Documentary
Human Rights Watch Women Directors: Meet Anne de Mare & Kirsten Kelly (The Homestretch)
Filmmakers and theater artists Anne de Mare and Kirsten Kelly have been making documentaries together for over a decade. Their work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, Sundance...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Joanna Lipper (The Supreme Price)
JoannaLipper is an award-winning filmmaker and a lecturer at Harvard University, where sheteaches a course called “Using Film for SocialChange.” Her work as a documentary filmmaker has been...
AFI Docs Women Directors: Meet Laura Naylor (The Fix)
Writer-producer Laura Naylor first discovered her interest in documentary-style representation while studying visual arts and art history at Columbia University in New York City. In 2011, she...
Human Rights Watch FF Director: Meet Blair Dorosh-Walther (Out in the Night)
Director and producer Blair Dorosh-Walther (who identifies as gender non-conforming and uses both male and female pronouns) is a social-issue documentary director, an experienced production...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Iva Radivojevic (Evaporating Borders)
Iva Radivojevic is an award-winning filmmaker who spent her early years in Yugoslavia and Cyprus before settling in NYC over a decade ago. Her work explores the themes of identity, migration and...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Rachel Beth Anderson (First to Fall)
Rachel Beth Anderson, a Sundance Award-winning cinematographer, has filmed around the world in several conflict zones, including Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, and South Sudan, for...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Cynthia Hill
Cynthia Hill crafts documentaries that take a complex approach to critical contemporary issues, creating story-driven and visually rich films. Private Violence is Hill’s fourth feature...
LAFF Women Directors: Debra Granik on Stray Dog, Her Follow-Up to Winter’s Bone
Debra Granik is the director of Winter’s Bone, the 2010 drug drama set in the Ozarks that received four Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay (by Granik and Anne Rosellini),...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Alessandra Zeka and Holen Sabrina Kahn (A Quiet Inquisition)
Alessandra Zeka and Holen Sabrina Kahn have been producing documentary stories collaboratively since 1998. Their films have focused on Albania, Rwanda, India, Taiwan, Central America, and the U.S....
Guest Post: “Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face” is About Turning the Camera on a Photographer
Afterworking for many years as a movie makeup artist for Tom Tykwer, Dani Levy andWim Wenders, I became used to getting very close to people, no matter howfamous, young or old. After my second child...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Jennifer M. Kroot (To Be Takei)
Jennifer M. Kroot directed the documentary feature It Came From Kuchar, about the legendary underground filmmaking twins George and Mike Kuchar, which premiered at the 2009 South by Southwest Film...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Katy Chevigny (E-Team)
Katy Chevigny is an award-winning filmmaker and partner at Big Mouth Productions. She has produced a dozen feature-length documentaries as well as short-form films, videos and webisodes. Her credits...
Women Directors Win Majority of Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund Grants
Female filmmakers make up the majority of the 2014 recipients of the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund, a grant devoted to supporting domestic and international projects with a social mission. The...
After Tiller Director Lana Wilson to Helm Doc About Suicide in Japan
After tackling late-term abortions in After Tiller, documentarian Lana Wilson will delve into an equally difficult and complex subject in her next project: suicide. Wilson’s follow-up to Tiller,...
Guest Post: Bridging the Generational Gap Through Technology
In 2009, a documentary idea simply fell into my lap. My two younger sisters were in highschool when they decided to create a volunteer program called “Cyber-Seniors.” Inspiredby seeing our...
Fed Up Director Stephanie Soechtig on Voting with Our Forks, Working with Katie Couric, and the Power of Knowledge
“For the past 30 years, everything we thought we knew about food and exercise is dead wrong. Fed Up is the film the food industry doesn’t want you to see. From Katie Couric, Laurie David and...
Sundance London Women Directors: Meet Jane Lipsitz (Under the Electric Sky)
By way of England and New York City respectively, Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz joined forces in 2001 to form the television production company, Magical Elves, which has given us Top Chef, Project...
Ukraine is Not a Brothel Director Kitty Green Documents Where Feminism and Self-Objectification Meet
Ukraine is Not a Brothel is a portrait of Ukraine’s topless feminist sensation, Femen, which has stirred up a press frenzy across Europe. Outraged by the world’s image of Ukrainian women as...
Newport Beach FF Women Directors: Meet Regina Russell (Well Now You’re Here, There’s No Way Back)
After two decades and over fifty film and television roles as an actress, Regina Russell steps behind the camera as director and producer. A visual artist in many mediums, she has always had a...
Hot Docs Women Director: Meet Teodora Ana Mihai (Waiting for August)
Teodora Ana Mihai was born in 1981 in Bucharest, Romania, under Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship. In 1989, she came to Belgium and was reunited with her parents, who had fled the year before. In...
SFIFF Women Directors: Meet Sara Dosa (The Last Season)
Sara Dosa’s past projects include work as an associate producer on Elena and Jacob Kornbluth’s acclaimed documentary about Robert Reich, Inequality for All. A graduate of Wesleyan University,...
SFIFF Women Directors: Meet Julie Bertuccelli (School of Babel)
Julie Bertuccelli is the daughter of filmmaker Jean-Louis Bertuccelli. She worked as an assistant director to several well-known filmmakers before helming several documentaries for television. Her...
SFIFF Women Directors: Meet Jane Pollard (20,000 Days on Earth)
Artist and filmmaker Jane Pollard met her collaborative partner Iain Forsyth at Goldsmiths College in the early 1990s. After the duo earned early acclaim with A Rock ’N’ Roll Suicide (1998), a...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Sheila Canavan (Compared to What: The Improbable Journey of Barney Frank)
Sheila Canavan makes her directorial debut with Compared to What: The Improbable Journey ofBarney Frank. Canavan grew up in Boston and met Frank as a youngcollege student, when they were both...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Farihah Zaman (This Time Next Year)
This Time Next Year is Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman’s first feature documentary as co-directors. Their short film “Remote Area Medical” premiered at the 2013 Full Frame Documentary Film...
