BY Women and Hollywood
Women In Film Awards $33,000 to Filmmakers in Sundance
More good news for female filmmakers at Sundance: Women In Film, Los Angeles awarded over $33,000 in cash and in kind-grants at “Unstoppable — The Road to Yes,” its 9th Annual Women in...
SAG Award Winners: Viola Davis & Uzo Aduba Make History
While all 20 acting nominees competing for an Oscar thisyear are white — for the first time in nearly 20 years — twowomen of color made history at the SAG Awards last night for their...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Mora Stephens — ‘Zipper’
Mora Stephens’ debut feature film, Conventioneers, won the 2006 Independent Spirit Awards’ John Cassavetes Award for Best Low-Budget Feature. The film premiered at the 2005 Tribeca Film...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Kristina Goolsby and Ashley York — ‘Tig’
Kristina Goolsby’s producing credits include Intervention and Who Do You Think You Are? Ashley York previously served as a producer on Inside Deep Throat and TransGeneration, and she directed the...
Sundance Women Producers: Meet Rebecca Green and Laura D. Smith — ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’
Rebecca Green and Laura D. Smith have produced the feature film It Follows, written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, which premiered to rave reviews at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Jenni Olson — ‘The Royal Road’
Jenni Olsen is a pioneering filmmaker, journalist, curator and film historian. She is also one of the world’s leading experts on LGBT cinema history. In addition to The Royal Road, Olson has had...
Sundance Women Producers: Meet Susan Bedusa — ‘Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead’
Susan Bedusa is currently Senior Vice President of Production and Development at 4th Row Films, where she sets up development and distribution deals with various networks and studios. She also...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Sophie Deraspe — ‘The Amina Profile’
Sophie Deraspe fell into cinema through visual arts and literature. As both a director and a cinematographer, she worked mostly in documentary before directing her realism-bending first feature...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Marielle Heller — ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’
Marielle Heller is a writer, director, and actor. She was selected as a2012 Sundance Screenwriting Fellow and a 2012 Sundance Directing Fellow, and washonored with the Lynn Auerbach Screenwriting...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Kris Swanberg — ‘Unexpected’
Kris Swanberg began her film career at Southern Illinois University, where she studied documentary film production. Her first feature, It Was Great, But I Was Ready to Come Home, played in...
Weekly Update for January 23: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening This Week Song One — Written and Directed by Kate Barker-Froyland Song One begins with anthropology grad student Franny (Anne Hathaway) immersed in Moroccan...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Jennifer Phang — ‘Advantageous’
Jennifer Phang is a San Francisco-based filmmaker with more than ten years of experience (Half-Life, Crazy Beats Strong Every Time, Glass Butterfly). The Berkeley-born daughter of Chinese-Malaysian...
Guest Post: How the Female-Heavy Crew Making ‘Little Accidents’ Probably Saved the Production
Although it was never an intentional goal, one of the best aspectsof making Little Accidents was making a film with so many strong women up anddown the ladder of production and finance. I became...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Kim Longinotto — ‘Dreamcatcher’
One of the foremost documentary filmmakers working today, Kim Longinotto is renowned internationally for her compellingly human portraits and her sensitive and compassionate treatment of difficult...
Kim Longinotto, Rose McGowan, and Erika Cohn Ink Deals at Sundance
Sundance 2015 is just getting underway, but there’s already a lot of exciting news coming in for female directors, novices and vets alike. Yesterday, the opening day of the festival, brought word...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Alexandra Shiva — ‘How to Dance in Ohio’
Alexandra Shiva is the founder of Gidalya Pictures, a Manhattan-based documentary production company. Shiva produced and directed Bombay Eunuch in 2001, which went on to win Best Documentary Feature...
Katniss Headlines the Highest-Grossing Film Two Years in a Row
Hunger Games fans, rejoice: Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen has dominated the box office once again. Mockingjay — Part 1 has surpassed Guardians of the Galaxy at the box office,...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Rania Attieh — ‘H.’
Rania Attieh & her H. co-director Daniel Garcia were named the 2015 Independent Spirit Awards’ “Someone to Watch.” Included among the “25 Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmakers...
Trailer Watch: Ellie Kemper Flees a Doomsday Cult in Tina Fey’s ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Erika Cohn — ‘In Football We Trust’
Erika Cohn is a DGA award-winning filmmaker with a diverse background in the arts and a passion for documentary photography. (Kickstarter)Co-directed by Tony Vainaku, In Football We Trust will...
‘A Path Appears’: Finding Hope and Horror While Uncovering Stories of Global Gender Oppression
‘Song One’ Director Kate Barker-Froyland on Rewriting Her Script for Anne Hathaway, Being Typecast as a “Woman Director”
Song One begins with anthropology grad student Franny (Anne Hathaway) immersed in Moroccan culture. We witness her carefully observing local rituals and taking meticulous notes. The drama chronicles...
SF Film Society Introduces New Fellowship for Female Filmmakers
If you’re a regular reader of Women and Hollywood’s interviews, there’s a good chance you’ve noticed that a significant number of female filmmakers have shared that securing funding for...
Tony Award Winner Anika Noni Rose Gets into Producing
You may recognize Anika Noni Rose from the stage (she won a Tony for her performance in Caroline, Or Change), TV (The Good Wife, Private Practice), or the big screen (Dreamgirls). The multi-talented...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Kim Farrant — ‘Strangerland’
Kim Farrant’s Naked on the Inside sold to major networks worldwide and her award winning short films The Secret Side of Me, Alias, Sammy Blue, Beloved and Bombshell have screened at Cannes, New...
