Interviews
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Chloé Zhao — ‘Songs My Brothers Taught Me’
Chloé Zhao was raised in Beijing and England, and is currently a MFA thesis student at New York University’s graduate film program. She was selected as a fellow at the 2012 Sundance Directors and...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
‘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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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....
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Nikole Beckwith — ‘Stockholm, Pennsylvania’
Nikole Beckwith’s plays have been read and performed in Ensemble Studio Theater, LAByrinth Theater Company, The Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Barrow Street Theater, 3LD, The Flea, Lesser...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Liz Garbus — ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’
Academy Award-nominated director/producer Liz Garbus co-founded Moxie Firecracker, Inc., an independent documentary production company, with filmmaker Rory Kennedy in 1998. Her directorial credits...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Alanté Kavaïté — ‘The Summer of Sangaile’
Born in Lithuania, Alanté Kavaïté studied Beaux Arts in Avignon and in Paris, where she specialized in photography and video. Her first feature film, Ecoute le Temps (Fissures), was released in...
‘Zero Motivation’ Director Talya Lavie on Finding Humor in the “Gray” Lives of Female Israeli Soldiers
Since winning the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival’s top prize (and the Nora Ephron award), Talya Lavie’s debut film, Zero Motivation, has become a critical darling. Currently boasting a 88% score on...
‘Miss Julie’ Director Liv Ullmann on Adapting a Misogynistic 19th-Century Play for 21st-Century Sensibilities
After making her film debut as a teenager and gaining international fame by starring in ten of Ingmar Bergman’s movies (including Persona and Scenes from a Marriage), Liv Ullmann directed her...
‘Take Care’ Director Liz Tuccillo on Making a Movie About the Inevitable Awkwardness of Exes
You may not have heard of Liz Tuccillo, but you’ve definitely heard of her work. Tuccillo’s first credited script was “The Post-It Always Sticks Twice” episode of Sex and the City, a...
IDFA Women Directors: Meet Hella de Jonge — ‘Don’t Lose Heart’
Sculptor and writer Hella de Jonge has published two books about her youth and her family: Los van de wereld (Apart from the World) and Spring (Jump). (Press materials) Don’t Lose Heart will play...
IDFA Women Directors: Meet Katelijne Schrama — ‘Georgica’
Katelijne Schrama studied fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where she produced a short film, Daydreams and Sandman, for her end exam. Since then, she has worked as a freelance...
IDFA Women Directors: Meet Camilla Nielsson — ‘Democrats’
Camilla Nielsson was trained asa documentary filmmaker at the Tisch School of the Artsand holds an M.A. in visual anthropologyfrom New York University (NYU). Theaward-winning filmmaker has directed...
IDFA Women Directors: Meet Lia Jaspers — ‘Match Me!’
Munich-born Lia Jaspers is the director of the documentaries Tar Dakar (2005), You Drive Me Crazy (2012), and Match Me! (2014). She lives and works as a freelance author and writer in Munich. Match...
IDFA Women Directors: Meet Eline Jongsma — ‘Empire’
Eline Jongsma is one half of Jongsma + O’Neill, an award-winning Dutch-American creative team working at the intersection of documentary, art, and technology. Jongsma + O’Neill’s latest...
Pulitzer-Winning Playwright Marsha Norman on Trapped Girls and the Perils of New Play Development
Crossposted with permission from The Interval. “I’ve become an activist, which was kind of a surprise to me. I thought it was going to be enough that I do it [write, succeed]; that my example...
IDFA Women Directors: Meet Eva Tomanova — ‘Always Together’
Eva Tomanova is a Czech author and director with abackground in journalism. For the last eight years, she has worked for Czech TV,Febio s.r.o., and TV Barrandov, and as a director of documentary...
IDFA Women Directors: Meet Gina Leibrecht — ‘How to Smell a Rose’
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Gracie Otto- ‘The Last Impresario’
Gracie Otto is an accomplished filmmaker with substantialcredits as a director, writer, editor, and actress from her bases in Sydney,Paris, and Los Angeles. Since graduating from Sydney Film School...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Michele Josue — ‘Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine’
Michele Josueis a filmmaker born to Filipino immigrant parents and raised in Maryland. Aftergraduating from Emerson College, Michele relocated to Los Angeles and worked asa short-form video editor...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Jilann Spitzmiller — ‘Still Dreaming’
DOC NYC Women Directors & Producers: Meet Roberta Grossman and Nancy Spielberg — ‘Above and Beyond’
Roberta Grossman (Above and Beyond’s director) is an award-winning filmmaker with a passion for history and social justice. She has written and produced more than forty hours of documentary film...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Kirsten D’Andrea Hollander — ‘Us, Naked: Trixie and Monkey’
Kirsten D’Andrea Hollander is a full-time professor at the MarylandInstitute College of Art (MICA), where she teaches in Foundation; Film andVideo; and Community Arts. She has received numerous...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Cheryl Furjanic — ‘Back on Board: Greg Louganis’
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Olga Lvoff — ‘When People Die They Sing Songs’
Olga Lvoff received an MFA in Social Documentary from the School of Visual Arts in 2013. She has worked as an independent film director since 2009. Her recent short documentary film, Two Travelers,...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Meghan O’Hara — ‘In Country’
Meghan O’Hara is a San Francisco-based filmmaker and educator. She is a 2014 Fellow of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and was named one of the 10 Filmmakers to Watch in 2014 by...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Johanna St. Michaels — ‘Penthouse North’
Johanna St. Michaels’ first documentary Best WishesBernhard was awarded the Swedish national film award “Dokumentärfilmspremien” in 2003.Her second work, Snap Shots from Reality,was nominated...