Christian Voß is a Professor and Head of the Department for South Slavic Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin since 2006 . From 2008 until 2016 he was Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Philosophy II in Berlin.
His research addresses the interface of sociolinguistics, historiography and anthropology, and focuses on the South Slavic-Greek border region. His habilitation from 2004 „The Macedonian dialect/standard continuum“ was financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He is principal researcher in several projects, e.g. „Melting Borders“ on the small border traffic between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece, on identity issues among Balkan Muslims, on linguistic gender mainstreaming in Croatia, Serbia and Albania, and on the historical boundaries in the Albanian-Macedonian contact zone.
He has published extensively on issues of sociolinguistics  in the Balkans, especially on language decay and revitalization of Slavic varieties in Northern Greece. He edited several scientific volumes, among others „Minorities in Greece, Historical Issues and New Perspectives" (2003, with Sevasti Trubeta), „Marginal linguistic identities, Studies in Slavic contact and borderland varieties” (2006, with Dieter Stern), „Habsburg vs. Ottoman legacy in the Balkans: Language and religion to the north and to the south of the Danube” (2010), “Co-Ethnic Migrations Compared, Central and Eastern European Contexts“ (2010, with Jasna Čapo and Klaus Roth), and „Doing Gender – Doing the Balkans, Dynamics and Persistence of Gender Relationsin Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successors or States“ (2012, with Simone Rajilić and Roswitha Kersten-Pejanić).
Since 2016, he is the director of the newly founded Interdisciplinary Center for transnational border research „Crossing Borders“ and supervisor of the emerging Competence Network „Liberal Arts in the Western Balkans“ (supported by ERASMUS+ and  DAAD).
He is the founder and editor of the book series „Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe“ and member of the editorial board of „Balkan Studies Library“, „Mediterranean Language Review“, „Südost-Forschungen“ and „Colloquia Humanistica“. Since 2012 he is member of the „Classe di Slavistica“ at „Academia Ambrosiana“ in Milan, and member of the scientific committee of „Centro Internazionale sul plurilinguismo“.

"Dear readers,
Let me express my gratitude for the great honor of having being selected as a winner of EUROPA PRIMA. Since the late 1980s I am traveling a lot throughout the Balkans, including a lot of field work among linguistic minorities in Northern Greece in the early 2000s. This Balkan experience was the best thing that happened in my life – and this is not meant in the sense it accelerated my academic career. Of course it is true that working with my informants – and many of them have become true friends – has given me the enthusiasm and strong motivation to continue my research, but more important here is the lesson Germans can learn in the Balkans: a more humorous and sophisticated attitude to life.
I am very lucky to work at Humboldt University – one of the best performing universities in Germany -, which is aware and even proud of its Eastern legacy and the intense contacts to the East and Southeast of Europe. My mission here is to contribute to the overcoming of the heterostereotypisation, alterization and even alienation of the Balkans in Western European and German public discourse.
It is our common task as scholars, artists and citizens to repeat again and again that there is no normative Europeanness separating populations into subjects and objects, but that Europe can be only perceived as an addition and in multiperspectivity. Our film festivals can contribute to introduce and integrate the Balkans in a cultural and emotional map of perceptual Europe, and I hope we can establish SEEFF in Berlin as a stable and highly visible label like is SEE à Paris.
So let me thank you once again!"

Christian Voß

The Artistic Council of SEE FF is pleased to announce that the winner of the SEE Film Legend award for 2017 is the distinguished Serbian director Dušan Makavejev.
Dusan Makavejev is the premier figure in Yugoslavian film history; his films are deeply rooted in his nation's painful postwar experiences and draw on important Yugoslavian cinematic and cultural models. Makavejev's work has violated many political and sexual taboos and invited censorship in dozens of nations. In the 1950s, after studying psychology at Belgrade University, Makavejev became involved in the activities of various film societies and festivals and studied direction at the Academy for Radio, Television and Film. As early as 1953, he began making short films and documentaries and would work in various capacities at both the Zagreb and Avala studios during the late 50s and early 60s. The documentary impulse remains powerful in Makavejev's work, as does the tendency to intercut undigested segments from other films into longer works.

Makavejev enjoyed great critical success with his first three features, Man Is Not a Bird (1965), "Love Affair" (1967) and Innocence Unprotected (1968). Highly allegorical and relying on techniques derived from Brecht and influenced by Godard, these films were sardonic and anarchistic views of Eastern European state socialist milieus.

