Reto Caffi member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

03.07.2009

Reto Caffi, the 37-year-old film director from Bern who received an Oscar nomination this year for his graduation film “Auf der Strecke” and won a Student Oscar last year, will be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in Los Angeles. The organisation announced in a press release on June 30, 2009, that it had extended an invitation to 134 filmmakers as new members for this honorary position.
Reto Caffi, who was honoured last year with the Student Oscar (the Honorary Foreign Film Award) for his graduation film from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and was among the nominees in the “Best Live Action Short Film” category of the Oscars this year, has been officially invited to join the roster of voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), which was founded in 1927. Members can only be accepted by an invitation from the Board of Governors. The members of the AMPAS include 6,000 artists and filmmakers who vote annually on the winners of the Oscars.



Reto Caffi already had two invitations from the Academy to travel to Los Angeles last year: in June 2008 for the presentation of the Student Academy Awards and then again in February 2009 in preparation for the Oscar award ceremony.



Reto Caffi’s appointment in the world’s most prestigious film academy is the crowning achievement of the extraordinary festival career of his film “Auf der Strecke”, which received 120 invitations to international festivals and was honoured with 50 awards. In Europe the film garnered such awards as the Grand Prix by the jury of the International Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival as well as the French “Césars” and “Lutin”, among others. Numerous television stations have also shown interest in his film: it has already been broadcast on Arte and the Swiss television stations. The 30-minute fiction film has a distributor in Germany: KurzFilmAgentur Hamburg, responsible for the World Sales. SWISS FILMS has launched “Auf der Strecke”, together with other short films by Reto Caffi, as an e-cinema screening in Switzerland.



Zurich, July 3, 2009



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