Festivals
2014 Athena List of Best Unproduced Screenplays with Strong Female Protagonists Announced
We need more female protagonists. According to a study by the Center for the Study of Women in TV and Film, only 11% of the top 100 grossing films in 2011 featured girls and women as main...
Berlinale Dispatch 1: Off the Plane and Into the Competition
I didn’t get to attend the beginning of the Berlin International Film Festival because the Athena Film Festival overlapped with the first weekend of the Berlinale. But I hopped on a plane the day...
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...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Sophie Fillieres
Paris-born Sophie Fillieres is the director of five films and the screenwriter of several other features. Her latest work, If You Don’t, I Will, follows a long-time couple, played by Emmanuelle...
Athena FF: Lexi Alexander Proposes a Solution to Hollywood’s Woman Director Problem
Lexi Alexander wants to be an optimist. “Let’s assume the men [in Hollywood] are not just selfish pricks,” she declared at the Athena Film Festival this past weekend, where she headlined a...
Athena FF: Callie Khouri on the Difference between Women Characters in Film vs. TV
Thelma and Louise screenwriter and Nashville creator Callie Khouri set out to be an actress, but soon realized that wasn’t for her. Staring out at the crowd from under a blinding spotlight, she...
Athena FF: Tales from the Trenches
No one group of women has cornered the market on terrifying tales fromthe trenches, but women working in TV and film definitely have a few riveting stories totell. Documenting and archiving those...
Athena FF: Amma Asante’s Belle Revisits Jane Austen Through Black POV
“This is the story of a woman who is loved.” Those are the words black British director Amma Asante used to describe her marvelous sophomore feature Belle at the Athena Film Festival this past...
Claudia Llosa’s Aloft Bought by Sony Classics
Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s first English-language film, Aloft, has been purchased by Sony Pictures Classics. Starring Jennifer Connelly, Aloft is one of the four women-directed films to...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Gina Kim
South Korea-born director Gina Kim is best known for the critically acclaimed drama Never Forever (2007), starring Vera Farmiga as a woman struggling to conceive a child with her infertile husband....
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Anja Marquardt
Writer-director Anja Marquardt was born and raised in Berlin when the city was still divided in two. Her personal and national background have strongly shaped her artistic interests. “Having felt...
Athena Film Fest Starts February 6th
Please join the Women and Hollywood team this weekend at the fourth annual Athena Film Festival, a celebration of female leadership in film. Taking place over four days at Barnard College in New...
Sundance Sale: Sony Classics Nabs Maya Forbes’ Infinitely Polar Bear
After debuting at Sundance to great reviews, Maya Forbes’ feature debut, Infinitely Polar Bear, has been bought by Sony Picture Classics. Starring Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana, the heart-tugging...
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...
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...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Kate Barker-Froyland
Kate Barker-Froyland is the writer and director of Song One, her first feature film. Her short film “Match” screened at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors/New...
DC Theaters to Launch Festival Showcasing Women Playwrights
The New York Times reports that 44 theater companies in Washington, DC, have joined forces to launch the Women’s Voices Theater Festival. The inaugural event will take place over eight weeks...
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...
Producer Alix Madigan’s Sundance Keynote: Instability of Indie Film is Worth the Risk
Alix Madigan has produced some great (female-centric) films: the Anna Faris stoner vehicle Smiley Face, Debra Granik’s Jennifer Lawrence-launcher Winter’s Bone, and Lynn Shelton’s new comedy...
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...
Five More Women-Directed Films Sold at Sundance
Some deals for women directors coming out of Sundance. Sony Pictures Classics is the new home of Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz’s Land Ho! In her interview with Women and Hollywood, Stephens...
Infographic: Women in Filmmaking at Sundance
Though the 2014 lineup at the Sundance was disappointingly low on women directors, the festival remains committed to advancing the ranks of women directors in the industry. Two years ago, Sundance...
Capturing Truth through Fiction in South Africa
The story of how I found my way to film is a funny one. I was living in Paris, and I had no money. I was working as a waitress and a babysitter, pretty much doing everything I could to feed myself....
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Sydney Freeland
Drunktown’s Finest is Sydney Freeland’s feature film debut and her response to a news story that characterized her hometown of Gallup, New Mexico, as “Drunktown, USA.” She has worked for a...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Geetu Mohandas
Geetu Mohandas is a filmmaker based in India. In 2009, along with her director/cinematographer husband Rajeev Ravi, she formed Unplugged, which produced her first short fiction film, “Kelkkunnundo...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Rose McGowan
Actress-turned-director Rose McGowan (Grindhouse, TV’s Charmed) was born in Italy and raised on a steady diet of pasta, European cinema, and classic films. Along with her cinephile father, she...
