Dorottya Zurbó

About

Dorottya Zurbó (b. 1988, Budapest) premiered her first feature-length documentary, THE NEXT GUARDIAN (co-director), at IDFA at the First Appearance Competition in 2017. The film is an intimate portrait of a family who struggles with generational conflicts in the isolated Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. The film has screened at more than 40 international festivals (such as True/False, Ambulante, San Francisco IDFF, MoMA DocFortnight, Camerimage, and Docs Against Gravity), was released in theaters and was broadcast around the world. The film was also shown in many remote villages inside Bhutan through a traveling cinema initiative, which allowed young audiences to experience documentary cinema for the first time.

She simultaneously worked on her directorial debut, EASY LESSONS, a feature-length documentary about a young Somali refugee girl trying to adapt to new society and culture in Hungary. The project was supported by the Incubator Program of the Hungarian National Film Fund. The film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival Critic’s Week section in 2018 and participated in more than 40 international festivals (including Sarajevo IFF, Camden IDFF, Thessaloniki IDF, HotDocs, and Dok.fest Munchen), receiving awards such as the Hungarian Critics Award for Best Documentary in 2019 and the Movies that Matter Award in ZagrebDox for the best film promoting human rights.

She graduated from the first edition of DocNomads Joint Master in documentary directing, for which she was awarded a full Erasmus Mundus scholarship in Lisbon, Budapest, and Brussels in 2014. She is also an honors graduate in film theory and history from ELTE, Budapest.

Her short films have won several awards and screened at many festivals (Verzió, One World, Astra, Doclisboa, Zagrebdox, Jihlava IDFF, etc.). She was invited to the IDFAcademy Summer School in 2015. She participated in the Sarajevo Talent Campus 2015. She was awarded a scholarship for young emerging artists from the Hungarian Academy of Arts (2015) and the National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Resources (2018). She is currently developing her third feature-length documentary GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS as a co-director. She is also a DLA candidate at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest and teaches directing for the Documentary Film Directing Master and Docnomads Joint Master programs.