Interviews
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Norah Shapiro — ‘Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile’
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Lesley Chilcott — ‘A Small Section of the World’
ProducerLesley Chilcott partnered with Davis Guggenheim on the 2006 AcademyAward-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary feature It Might Get Loud (2009), the Barack Obama...
‘Beyond the Lights’ Director Gina Prince-Bythewood on Being Inspired by Alicia Keyes and the Search for Her Birth Mother
Given the central role that overt sexuality plays in female pop and hip-hop stardom, I’m sure we’ve all wondered what the performers are thinking as they parade down the red carpet, on stage, or...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Abby Ginzberg — ‘Soft Vengeance’
Filmmaker Abby Ginzberg has been producing and directing award-winning documentary films for nearly three decades. Her most recent feature-length documentary, Soft Vengeance: Albie Sachs and the New...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Mary Dore — ‘She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’
Mary Dore is an award-winning documentary producer who brings an activist perspective to her films. Dore grew up in Auburn, Maine, and began her career working with a Boston film collective that...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Geeta V. Patel — ‘Meet the Patels’
Geeta V. Patel is writer/director of the upcoming feature film Mouse. Patel made her directorial debut with the documentary war thriller Project Kashmir, which led to directing fellowships at...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Rachel Lears — ‘The Hand That Feeds’
RachelLears’ most recent feature documentary, TheHand That Feeds, co-directed with Robin Blotnick, won the audience awardfor best feature at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2014, Best of...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Natasha Verma — ‘Hardy’
Natasha Vermawas born in New York City and raised in South Texas. She is a 20-year oldtelevision journalist, producer, and filmmaker. Her work has been featured onABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox News. Verma...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Yuki Kokubo — ‘Kasamayaki’
Yuki Kokubo is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in NewYork City. Raised in an artists’ community in rural Japan, Kokubo and her familyrelocated to New York City in 1986. She began...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Jessica Solce — ‘No Control’
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Sara Newens & Mina T. Son — ‘Top Spin’
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Pamela Yates — ‘Disruption’
Pamela Yates is the co-founder of Skylight Pictures, a company dedicated to making films and advanced digital media abouthuman rights and the quest for justice. Her previous film Granito: How to...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Ursula Liang — ‘9-Man’
Ursula Liang is a journalist who has worked in a wide range of media, including posts at ESPN The Magazine, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The New York Times Op-Docs, and StirTV. She is the...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Linda Hoaglund — ‘The Wound and The Gift’
Linda Hoaglund was born in Japan as the daughter of American missionaryparents and raised in rural Japan, where she attended Japanese public schools.A graduate of Yale University, she subtitled 200...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Stephanie Wang-Breal — ‘Tough Love’
Stephanie Wang-Breal has been producing and directing commercials, television shows, anddocumentaries for the past 10 years. Tough Love is Wang-Breal’s second feature-length documentary. The film...
DOC NYC Directors: Meet Andrea B. Scott — ‘Florence, Arizona’
Andrea B. Scott is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker, editor, and writer. She was an editor and an associate producer on A Place at the Table, directed by Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush,...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Sarah Teale & Lisa F. Jackson — ‘Grazers: A Cooperative Story’
Sarah Teale hasproduced a number of films for HBO, including the recent four-part series TheWeight of the Nation, which was nominated for a Primetime Emmy; Dealing Dogs(Emmy-nominated for Best...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Victoria Campbell — ‘Monsieur Le Président’
I am a visual artist, performer, and filmmaker. My first film, House of Bones, is a personal memoir and meditation on family, past and present, and the way a house/space defines a person.The film...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Brenda Goodman — ‘Sex(Ed)’
AFI Fest Women Directors: Meet Sarah Adina Smith — ‘The Midnight Swim’
Crosspost: Broadway Actress Erin Davie on Being Called “Weird” and Avoiding the Typical Ingenue Roles
Crossposted from The Interval with permission of the author. We took Erin Davie to Coney Island to talk to her about starring in the Broadway revival of Side Show, and it was an adventure. There...
‘See No Evil 2’ Directors Jen and Sylvia Soska on Reinventing Horror and the Benefits of a Creative Partnership (VIDEO)
Crosspost: Tony-Winning Theater Director Susan Stroman on What’s Changed for Women in the Last Ten Years
Originally published on and cross-posted with permission from The Interval. Let’s just start with some facts. Susan Stroman has won five Tony Awards and has received an additional nine...
‘Sleeping with the Fishes’ Director Nicole Gomez Fisher on the Need for Diversity and the Unexpected Rewards of Low Budgets
Family — love them, hate them, or the complicated in-between, they are rarely easy. In the semi-autobiographical Latino-Jewish comedy Sleeping with the Fishes, Lexie Fish (Gina Rodriguez, now...
Crosspost: Romola Garai on Sexism in Film and Theater and Feeling Like a “Commodity”
Cross-posted with permission from The Interval. When we saw the announcement of Romola Garai’s casting in Indian Ink, we e-mailed The Roundabout right away — seriously, like within ten...
LFF Women Directors: Lynette Wallworth — ‘Tender’
Lynette Wallworth is an Australianartist/filmmaker whose immersive video installations and film works reflect onthe connections between people and the natural world and explore fragile states of...
LFF Women Directors: Rebecca Johnson — ‘Honeytrap’
Layla (Jessica Sula) is 15 and has been living in Trinidad. Returned to her estranged mother in London, she is faced with settling into a new home and a new city with a fresh set of rules and codes....
Crosspost: Tony-Nominated Writer Sarah Ruhl on Plays About Motherhood and Challenging Theater’s Male Domination
The following has been cross-posted with permission from The Interval. “You should know about me arranging playdates for my daughter,” says Sarah Ruhl as she runs into a friend during the course...
