Ursula Meier

Ursula Meier
Ursula Meier in 2012
Born	(1971-06-24) 24 June 1971 (age 45) Besançon, France
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter

Ursula Meier (born 24 June 1971) is a French-Swiss film director and screenwriter who received the Best Director award at the 2008 Festival du Film Francophone d'Angoulême [Angoulême French-language Film Festival] for her first theatrical feature, Home, which won the 2009 Swiss Film Prize for Bester Spielfilm (Best Film) as well as Bestes Drehbuch (Best Screenplay) (shared with Antoine Jaccoud). The film also received a César nomination for Best First Film and a Best Film nomination at Argentina's Mar del Plata Film Festival.

A native of Besançon, the capital of the Franche-Comté region in eastern France, near the Swiss border, Ursula Meier graduated from Belgium's Institut des Arts de Diffusion [Institute of Visual Arts] and served as assistant director to the internationally-renowned Swiss auteur, Alain Tanner, on his films Fourbi [Gear] (1996) and Jonas et Lila, à demain [Jonas and Lila, 'Till Tomorrow] (1999). She won her first major film award for the 1998 short, Des heures sans sommeil [Sleepless], which received the Special Jury Prize at the Festival International du Court-Métrage de Clermont-Ferrand [Clermont-Ferrand International Festival of Short Films] as well as the International Grand Prize at the 1998 Toronto International Film Festival and a Best Short Fiction Film nomination at the Molodist International Film Festival in Kiev. In 2002, her film Tous à table [Table Manners], which had already won the Audience Award and the Press Award at the 2001 Clermont-Ferrand Festival, as well as the Best French-Language Short Film award at the 2001 Créteil International Women's Film Festival, received a Swiss Film Prize nomination for Bester Kurzfilm [Best Short Film].