction Film nomination at the Molodist International Film Festival in Kyiv. In 2002, her film Tous à table (Table Manners), which had already won the Audience Award and the Press Award at the 2001 Clermont-Ferrand Festival, as well as the Best French-Language Short Film award at the 2001 Créteil International Women's Film Festival, received a Swiss Film Prize nomination for Best Short Film. In 2003, Ursula Meier served as a member of the jury at the Brest European Short Film Festival and won the Cinema Prize – Feature Film award at Portugal's Avanca Film Festival as well as a nomination for the Swiss Film Prize as best feature film for her made-for-TV movie, Strong Shoulders. In April, with the selection of Strong Shoulders for New York City's New Directors/New Films Festival at the Museum of Modern Art and Film Society of Lincoln Center, she made the journey to introduce the film and participate in question-and-answer sessions.