Jonathan Nossiter

'Jonathan Nossiter, an American and Brazilian citizen raised primarily in Europe, is a Sundance winning and a Cannes Palme d'or and Berlin Golden Bear nominated film director.

Early life

The son of Washington Post and New York Times foreign correspondent Bernard Nossiter, he was born in the United States in 1961. He grew up in France, England, Italy, Greece and India. He studied painting at the Beaux Arts in Paris and at the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as Ancient Greek at Dartmouth College (Phi Beta Kappa, Senior Fellow.) After work as an assistant director in the theatre in England (The Newcastle Playhouse, King's Head), he went to New York where he landed a job moving office furniture for the film Fatal Attraction, which led to a position as assistant to the director Adrian Lyne for the length of the shoot.

Film career

It was during the filming of Fatal Attraction that Nossiter met Quentin Crisp, who later became the star of his first feature film, Resident Alien, a hybrid fiction-documentary also starring John Hurt and Holly Woodlawn. Theatrically released in 1991, after premieres at the Berlin and Toronto Film Festivals, Resident Alien, which he wrote, produced and directed, is a comic portrait of the last, tattered days of New York’s bohemian underground. It was rereleased in 2005 on DVD in the US in an edition with a later, twinned film Losing The Thread, a comedy about art world follies and the triumph of tourism in Florence, Italy. His second feature film Sunday (1997), which he produced with Alix Madigan, co-wrote with James Lasdun and directed, won the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize for Best Film and Waldo Salt award for Best Screenplay and the Deauville Film Festival's Grand Prize for Best Film and their International Critics' Prize, as well as earning a selection in Un Certain Regard in Cannes. Starring David Suchet, Sunday is a dark romantic comedy about the travails of an unemployed IBM employee among the homeless in Queens and his fairy tale one day love affair with an ageing actress.

Nossiter’s subsequent feature, Signs and Wonders (2000), starred Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgård. Shot in Greece and produced by MK2 and Nick Wechsler (the only film Nossiter did not act as a producer), this psychological thriller was nominated for a Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival in 2000.

His fourth feature film, Mondovino (2004), which he produced, directed, shot and edited, is a documentary set in the real world of wine. It was nominated for the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 2004 (one of only four documentaries ever nominated in the history of the festival). It was also the only documentary ever nominated for Best European Film at the Césars in 2005. A 10 part series derived from the feature, which he also directed and produced, was given a gala premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and released by Diaphana on DVD in France in 2006. It was released in the US in 2007 and has been shown on television in more than 20 countries.

"Rio Sex Comedy" (2010), which he wrote and directed, stars Charlotte Rampling (his second feature with the actress), Irène Jacob, Bill Pullman and Fisher Stevens. The film was produced as a cooperative, with all actors and technicians paid the same salary and sharing ownership of the film. It had its world premiere in a Gala screening at the Toronto Film Festival and was released theatrically and on vod and dvd in 2011. Mixing screwball comedy and documentary improvisation, actors and favela residents with downtown and uptown Rio characters (including world famous plastic surgeon Ivo Pitanguy), the film is a wild comedy of manners about the new age of narcissism. http://www.jonathan-nossiter.com/#!rio-sex-comedy/c1clj

His sixth feature film, Natural Resistance (2014), premièred in two different sections of the Berlin Film Festival (Panorama and Culinary Cinema) and has been released in France, Italy (2014), the US, UK (2015) and other countries. Returning to the wine world ten years after Mondovino, Nossiter traces the revolution of four Italian natural winegrowers, as well as the fight to preserve cinema culture lead by Gian Luca Farinelli of the Cineteca di Bologna, in a meditation on the relationship between culture and agriculture. http://www.jonathan-nossiter.com/#!natural-resistance/c1iv8

Nossiter's other films include Losing The Thread for RAI in Italy and the Sundance Channel in the US (premiere Rotterdam Festival 2001) and Searching for Arthur, a look at Arthur Penn in New York, for Telepiu's Italian series Directors on Directors (premiere at Locarno Festival 1997), Making Mischief (2000), Alsatian Resistance (2014) and "Desistenza a Milano" (2014), both of which appear as bonus films on various DVD releases of Natural Resistance.

Nossiter was President of the Jury at the Locarno Film Festival (2009) and president of the Jury of the Rome Film Festival (2014) and has served on film festival juries all over the world.

Wine

A trained sommelier, he has made wine lists and trained staff for a variety of restaurants in New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Rome, including Balthazar, “Rice”, “Il Buco” “Man Ray”, “Roberta Sudbrack”, Claude Troisgros, “Aprazivel” and "Flavio Velavevodetto".

His book "Taste & Power" in France, "Liquid Memory" in the US and UK (French: Le Goût et le Pouvoir), was published in 2007 by Editions Grasset in France, where it was a bestseller. It won the World Gourmand Book Awards fro Best book of Wine literature (2008) with enthusiastic reviews from all the major publications, including Télérama who wrote " his voice speaks with contagious emotion" , Le Monde, who described it as "a call to liberty" and Le Figaro who called it " a vitriolic attack on the staid world of wine" . Consequently, it received varied reactions from the wine community, including from one of the book's principal targets Robert M. Parker, Jr who accused Nossiter of stupidity and bigotry.

An English edition of the book, entitled Liquid Memory, translated and re-written by Nossiter, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2009. It also garnered positive reviews and attention, including the New York Times, which called it "extremely entertaining, especially when Nossiter’s hackles are raised, which (happily for the reader) is a lot of the time." Bill Buford, founder of Granta, former New Yorker literary editor and author of "Heat" wrote "In the two thousand-year history of writings on food and wine, Liquid Memory is unique." And went on to praise it as "the greatest book ever written about wine." http://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Memory-Why-Wine-Matters/dp/B0046LUIHY?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

The book has also been published in Portugal, Japan, Greece, the UK, Brazil and Italy. The Italian edition published by Einaudi as " Le Vie del Vino" won the award for “Best book on wine and culture” at the Pescara Festival. He is currently writing a new book for the French publisher Stock, tentatively titled "Cultural Insurrection." http://www.premiersplans.org/festival/selection_officielle-jurys.php, http://www.jonathan-nossiter.com/#!biography/cjg9

See also

• List of wine personalities

External links

• Jonathan Nossiter at IMDb
• Jonathan Nossiter's official site