Trailer Watch: Breastmilk Doc Explores the Many Different Ways to Be a Parent and Nourish
After delving into the dangers of contemporary American motherhood in the documentary The Business of Being Born, producer Ricki Lake is back with another parenting-related feature. Directed by Dana...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Eva von Schweinitz (A Film Is a Film Is a Film)
Eva von Schweinitz is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist, working in theater, film, and interactive media. Holding a B.A. in screenwriting, she has expanded her interest in storytelling into...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Jessica Yu (Misconception)
Jessica Yu’s award-winning body of work includes her film “Breathing Lessons,” which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short; her documentary for Participant Media on the water crisis,...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Kate Davis (Newburgh Sting)
Kate Davis’ documentary Southern Comfort, a 2001 Sundance Film Festival Grand Prize winner, has won over 25 awards and continues to be screened as a seminal work aimed towards overcoming...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Sabine Lubbe Bakker (Ne Me Quitte Pas)
Filmmaker Sabine Lubbe Bakker was born and raised in Antwerp, Belgium, and has studied in The Netherlands and Brazil. Her credits include the award-winning documentary Shout (2010), Power to the...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Melissa Johnson (Love in the Time of March Madness)
Melissa Johnson is a writer and filmmaker living in Venice, California. She is best known for her award-winning feature documentary, No Look Pass, about a Burmese lesbian basketball star, currently...
Guest Post: Getting to the Finish Line
I’ve worked on Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe A La Hache for years — three and a half years, to be exact. During that entire time, I so desired to have a woman on my team. There...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Johanna Hamilton (1971)
Johanna Hamilton has most recently co-produced Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which won Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008 and was shortlisted for an Academy Award. She has produced...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Alexandra Liveris (Nocturnity)
Alexandra Liveris is currently an MFA Candidate in Stanford University’s Documentary Film Program. In 2013 she directed three shorts and is currently directing a documentary under the working...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Olivia Klaus (Life After Manson)
Olivia Klaus is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been seen on networks like CNN, HLN, Discovery, MTV and The History Channel. Sin by Silence, her 2009 directorial debut, went on...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Jennifer Grausman (Art and Craft)
Jennifer Grausman directed and produced the Emmy-nominated documentary Pressure Cooker (2008). Previously, she was the Director of the Screenwriters Colony and Manager of Exhibition and Film Funding...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Linda G. Mills (Of Many)
Linda G. Mills is the inaugural Lisa Ellen Goldberg professor at New York University and co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the Of Many Institute with Chelsea Clinton (who produced “Of Many”)....
Trailer Watch: Food Industry Scrutinized in Fed Up
“This is the first generation of American children expected to lead shorter lives than their parents,” intones a talking head in Stephanie Soechtig’s sugar expose Fed Up. “Over 95% of all...
Malala Movie Finds Second Financier
A documentary about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who survived an assassination attempt at age 14 for advocating girls’ education, is one step closer to getting made. Socially...
April 2014 Film Preview
The Big Dipper isn’t the only constellation of stars you’ll see this April — there’s a handful of actress-led vehicles on offer this coming month. By far the biggest is The Other Woman,...
Review of Freida Mock’s Anita: The Story of a Hero
The following review was originally published as part of Women and Hollywood’s Sundance 2013 coverage. When I was a young woman just starting my career, I encountered sexual harrassment like so...
AFFRM Acquires Nailah Jefferson’s Vanishing Pearls
Nailah Jefferson’s Slamdance documentary Vanishing Pearls, which profiles the devastation wrought by the BP oil spill on the tiny fishing community of Pointe a la Hache, Louisiana, has found...
Interview with Freida Mock, Director of Anita
I was able to see the new documentary Anita at Sundance 2013. Here are my thoughts. The film opened the 2013 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in NYC and opens this week in NY and LA. The following...
New York Indian Film Festival to Salute Gurinder Chadha
On the 20th anniversary of Bhaji on the Beach, her BAFTA-nominated dramedy about a group of South Asian women who take a day trip to the British seashore, Indian-British director Gurinder Chadha...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Doris Dorrie
Doris Dorrie has made more than 30 feature films since 1976 to become one of the most famous filmmakers in her native Germany. Her films include Bliss, How to Cook Your Life, Naked, and Am I...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Sandy McLeod
Sandy McLeod is an acclaimed independent filmmaker, having directed numerous music videos and short films in her 25-year career. Her short documentary “Asylum” was nominated for an Academy Award...
War Zone/ Comfort Zone: Confronting the Issue of Homeless Women Veterans
Making a movie is like walking across a tightrope. It requires balance, will and muscles you never even knew you had. I’ve spent the last few years making a documentary about homeless women...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Diana Whitten
Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts made waves in 1999 when she announced that she would provide abortions on international waters to women living in countries like Ireland and Poland. When her...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Catherine Gund
Elizabeth Streb is not just a choreographer; she is an extreme action architect. Documentarian Catherine Gund’s Born to Fly traces the evolution of Streb’s movement philosophy — she pushes...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Kitty Green
Kitty Green’s short films have screened at film festivals internationally. After graduating film school, Green worked for ABC in Australia producing content for national broadcast. Green spent the...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Amy C. Elliott
Documentary filmmaker Amy C. Elliott is drawn to America’s weirdness. Her 2010 feature debut, World’s Largest, profiled small towns that built grandiose roadside attractions. Her newest work,...