Aliona van der Horst

Aliona van der Horst
Jury member for the Graduation Films of 2020 (DN edition 7)

Dutch director Aliona van der Horst has directed international award-winning documentaries in her +20 years of filmmaking.

She was born in Moscow, Russia, and studied Russian literature at the University of Amsterdam and film at the Dutch Film and Television Academy.

She began her career in 1997 with the much-acclaimed ‘The Lady with the White Hat’ and since then has received multiple awards for most of her films, among them the Special Jury Prize at the Tribeca film festival for ‘Voices of Bam’ (2006), and the Grand Prix of the FIFA Montreal for ‘The Hermitage Dwellers’ (2004).

For her documentary ‘Boris Ryzhy’ she received the Silver Wolf Award at the IDFA 2008, Best Documentary Award at Edinburgh Filmfestival 2009, the Award of the Dutch Filmjournalists and the Special Jury Prize at the FIFA, Montréal.

Her most recent film, ‘Love is Potatoes’, a first-person doc that deals with post-memory in contemporary Russia, won a number of awards, including the Golden Calf Award (Dutch Oscar) in 2018.

Aliona has received the Jan Kassies award by the Dutch Cultural Broadcasting Fund, for outstanding achievement. Retrospectives of her work were held in Barcelona, Kiev and Belgrade. She is a member of the Documentary branch of AMPAS.