>
Bill Forsyth
This droll filmmaker blends quirky but incisive comedy with bracing moral underpinnings. At age 17, Forsyth was hired as the sole assistant to a documentary filmmaker and gradually learned all aspects of production. After a brief stint in the late 1960s at London's National Film School and at the BBC as an assistant editor, he returned to Glasgow. Forsyth ended his partnership in a sponsored film company as he longed to make fiction features rather than industrial documentaries. A subsequent collaboration with an amateur theater group of mostly young players led to his first feature, "That Sinking Feeling" (1979), shot for $10,000.