LFF Women Directors: Meet Corinna McFarlane — ‘The Silent Storm’
On a remote Scottish island in the 1950s, Aislin (Andrea Riseborough) lives with her minister husband Balor (Damian Lewis). He is a man of sudden and violent mood swings and stern religiosity....
Susanne Bier on ‘A Second Chance,’ ‘Serena,’ and Her Upcoming Mary, Queen of Scots Biopic
Susanne Bier is one of the most respected and well-known women directors in the world. One of three female filmmakers to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, the prolific Danish helmer’s...
Woodstock Film Festival Women Directors: Jenna Ricker — ‘The American Side’
There’s three sides to every story. The truth, the lie, and the American Side. Following a mysterious suicide at Niagara Falls, a low-rent detective unravels a conspiracy to build a revolutionary...
LFF Women Directors: Josephine Decker — ‘Butter on the Latch’ & ‘Thou Wast Mild and Lovely’
One of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of 2013, Josephine Decker makes films, performances, and friends in strange places. Her newest two films, Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and...
LFF Women Directors: Desiree Akhavan and Cecilia Frugiuele — ‘Appropriate Behaviour’
Appropriate Behavior writer-director Desiree Akhavan is the Iranian-American co-creator and star of the criticallyacclaimed web series The Slope, acomedy that follows a pair of superficial,...
LFF Women Directors: Shira Geffen — ‘Self Made’
Self Made’s opening scene sees a young woman sleeping contentedly, only for her bed to suddenly give way and collapse underneath her. It is a moment that is at once dreamlike and shocking, and it...
London Film Fest Director Clare Stewart on Cinephilia as a Religion and Her Advice to Future Programmers
As the Director of the London Film Festival and the Head of Exhibition at the BFI, Clare Stewart has curated and will showcase nearly 250 films this month. The London festival will run from October...
Makers Presents ‘Women in Hollywood’; ‘Maleficent’ Screenwriter Linda Woolverton on What’s Changed and What Hasn’t
Tonight, the Makers documentary series continues with a look at women in Hollywood. There are some great interviews, including one with Jane Fonda, where she talks about how she was able to get her...
A Woman You Should Know: Margaret Nagle — Developer of the Red Band Society and the Writer of The Good Lie
Margaret Nagle was one of the first women in met in Hollywood who told me really what it was like to be a working woman in Hollywood. She told me about unbelievable (which I totally believed)...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Mami Sunada — ‘The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness’
Mami Sunada was born in Tokyoand studied documentary filmmaking at Keio University. She broke into film by assisting director Hirokazu Kore-eda on StillWalking and Air Doll. She also wrote and...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Boo Ji-Young — ‘Cart’
Boo Ji-Young attended the Korean Academy of Film Arts. She directed the feature film Sisters on the Road (2009), as well as four shorts: Spark (1997), His Humming (2000), A Drop of Clear Salty...
Fort Bliss Director Claudia Myers on Women in the Military and the Difficulties of Balancing Motherhood and Film
There are many films about the harrowing experiences of war, but not nearly enough about women soldiers — especially women with families. Returning home after serving her tour in Afghanistan...
Guest Post: ‘Srugim’ Brings Orthodox Jewish Women’s Feminist Struggles to the Small Screen
The Israeli series Srugim, which ran from 2008 to 2011, was a watershed moment for how women areportrayed on Israeli television. The show raised the bar particularly with its sympathetic depiction...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Megha Ramaswamy — ‘Newborns’
MeghaRamaswamy is a Mumbai-based screenwriter and director. She wrote the screenplayfor the feature film Shaitan, and wroteand directed the fictional short Bunny. (TIFF official site) Her 8-minute...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Shahad Ameen — ‘Eye & Mermaid’
Shahad Ameen was born and raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Realizing at an early age that she could not make her dream of becoing a professional soccer player come true in Saudi Arabia, she turned to...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Carolina Markowicz and Fernanda Salloum — ‘Tatuapé Mahal Tower’
Carolina Markowicz is a director and screenwriter from São Paulo, Brazil. She has directed the short film 69-Luz Square, which won several awards in many festivals around the world, including Bst...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Nanna Kristín Magnúsdóttir — ‘Playing with Balls’
Nanna Kristín Magnúsdóttir is an Icelandic actress,producer, and VFS (Vancouver Film School) graduate who has receivednumerous nominations and awards for her work both in Iceland...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Sarah Galea-Davis — ‘An Apartment’
Sarah Galea-Davis is an award-winning director, writerand producer. She works in both fiction and documentary filmmaking. Her last short film, Can You Wave Bye-Bye?, won Best Short Film at the...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Torill Kove — ‘Me and My Moulton’
Torill Kove is an award-winning director, animator, illustrator, and author. Born in Hamar, Norway, Kove lived in Kenya before moving to Montreal in 1982 to attend Concordia University. She went on...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Caroline Mailloux — ‘The Barnhouse’
The Barnhouse is the third short film written and directed by Caroline Mailloux. Her films Motel Pluton and Cher Dieu (Dear God) both enjoyed much success on the festival circuit, and Cher Dieu was...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Amanda Strong — ‘Indigo’
Amanda Strong is a filmmaker and media artist working in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Making use of diverse media (film, photography and illustration) and artistic collaboration, her work seeks...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Johanne Ste-Marie — ‘Migration’
Johanne Ste-Marie is a Montreal native who dove head firstinto the burning ring of animation after graduating with a BFA in FilmAnimation from Concordia University. In 2002, she formed an art duo,...
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Michelle Latimer — ‘The Underground’
Michelle Latimer, writer and director of the dramatic short The Underground, is an actor, filmmaker, and curator. Her award-winning documentary Aliaspremiered at the 2013 Hot Docs Film Festival...