Documentary
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Margaret Brown
Alabama native Margaret Brown is a Peabody Award-winning director whose last documentary feature, The Order of Myths, received the Truer Than Fiction Award at the 2009 Independent Spirit Awards and...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Sandrine Orabona
Sandrine Orabona has worked professionally for over two decades as a director, producer, editor and shooter to enhance her storytelling skills in the non-fiction genre. She is the co-director of the...
Women and Girls Lead Launches Online Film Fest #SheDocs for Women’s History Month
In celebration of March and Women’s History month, Women and Girls Lead has partnered up with Eileen Fisher to roll out the second annual #SheDocs, an online film festival featuring twelve...
Ricki Lake to Explore Dangers of Hormonal Birth Control in New Doc
I don’t know of any woman who hasn’t seen Ricki Lake’s The Business of Being Born. The Abby Epstein-directed documentary from 2008 exposes how our dysfunctional health care system has resulted...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Rebecca Chaiklin
The Occupy Wall Street movement receives a loving eulogy in the documentary Another World, directed by Rebecca Chaiklin and Fisher Stevens. Chaiklin is also the co-director of two other politically...
Nancy Buirski’s Afternoon of a Faun Explores a Dance Legend
Photographer-turned-film festival founder- turned-director Nancy Buirski’s first film was the documentary The Loving Story, a look at the 1967 Supreme Court case that made interracial marriage...
SXSW Festival Lineup Features 20 Features from Women Directors
Of the 115 features that will play at the South by Southwest Festival in March 7–15, women filmmakers will be represented in 20, or about 17%, of them. Two of the eight films competing for the...
Women and Hollywood February 2014 Film Preview
There’s only a smattering of films directed, written, and about women on offer this upcoming month, but there’s a few gems in the mix, as well as a great deal of variety in quality and...
Watch the Sundance Spotlight on Women Directors Panel
Indiewire’s Thompson on Hollywood founder, Anne Thompson moderated a women’s director panel at Sundance, and a video of the discussion was released earlier this week by SundanceNOW’s Doc Club....
Stephanie Soechtig’s Sundance Doc Fed Up Sold
Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo’s Rich Hill was the nonfiction jury favorite at this year’s Sundance, but the documentary that’s arguably received the most Park City attention is...
Women Win Nearly a Third of Sundance Awards
The 2014 Sundance Film Festival came to a close yesterday, culminating in a two-hour awards ceremony hosted by Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally. Women directors, editors, cinematographers, and...
Slamdance Women Directors: Meet Nailah Jefferson
Born and raised in New Orleans, Nailah Jefferson created the production company Perspective Pictures in March 2010 to tell stories that shed light on little known issues. A month later, the BP oil...
Sundance Woman Directors: Meet Tracy Droz Tragos
Tracy Droz Tragos won an Emmy Award for her first documentary, Be Good, Smile Pretty, which aired on PBS’s Independent Lens and chronicled her journey to know her father, who was killed in...
Trailer Watch: Freida Mock’s Anita
“Once I got subpoena’d, I knew what I had to do. I’m gonna tell what happened to me.” Directed by Oscar nominee Freida Mock, Anita focuses on the Clarence Thomas hearings, particularly the...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia
Web Junkie co-directors Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia came to work together on a documentary about Internet addiction out of a shared curiosity and anxiety about the effects that our technological...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Jennifer M. Kroot
To Be Takei documentarian Jennifer M. Kroot previously directed the documentary feature It Came from Kuchar, about the legendary underground filmmaking twins George and Mike Kuchar, which screened...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Chelsea McMullan
Chelsea McMullan is a Canadian filmmaker and artist whose films have screened on the international festival circuit and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. McMullan is a member of...
What Happened to the Women Directed Films from the Sundance Class of 2013?
The 2013Sundance Film Festival was notable for the number of women directors,particularly in the U.S. Dramatic and Documentary Competitions — where halfwere female filmmakers. As Sundance 2014...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Valerie Veatch
Love Child director Valerie Veatch made her directorial debut at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival with the hit Me @ The Zoo (co-directed by Chris Moukarbel). Her highly anticipated follow-up, Love...
The Good and the Bad Among the 2014 Oscar Nominees
2013 was an even-worse-than-usual year for non-acting women in Hollywood — only 6% of the 250 top-grossing films were directed by female filmmakers and just 10% written by female...
Sarah Polley, Lucy Walker, Jehane Noujaim are DGA Doc Nominees
Jehane Noujaim’s The Square, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, and Lucy Walker’s The Crash Reel are three among the five nonfiction films to receive a Best Documentary nod from the Directors...
Sarah Polley, Lucy Walker, Barbara Kopple Win at Cinema Eye Awards
Sarah Polley, Lucy Walker, and Barbara Kopple were honored at the seventh annual Cinema Eye Honors, which “recognize and honor exemplary craft and innovation in nonfiction film.” Polley won the...
Trailer Watch: Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s The Mask You Live In
Sometimes you wear the mask, and sometimes the mask wears you. After the success of her documentary Miss Representation, which details the mainstream media’s pernicious effects on girls, Jennifer...
What the F@#- is Cancer and Why Does Everybody Have It?
I’ve been around a bit in this business. I came up throughthe ranks of production and then moved into post, all the while writingand working towards helming a film of my own to make my life...
Pussy Riot No Longer a Band; First Russian Screening of Their Doc Canceled
Just a day after newly freed Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina announced the disbandment of Russia’s most important feminist punk group, the Putin administration...