Sundance Women Producers: Meet Mel Eslyn
The One I Love producer Mel Eslyn began working on films and music videos in the Midwest in her teens, working her way up through the set hierarchies. Years later, she relocated to Seattle,...
Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child Sold at Sundance
Just a couple of days after it acquired Lynn Shelton’s Laggies, A24 (which has a good track record for releasing women directed films- last year they released Sally Potter and Sofia Coppola) has...
Sundance Women Producers: Meet Katie Stern
Listen Up Philip producer Katie Stern grew up in New York City. At a young age, she started making movies with her older brother, many of which have appeared on public access television. She has...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Madeleine Olnek
Madeleine Olnek is a writer and director who honed her skills in New York venues with more than 20 produced plays, all comedies. Her Sundance Film Festival shorts “Countertransference” (2009)...
Sundance’s Women in Film Event Calls Out Hollywood Sexism, Awards $32k in Grants
There was apparently one running theme at the eighth Women in Film panel hosted by the Sundance Film Festival: entrenched industry sexism. Six women directors and producers, representing five...
No Meaningful Change Over Time in Female Filmmaker Participation at the Sundance Film Festival Among New Research Released Today at Sundance
This morning, Women in Film and the Sundance Institute released the next stage of research on female filmmakers. Last year they released an unprecedented first phase in the work that began the...
Lynn Shelton’s Laggies Sold at Sundance
Two days after its Friday premiere at Sundance, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that director Lynn Shelton’s arrested-development dramedy Laggies had been bought by A24 for approximately...
Sundance Women Producers: Meet Mynette Louie
Producer Mynette Louie has worked on the films Children of Invention, Cold Comes the Night, and California Solo. Louie is also the current president of Gamechanger Films, which funds women-directed...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Martha Stephens
Raised in the hills of Appalachian Kentucky, Land Ho! co-director Martha Stephens longed to create films celebrating and investigating her native land and people. A graduate of the North Carolina...
Sundance Women Producers: Meet Galt Niederhoffer
Film producer, director, and novelist Galt Niederhoffer is a Sundance veteran, with eight Park City selections or award winners to her name. She is a producer on Maya Forbes’ Infinitely Polar...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Maya Forbes
Maya Forbes was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She moved to Los Angeles in 1990 to write for film and television. She began her career on HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show and has since...
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...
More Women Directors Announced for Berlinale
Sadly, not a whole lot of them. Of the 36 films screening at the Berlin International Film Festival’s Panorama event, “an overview of current international fictional-feature production,” only...
Sundance Women Directors: Lynn Shelton on the Question that Shapes Her Work and the Beauty of Sundance
Laggies director Lynn Shelton is best known as the writer-director of the acclaimed comedy Your Sister’s Sister, starring Emily Blunt, which screened at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Her 2009...
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...
Women Directors Comprise 33% of Berlinale Forum
“There is no lack of female directors.” That’s one of the main take-aways from Oscar-nominated director Lexi Alexander’s recent post on the institutional sexism plaguing the movie industry....
Four Women Directors Will Compete for 2014 Berlinale’s Golden Bear
Austrian Feo Aladag, Peruvian Claudia Llosa, Iranian-Austrian Sudabeh Mortezai, and Argentine Celina Murga will compete for the top prize at the 64th Berlin International Film...
Watch the Athena Film Fest 2014 Trailer
The 2014 Athena Film Festival has released a trailer for the February event. Watch the video below, read the full Athena lineup here, and see you there!
Jane Campion to Lead Cannes 2014 Jury
The Cannes Film Festival has selected New Zealand director Jane Campion to preside over the 2014 jury. Campion has been one of the most vocal critics within the industry of Hollywood’s...
Athena Film Fest Lineup Announced
The Athena Film Festival, the Women and Hollywood-affiliated event co-founded by Melissa Silverstein, has announced the lineup for its fourth annual showcase of works by women directors and about...
Melissa Leo Steps Up to Fund Women Screenwriters
Actress Melissa Leo has already proven her awesomeness in The Fighter, Frozen River, and one very special, very scary episode of Louie. (If you’ve seen it, you definitely know which one I’m...
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...