The festival will also show a retrospective of some of Zsigmond?s best and most well-known works.
Vilmos Zsigmond was born in the city of Szeged in southeast Hungary in 1930 and studied at the College of Theatre and Film Arts. Zsigmond filmed the events of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, an anti-Soviet uprising, together with his friends. After the revolution was crushed, he emigrated to the United States with his classmate László Kovács.
In the 70s, Zsigmond found fame as a cinematographer, achieving the height of his career in 1978 with an Academy Award for his work on Steven Spielberg?s ?Close Encounters of the Third Kind?. One year later, he was nominated again for an Oscar for his work on Michael Cimino?s ?The Deer Hunter?. His third Oscar nomination was in 1985, for ?The River?. Zsigmond also won an Emmy in 1993 for the television production ?Stalin?, starring Robert Duvall. In 1999, he was honoured with a lifetime achievement award by the American Society of Cinematographers.
In the course of his career, Zsigmond has worked with well-known directors such as Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, Michael Cimino, John Boorman and Woody Allen, as well as with Richard Donner, Sean Penn and Kevin Smith. Zsigmond?s oeuvre includes classics such as ?Close Encounters of the Third Kind?, ?McCabe and Mrs. Miller?, ?The Deer Hunter?, ?Deliverance?, ?Scarecrow?, ?Obsession? and ?The Witches of Eastwick?. In Hungary, Zsigmond was most recently cinematographer for the film adaptation of the opera ?Bánk Bán?.