Much of Makavejev's work has been uncompromisingly experimental as well as politically outrageous. WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) is the best example of this combination and is the director's most influential work to date. Much of the film is composed of a documentary Makavejev researched in the late 1960s while in the US on a Ford Foundation grant and which was eventually financed by German TV. A witty, passionate, and often rambling account of pioneering psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and his American disciples, the material is intercut with a fictitious political-sexual allegory set in contemporary Belgrade. The film was instantly banned in Yugoslavia and made Makavejev persona non grata in his native country until the late 1980s.

Sweet Movie (1974) was made in Canadian exile, with some production resources furnished by the National Film Board of Canada. Also a disjointed, two-part narrative, it again focuses on radical techniques in sexual psychotherapy, here played out rather than verbalized. Intertwined is yet another acidic, allegorical fable of the decay of Yugoslavia's socialist legacy. Extremely violent and sexually explicit, "Sweet Movie" was dismissed (and censored) as pornography in many countries, and added to Makavejev's reputation as a "filmmaker maudit."

Montenegro (1981) has been Makavejev's greatest financial success to date. Political commentary and formal experimentation are subordinated to narrative drive in this story of a housewife (Susan Anspach) who grapples with sexual liberation and fails.

The Coca-Cola Kid (1985), Makavejev's second major international co-production, was marred by on-set squabbles between actors, and the rejection of Makavejev's intriguing plan to use a long reel of multilingual Coca-Cola commercials as a narrative structuring device. What emerged was a genuinely erotic film which takes a quirky, satiric view both of its Australian setting and the international business world.

Makavejev's long exile from his homeland ended in 1988 with the release of Manifesto (1988), a Ruritanian political farce mostly shot in Yugoslavia. Although the film marks the most disciplined, traditional storytelling of Makavejev's career, it has seen only limited bookings in the US. Also little seen was his follow-up Gorilla Bathes at Noon (1993), a political comedy based on the adventures of a Russian soldier as he wanders around Berlin. In 1994 he made Hole in the Soul, an autobiographical documentary about the changes of the society and his own life.

The Artistic Council of the SEE FF decided to give the prestigious award Grand Prix SEE ACTOR 2017 to the famous Romanian actor and detector Ion Caramirtu. 
Ion Horia Leonida Caramitru (born March 9, 1942) is a Romanian stage and film actor, stage director, as well as a political figure. He was Minister of Culture between 1996 and 2000.
Born to an Aromanian family in Bucharest, he graduated from the I. L. Caragiale Institute for Theater and Film Arts in 1964, having debuted on the stage a year earlier — with the title role in an acclaimed production of William Shakespeare's Hamlet for the Bulandra Theater. He continued his engagement for Bulandra while starring in plays at the National Theatre Bucharest and various other theaters.
Caramitru was a protagonist in a series of theatrical productions by directors such as Liviu Ciulei, Moni Ghelerter, Andrei Şerban, Liviu Purcărete, Sandra Manu, Cătălina Buzoianu, Alexandru Tocilescu, and Sică Alexandrescu (acting in plays such as Mihail Sebastian's Steaua fără nume, Georg Büchner's Danton's Death, Aeschylus' The Oresteia, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, Carlo Goldoni's Il bugiardo, and in many of Shakespeare's works). As a director of theater, opera, and operetta productions, Caramitru notably staged works by Frederick Loewe (My Fair Lady), Marin Sorescu (The Third Stake), Benjamin Britten (The Little Sweep), Aleksei Nikolaevich Arbuzov (The Lie), and Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice); his adaptations of Peter Brook's La Tragédie de Carmen and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin were hosted by the Grand Opera House in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Caramitru starred in over 30 feature films, making his debut with a supporting role in Ciulei's Forest of the Hanged (1964). Among his best-known roles are Vive in Dimineţile unui băiat cuminte (1966), Gheorghidiu in Între oglinzi parallele (1978), Ştefan Luchian in Luchian (1981), and Socrate in the Liceenii series (1985–1987). Later in life, Caramitru has had minor roles in foreign films: he was an anarchist in the 1991 Kafka, Tatevsky in Citizen X (1995), Zozimov in Mission: Impossible (1996), Count Fontana in Amen. (2002), and a Bulgarian immigrant to Ireland in Adam & Paul (2004).
For his work in establishing British-Romanian cultural links, Caramitru was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. In 1997, the French Ministry of Culture awarded him the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
In May 2005, he won the competition for the head office of the National Theatre Bucharest.