Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, one of only three directors to ever win consecutive Oscars® and the first to do so in 65 years, sat down with ground-breaking performance artist Marina Abramović to discuss his beautifully varied work as part of Tribeca’s 2017 Directors Series.

Academy Award®-winning director, writer, and producer Alejandro G. Iñárritu is one of the most acclaimed filmmakers working today. He made his feature directorial debut at the Cannes Semaine de la Critique in 2000 and was nominated for a Foreign Film Academy Award® with Amores Perros. His following credits include 21 Grams, Babel, which garnered seven Oscar® nominations and won the Best Director Award at the 2006 Festival de Cannes, and Biutiful, presented in competition in 2010 at Cannes. Iñárritu took home the prize for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the 87th Academy Awards® for Birdman. The following year, Iñárritu won his second consecutive Academy Award® for Best Director for The Revenant. He is the first Mexican filmmaker to be nominated for either director or producer in the history of the Academy Awards® and the first Mexican filmmaker to receive a Best Picture award at Cannes. Most recently, Iñárritu created the VR installation Carne y Arena (Virtually present, Physically invisible), which previewed at the 2017 Festival de Cannes as the first VR project ever included in the official selection, and garnered Iñárritu his fifth Academy Award®, a special Oscar® presented to him by the Board of Governors. 

Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance art, creating some of the form’s most important early works. The body has always been both her subject and medium. Exploring her physical and mental limits, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. Abramović was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale. In 2010, Abramović had her first major U.S. retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in “The Artist is Present” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2014, she completed the three-month performance “512 Hours” at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Abramović founded Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields.