Zara Dwinger is an upcoming director who loves to make visually playful films with a heart. She loves to tell stories about typical and endearing characters in a lighthearted but honest way. She likes to combine the real with the unreal; mostly by working with inexperienced, ‘real’ cast put in a colorful and stylized world.

After a studies in Cultural Anthropology and doing editorial work for online cultural magazine hard//hoofd, Zara found her true passion was filmmaking. She graduated from the Dutch Film Academy as a director in 2017. There she made the colorful short LIV, which is featured on Short of the Week, and her critically acclaimed graduation film Sirene. The latter, a coming-of-age film about confusion and identity, won several prizes internationally, was selected for many film festivals all over the world and premiered at the prestigious Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival. In school she also made a commercial about cyberbullying which got nominated for the Porsche International Student Advertising Film Award in Germany.

After graduating she got signed by commercial production company Wefilm, where she made among others the Christmas ad for the biggest Dutch theme park, Efteling.

She is currently working on a short fiction film for NTR Kort!, a colorful and contemporary take on Romeo and Juliet about two teenage girls in a juvenile detention center.