Best Women Directed Documentaries of 2013
All this week, Women and Hollywood will run our own “Best of” lists to honor and celebrate the year’s best women-directed and women-centric movies and TV shows. With Hollywood in the grips of...
Crosspost: Heroines of Cinema: An A to Z of Women in Film in 2013
It’s at times like these that twenty-six letters seems awfully few. Not that this list is intended as an encyclopedia. Instead, please see it as a mere sample of the films worth seeing, the...
The Crash Reel Director Lucy Walker on Snowboarding and Simone de Beauvoir
British director Lucy Walker is best-known for her Oscar-nominated film Waste Land, a profile of artist Vik Muniz’s work with Brazilian catadores, or workers who collect recyclables from...
Few Women-Directed Films to Premiere at Sundance
A disappointingly few number of women-directed narrative and nonfiction features will debut at Sundance. Only three women filmmakers from a total of sixteen will enjoy the prestige that comes with...
Awards Roundup: Europe, Boston, LA, NY Online, British Indies, and IDAs
The first major award weekend yielded honors for directors Susanne Bier (Love is All You Need), Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda), Sarah Polley (Stories We Tell), Jehane Noujaim (The Square). Results from...
Sundance US Competition List a Disappointing Tumble from Last Year’s Equality Benchmark
At last year’s Sundance Festival, the future looked rosy, with half of all U.S. narrative features and documentaries in the Park City lineup coming from female filmmakers. It was a promising...
Chicken & Egg Pictures Helped Fund 23 Documentaries by Women Directors This Year
Chicken & Egg Pictures, the “only nonprofit film fund devoted solely to supporting women documentary directors,” announced last week that it would help support 23 nonfiction features...
The Punk Singer Director Sini Anderson: “It’s Not Hard to be Drawn to Kathleen Hanna’s Story”
Sini Anderson has worked in film for over ten years as a producer, first assistant director, and creative consultant. The Punk Singer is Anderson’s first feature length documentary. She has served...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Laura Checkoway
Journalist Laura Checkoway has penned revealing celebrity profiles and investigative features for numerous publications and is the former senior editor of Vibe magazine. Her acclaimed first book, My...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Vicki Vasilopoulos
Vicki Vasilopoulos is a Greek-American journalist whose articles have been published in The New York Times, Esquire, New Jersey Monthly and Time Out New York. She spent over a decade as Senior...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Lucy Kostelanetz
Filmmaker Lucy Kostelanetz premiered her first documentary feature Sonia in 2007 in film festivals around the world. Her previous work included two award-winning films for children, Rebeka Goes Down...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Gitte Peng
Gitte Peng is an education reform expert who served as Senior Education Policy Advisor in Mayor Bloomberg’s administration, developing and overseeing the City’s school reform policies and...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Therese Shechter
Therese Shechter deftly fuses personal narrative, interactive technologies and grassroots activism to chronicle 21st-century feminism, most recently as the writer and director of the documentary How...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Linda Hoaglund
Since 2007, Linda Hoaglund has produced three films and directed two relating to the Pacific War and postwar Japan. Born in Japan as the daughter of American missionary parents, she attended...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Sierra Pettengill and Jamila Wignot
Sierra Pettengill is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Town Hall is her directorial debut. She is the producer of Cutie and the Boxer (U.S. Documentary Directing Award, Sundance ’13) and the archival...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Dori Berinstein
Dori Berinstein is a Broadway producer and a director of feature-length documentaries about theater. Her Broadway producing credits include Carol Channing: Larger Than Life, Legally Blonde,...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Sarah McCarthy
Born in Sydney, Sarah McCarthy studied film in her native Australia. After graduating with first-class honours, she moved to London, where she worked in development for the BBC and RDF Media before...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Samantha Grant
Samantha Grant is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, and educator. In 2007, Sam was named a Carnegie/Knight fellow as part of the News 21 Initiative on the Future of Journalism and...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Beth B
Beth B produced, directed and edited Exposed. She also shot much of the film, and, with composer Jim Coleman, wrote several of the musical numbers. Beth B exploded onto the New York underground...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Merete Mueller
Merete Mueller is a writer and award-winning filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. With a background in fiction-writing and journalism, Merete has worked as the Managing Editor of elephant journal, a...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Suzan Beraza
Born in Jamaica and raised in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, social and environmental issues pervade Suzan’s work. Her films have appeared on National Public Television and on the...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Ky Dickens
Award-winning filmmaker Ky Dickens directed the documentary Fish Out of Water, which uses animation, LGBT narratives and historical analysis to deconstruct the seven Bible verses used to condemn...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Dawn Porter
DawnPorter is the founder of Trilogy Films and the director/producer of Gideon’s Army, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and aired on HBO. Before becoming a filmmaker, she was...
Trailer Watch: Maidentrip
In 2010, Laura Dekker made history by becoming the youngest person to sail around the world. She was 16, though she might have been even younger were it not for the interference of the Dutch...
The Square Directed by Jehane Noujaim Partners with Netflix and Participant Media
In another indication of just how much things are changing in the business, award winning documentarian Jehane Noujaim whose film The Square is now in an Oscar qualifying run has decided to forgo...
IDA Documentary Awards Announces 2013 Nominations
IDA has announced their 2013 Documentary Awards nominations. Among them are some of the most talked about female directed documentaries of the year including Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Blackfish,...