Saturday, June 14-----Marius Holst is a Norwegian filmmaker who was born in 1965 in Oslo and trained at the London International Film School. He became internationally known for his feature film CROSS MY HEART AND HOPE TO DIE, which won the Blue Angel Award at the 1995 Berlin Film Festival. After spending time directing big budget commercials, he returned in 2001 to the world of feature filmmaking with the film DRAGONFLY. His third film MIRUSH, an intense family drama about a young boy from Kosovo who travels to Norway to find the father who ran away when he was a baby, is in the Official Competition at Festroia.

"In the late 1990s, I went to Kosovo during the war and made a documentary where I met this boy who told me that his father had gone to Germany and never returned. He sent money and letters home, but one day the money and letters stopped coming. The boy told me that when he was older, he would go to Germany and find his father. So that story stuck with me, because it is a very common one in several countries. In fact, it happened to me. My fater disappeared or left when I was very young, but I never went looking for him.

Since the emotions and feelings are pretty much the same, I believe that telling the story with a Kosovo boy would make the story stronger, with a canvas more relevant to today's Europe.

I work in both documentary and feature films, because for me, good fiction needs authenticity in the characters. And, in that sense, good documentaries always beat good fiction, because there is nothing more authentic than real life."