Amat Escalante

Amat Escalante (born 28 February 1979) is a Mexican film director, producer and screenwriter who won the best director prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

Biography

Escalante was incidentally born in Barcelona, Spain while his parents —composed by a Mexican father and an American mother— had been living in Norway. He spent most of his early years in Guanajuato, Mexico, but moved to Spain in 2001 to study film editing and sound at the Center for Cinematographic Studies of Catalonia (Centre d'Estudis Cinematogràfics de Catalunya, CECC) and apply for Spanish citizenship; which he failed to secure.

After his stint in Barcelona, he joined the International School of Film and Television (EICTV) in Havana, Cuba; an institution founded by Nobel prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez, Fernando Birri and the Julio García Espinosa "to support the development of national audio-visual industries" in non-aligned countries. Back in Mexico, he directed a short film (Amarrados, 2002) that received an award at the 2003 Berlin International Film Festival.