Biographies
Luisa Pretolani
Ingun Olsen
Luisa Pretolani’s biography
Luisa Pretolani is a writer, director and producer, and the founder of Pahni Productions.
During the course of her career Luisa has worked extensively both in New York, where she completed her Masters degree in film production, and in London, one of her bases of choice. Her film work - whether fiction or non-fiction - generally focuses on social or political issues and unique, intimate human stories.
Luisa has produced documentaries for Discovery Channel, Al Jazeera International and others; among her latest are: Italy’s Other Religion, Berlusconi’s Last Stand and People VS the Mafia.
Her feature documentary Mandy’s Choice, edited by Ingun Olsen, treats with great sensitivity the story of Mandy Garvin, a young American widow who successfully stood up against the system to be allowed to harvest her deceased husband's sperm in order to have his child. Luisa's latest documentary, In Search of the Messiah, directed by Tim Meara, tells the 21st Century story of a world class musician's search around the globe for an instrument to play, in a time when most of the great violins have disappeared into private or corporate collections; it has screened in both the U.S. and Europe and has been selected for the Leeds Film Festival and Chicago Music Film Festival.
In her native Italy, Luisa co-directed with Massimiliano Valli a trio of inter-related features for VACA Produzioni: Tizca, Berbablu and Tanabess.
She is also writer/director for the New York-based feature Different Kind of Love, produced by Fahrenheit Films/Vikki Scott. This romantic comedy has attached the first class talents of Richard Dreyfuss, Juliette Lewis, Jackson Rathbone, Nazneen Contractor, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Selma Blair and Roshan Seth. New York-based principal photography shooting begins in 2010.
Ingun Olsen’s biography
Ingun Olsen is a widely experienced documentary director and editor who has worked in the television industry for more than 20 years, both in London and in the Faroe Islands.
She achieved an MA in Documentary Film from Goldsmiths College, where her graduate project Mirror in My Mind - a very personal documentary film about her mother's mental illness and memory loss - was nominated for the Royal Television Student Award and premiered at the Sheffield Film Festival.
Ingun has produced a number of films about artists, and her documentary about the Faroese composer Sunleif Rasmussen Breath of the Ocean has been broadcast on all the major Scandinavian channels.
She has co-produced and edited Throwing Paint Tins Off The Roof directed by Vibeke Bryld. This work - described as “a poetic film about community, architecture and social change” - was nominated for the New Vision Award at the Copenhagen Dox Film Festival.
Ingun is currently developing Locking Up the Innocent, a feature documentary about immigrant children kept in UK detention centres. She is also presently co-producing Tell My Story, directed by the Israeli filmmaker Shira Lavy, about a Bedouin woman in South Israel who battles an abusive ex-husband for custody of her eight children.