"The filmmakers and projects I'm drawn to are where I suspect cinema can come to its full force. I do believe cinema is potentially the greatest art form, that the frame line is metaphysical. Though when the lights come down, how disappointing on screen when it's the same old f***ing shot…" Anthony Dod Mantle, interviewed by Gerald Peary in 2000. A native of Oxfordshire, Anthony Dod Mantle was first feted for the Dogme titles Festen, Mifune and Julien Donkey-Boy, and recently struck Oscar® gold for his work on Danny Boyle’s phenomenal Slumdog Millionaire. He also shot The Last King of Scotland, Brothers of the Head (EIFF Michael Powell Award-winner 2006), Dogville and 28 Days Later. An extensive traveller in his early youth, Dod Mantle picked up an interest in photography along the way, and went on to study at the London College of Printing. He was offered a place at the Royal College of Art, but feeling that – as he says – "I should probably extricate myself from an elitist artist environment", he opted instead to study cinematography at the Danish National Film School in Copenhagen. Thus commenced his key involvement with the Dogme brotherhood, which led to an ongoing professional relationship with Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Von Trier. "Once the principals of photography are learned, the difficulty then, in terms of the quality of the cinematography, is basically forgetting about the technique – not completely because you have to be able to expose the film properly – but to unleash the heart and the brain and to realise that you’re interpreting a script and not just photographing for effect." – Seamus McGarvey, interviewed by the Irish Film & Television Network in 2007. Born in Armagh and now an Edinburgh resident, Seamus McGarvey established himself with early projects that included shooting Butterfly Kiss for Michael Winterbottom, The Winter Guest for Alan Rickman and The War Zone for Tim Roth. A meeting with Stephen Frears at EIFF 1999 took him to Hollywood to shoot High Fidelity, and he has since worked on such titles as Enigma, The Hours, Atonement (for which he was Oscar®-nominated), and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. Most recently McGarvey shot the television adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency for the late Anthony Minghella; Joe Wright’s The Soloist; and Sam Taylor-Wood’s anticipated feature debut, Nowhere Boy.