Wikipedia:Introduction (historical)

Gastón Duprat (born December 8, 1969 ) and Mariano Cohn (born December 1, 1975) are TV and film directors and producers from Argentina. They initiated their career in TV in 1999, when they created and produced Televisión Abierta, an innovative and interactive TV show where the viewers created the content.

Early steps

Gastón and Mariano met at the 1997 National Experimental Video Festival in Buenos Aires, where Gastón was a member of the jury and Mariano was in competition. They began exchanging ideas after the event and started to work on new projects. They have been creative and business partners since then. In the fields of experimental film and video they have created more than twenty works that have been seen in movie theaters, art-house venues and museums around the world. Some of the reknown titles are: Cámara de sombra (1990), Circuito (1993), Venimos llenos de Tierra (1996), Hectárea (1998), Soy Francisco López (2000), 20/12 (2001) and Hágalo usted mismo (2002)

Television

In TV, they designed conceptual and innovative formats like Televisión Abierta (1999), Cupido (2000), Cuentos de terror (2001), Navegando con Fede (2002), and El Amante TV (2007), among others. They desgined, founded and directed the cultural TV channel Ciudad Abierta (2003) for the City of Buenos Aires, where they developed new concepts for mass communication.

Film

In the area of the feature films they started directing Enciclopedia (1998) and Yo Presidente (2006); a feature documentary film coproduced with journalist Luis Majul and Patagonik (Disney Films) that obtained the First Prize in the International Festival of Cinema Independent from Mexico and the Best Prize Documentary Movie in the Festival of Malaga. Two years later they directed El artista (2008), coproduced between with Aleph Media (Argentina), Cinecittá and Istituto Luce (Italy), and received the Ibermedia (Spain) grant for film production. The film was theatrically released in Italy, Spain and France.

El hombre de al lado (2009), their last cinematographic work, won the Best Argentine Feature Film prize at the 24º Mar del Plata Film Festival in Argentina, the Best Cinematography Award in the World Dramatic Competitiion at Sundance 2010, and it was selected to participate at The Lincoln Center Film Society’s and MoMA’s prestigious New Directors New Films 2010 in New York, USA. The film will have its theatrical release in September, 2010

Awards by film

Year	Film	Award
2007	Yo, Presidente	First Prize in the International Festival of Cinema Independent from Mexico Best Prize Documentary Movie in the Festival Of Malaga
2008	El artista	Best Movie and Best Script at the International Festival of Bursa, Turkey The Audience Award at the Cinémas d'Amérique Latine Festival in Toulouse, France Best New Directors award at the 15th Lleida Film Festival, Spain
2009	El hombre de al lado	Best Argentine Feature Film prize at the 24º Mar del Plata Film Festival, Argentina Best Cinematography Award in the World Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2010, USA Official Slate at The Lincoln Center Film Society’s and MoMA’s prestigious New Directors New Films 2010 in New York, USA Best Directors and Best Actors at the 16th Lleida Film Festival, Spain