Marco Müller to Serve as the Chief Advisor of Beijing International Film Festival

　　The Beijing International Film Festival (BJIFF) is proud to announce that Marco Müller, former director of Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam and Rome festivals has been appointed General Advisor.

　　With over 30 years of film programming as a festival director, Müller is also well-known as an international film critic and historian. Writer and director of documentary films about cinema (and Chinese cinema in particular), he holds the chair of Styles and Techniques of Cinema at the Academy of Architecture (Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano-Mendrisio).

　　Müller started working as a festival programmer in 1978, serving as the a consultant for Asian cinema at the Venice Film Festival from 1981 to 1995. His first job as festival director was “Ombre elettriche” (Electric Shadows) in Turin 1981: the largest-scale retrospective of Chinese cinema to have been organized in the West. Subsequently Müller served as director of the festivals of Pesaro (1982-1989), Rotterdam (1989-1991) and Locarno (1992-2000). From 2004 to 2011 he has been director of the Venice Film Festival - representing the longest term ever in the history of the festival - more recently director of Rome Film Festival from 2012 to 2014.

　　Müller's credit also include film production with work as a producer or coproducer on 14 features including award-winning movies, and Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, top-tier honours in Cannes and Venice, from China, Bosnia, Turkey, Iran, Russia and Central Asia, Brazil – and also short-films and documentaries.

　　Recipient of the Award of Honour from the Chinese government (Guowuyuan Rongyu jiang), he has also received other similar important awards in 8 different countries, the most recent one being the Silver Apricot “for outstanding contribution to the international festival movement” (Armenia, July 2014).

　　A regular contributor of essays on film to European magazines and dailies, Müller has also written and edited over a dozen books on Russian and Soviet cinema, Chinese and Asian cinema.

　　Müller’comment on his new position at the BJIFF is: “I am very honoured to have been appointed as General Advisor and I hope to help the festival develop in the exciting new directions that it aspires to”.