Emerging Australian actor Luke Ford, 29, kick started his career by guest starring in a number of Aussie dramas such as Water Rats and McLeod’s Daughters, eventually landing him a leading role alongside Brendan Fraser in the 2008 Hollywood blockbuster The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. He has returned home to co-star in Animal Kingdom — the critically acclaimed crime drama from first-time director David Michôd – playing the youngest of 3 brothers in a Melbourne criminal family being hunted by the police.

Greek-Australian actor/comedian Nick Giannopoulos, who shot to fame after the hit Aussie comedy The Wog Boy in 2000, not only took the stigma out of the derogatory nickname ‘Wog’, he subsequently made a prolific career out of it. Ten years after The Wog Boy became the 13th Australian film to ever to break $10 million mark at the local box office, Giannopoulos has done something that few Aussie filmmakers ever get the chance to; he’s made a sequel. Written, produced and starred in, to be more precise.

Australian actor-turned-director Jeremy Sims first got his first taste in filmmaking in 2006 with Last Train to Freo, a taught low-budget thriller set almost entirely in the confines of a train carriage. Producer Bill Leimbach, while looking for a director who could make great use of limited space and a limited budget for an Australian war epic he was planning, saw Sims’ debut and knew he was the right man for the job. That film became Beneath Hill 60 and stars Brendan Cowell (of TV’s Love My Way) as Captain Oliver Woodward, one of 4,500 Australian miners tasked with tunnelling deep below enemy lines during the First World War. Woodward’s mission was to detonate an enormous explosive stockpile some 30 meters beneath Hill 60, a small but advantageous knoll held by the Germans along the Western Front in the flat plains of Flanders, Belgium. When it was eventually detonated on June 7th, 1917 along with 18 similar mines, the blast killed approximately ten thousand German soldiers and was heard as far away as London. It went down in history books as the largest man made explosion the world had ever seen.

Dutch-born French film director Jan Kounen has come a long way from filming music clips for synth-pop act Erasure. Touring his film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky as part of the 21st Alliance Francaise French Film Festival, he talked to Cut Print Review about the fashion empress, anti-romance and comics.