Trailer Watch: How College Campuses Became ‘The Hunting Ground’ for Rapists
The first trailer has arrived for The Hunting Ground, and it is heartbreaking and frustrating, which is to be expected given its subject matter: the ubiquity of sexual assault on U.S. campuses and...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Mor Loushy — ‘Censored Voices’
Mor Loushy graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in 2007 and has been working as a freelancer ever since. Her debut film, Israel Ltd., world-premiered at IDFA 2009 and has been...
Guest Post: Earning My Invitation into the Highly Secretive, Male-Dominated Fraternity of Magicians
Ricky Jay, the subject of my American Mastersdocumentary DeceptivePractice (premieres Friday, January23 at 9 PM on PBS), told me that the field of sleight of hand is one of theworld’s few true...
Slamdance Women Directors: Meet Esra Saydam and Nisan Dag — ‘Across the Sea’
Esra Saydam is an award-winning filmmaker born and raised in Istanbul who later moved to the US for her filmmaking career. She directed two shorts that screened at festivals such as the Seattle FF...
Anne Hathaway and Julie Taymor Team Up for Play About Female Fighter Pilot
After winning an Oscar for playing the doomed Fantine in Les Misérables two years ago, Anne Hathaway will delve even deeper into her theatre roots by starring in Grounded, a one-woman play about a...
Slamdance Women Directors: Meet Dana Nachman — ‘Batkid Begins’
Born and raised in New York, writer/director Dana Nachman’s films — Witch Hunt (2008), Love Hate Love (2011), and The Human Experiment (2015) — have premiered and screened at the...
Watch: First Clip from Liz Garbus’ Nina Simone Documentary
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Anna Boden — ‘Mississippi Grind’
The first feature from the filmmaking team of Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden was Half Nelson, which world-premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before going on to win numerous prizes. Half Nelson was...
The Big O: Ava DuVernay’s Sisterhood of Un-Nominated Women Directors — and How They’ve Fared Since
As the country celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this week, it was difficult not to think about what could have been when the nominations for the 87th Academy Awards were announced last...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Leslye Headland — ‘Sleeping with Other People’
Leslye Headland started her writing career in theater, with such plays as Bachelorette (Second Stage), Assistance (Playwrights Horizons), and the rest of the “Seven Deadly Plays” series (IAMA...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Louise Osmond — ‘Dark Horse’
Director Louise Osmond started her career at the UK network ITN in their news journalism graduate trainee program, covering stories in Europe and Africa before moving into documentaries. Her most...
16% of Berlinale 2015’s Films in Competition Directed by Women
Of the 19 films that will compete for the Golden and Silver Bears at the Berlin International Film Festival this year, only 3 will be directed by women, comprising a scanty 16% of the Berlinale’s...
Sundance 2015: The Films We Can’t Wait to See
As we reported back in December, ninewomen-directed narrative and documentary features (out of a total of 29premieres) will make their debuts at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. 36%, or more...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Ilinca Calugareanu — ‘Chuck Norris vs Communism’
Ilinca Călugăreanu is a freelance documentary filmmaker and editor based in London with a background in anthropology. As she describes herself, “I moved towards filmmaking whilst exploring the...
Guest Post: ‘It Happened Here’: Documenting Rape Culture on College Campuses
I’ve been adocumentary filmmaker for over 40 years, and in that span I have crafted film on topicsas diverse as the Barbie doll, the New York Mets, restorative justice, breastcancer, and people...
Margaret Nagle to Receive WGA Award for ‘The Good Lie’ Script
Margaret Nagle (Boardwalk Empire, The Red Band Society) will receive the Writers Guild of America’s 2015 Paul Selvin Award for her The Good Lie screenplay. Named after the WGA’s late general...
Jennifer Lawrence in Talks to Star as Diver Audrey Mestre
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Friday Barkfors — ‘Pervert Park’
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Chai Vasarhelyi — ‘Meru’
(Elizabeth) Chai Vasarhelyi is an award-winning film director and producer with Hungarian, Chinese, and Brazilian roots. Her first film, A Normal Life, about young Kosovars who came of age during...
Two Weeks to Go Until the 2015 Athena Film Festival (New Poster)
There’s just two weeks left until the launch of the 5th annual Athena Film Festival, which will run at the Barnard College campus in Manhattan from February 5–8, 2015. This year, Jodie Foster...
Chart: The Higher You Go in Hollywood, the Harder Women Directors Are to Find
We all know the woeful statistics about women directors, but a new graphic from FiveThirtyEight illustrates just how the deck is stacked against female filmmakers, especially at the studio and...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Shari Springer Berman — ‘Ten Thousand Saints’
Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini are an Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaking team well recognized for their innovative body of work, which blends an affection for idiosyncratic,...
Guest Post: #OscarSoWhite Includes the Documentary Category, Too
The 2015 Oscarnominations upset many people. When the Academy nominated the highlyregarded film Selma for Best Picture but snubbed its African-American femaledirector, Ava DuVernay, publications as...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Anne Sewitsky — ‘Homesick’
Sundance winner Anne Sewitsky studied directing at the Norwegian Film School. She has directed several features and high-end television dramas. Homesick will be Sewitsky’s third feature, and the...
Spring 2015 Theatre Preview: Women on Broadway
Broadway can be a disheartening place forwomen. Too few are represented as writers and directors, and women’s stories don’toften make it to the stage. The previous 2013–2014 season did not...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Jean Carlomusto — ‘Larry Kramer in Love and Anger’
Jean Carlomusto’s documentaries have been exhibited internationally in festivals, museums, and on television. She produced, directed, and edited Sex in an Epidemic, which premiered on Showtime....