Interviews
Director Liza Johnson on Exploring Kristen Wiig’s Dramatic Side in Hateship Loveship
After receiving rave notices for her feature debut Return, director Liza Johnson has followed up with a second film about an outsider protagonist desperately wanting in. Return starred Linda...
MMA Fighter and Action Star Gina Carano on In the Blood and What Makes a Good Heroine
In the Blood is a love story — a bullet-riddled, blood-soaked love story. When Ava’s (Gina Carano) husband (Cam Gigandet, Twilight) goes missing on theirhoneymoon in the Caribbean, she...
AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women Turns Forty; Kimberly Peirce to Deliver Keynote
When the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women (DWW) was launched forty years ago, women made up less than 10% of Hollywood’s directing ranks. Sadly, the numbers have not...
Krysten Ritter on the Life She Could’ve Led in Her New Film “Refuge”
When Amy’s (Krysten Ritter) parents head toFlorida for a “vacation” without a return ticket, she is left to take care ofher two younger siblings: Nat (Logan Huffman, V), her temperamental...
ND/NF Women Directors: Meet Jessica Oreck
Jessica Oreck makes projects large and small that instill a sense of wonder and invite viewers to question their relationship with the natural world. Her most recent feature-length documentary,...
Taylor Schilling and Wiebke von Carolsfeld on Selling Stories About Women
Actress Taylor Schilling (Orange is the New Black) and writer-director Wiebke von Carolsfeld (Marion Bridge) share a mutual passion: telling women’s stories. “I was really compelled by...
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...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Sarah-Violet Bliss
Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers are filmmakers based in Brooklyn who met at NYU Graduate Film school. They have each written and directed award-winning short films that have screened at...
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 Iva Radivojevic
Iva Radivojevic is a NYC-based filmmaker who explores themes of identity, migration and immigrants. Her films have screened at various venues, including Rotterdam, HotDocs, PBS, Documentary Channel...
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...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Leah Meyerhoff
In making her feature debut, director Leah Meyerhoff went back home — literally. I Believe in Unicorns was partly filmed in the house Meyerhoff grew up and where her mother still lives, since...
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,...
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 Liz Tuccillo
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...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Leigh Janiak
Director Leigh Janiak’s first feature, Honeymoon, came out of the NYU grad’s desire to tell “an intimate, grounded genre story.” Shot in North Carolina, the thriller owes its existence to...
Unifrance Exec Spotlights French and American Women Directors
If you see any French films this year, you’ll have Isabelle Giordano to thank for that. Since June 2013, Giordano has been the General Director of Unifrance Films, the government agency that...
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...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Feo Aladag
Writer-director Feo Aladag’s In Between Worlds was one of four German films to compete for the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale. The Vienna-born filmmaker has been a European director to...
How The Mary Tyler Moore Show Got Women’s Stories Just Right
If you grew up in the 1970s, chances are you remember watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show on Saturday nights, most likely with other female members of your family. You probably also remember the...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Anna Kazejak
The difficult transition to adulthood is a topic Polish writer-director Anna Kazejak has addressed repeatedly in her work. Kazejak made her feature debut in Ode to Joy, a triptych film co-directed...
Berlin Women Directors: Meet Sudabeh Mortezai
German-born Sudabeh Mortezai grew up in Tehran and Vienna. Her film debut was the documentary Children of the Prophet, a look at Iranian mourning rituals for Imam Hossein, the Prophet Mohammad’s...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Celina Murga
Argentine director Celina Murga was thrust into the international film scene when she was chosen by Martin Scorsese to participate in the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative several years ago....
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...
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...
The Pretty One Director Jenee LaMarque on Her Twin Obsession and Her Inspiration to Make Her Debut Feature
Being a sister is hard, but being the sister of your dead twin is way harder. That’s the sad predicament socially awkward Laurel (Zoe Kazan) finds herself in, but she’s so fed up with being...
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...
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...
Interview: Run and Jump Director Steph Green on Families in Flux and Discovering Will Forte’s Dramatic Side
The January doldrums are over. The first great movie of 2014 has arrived: Oscar-nominated director Steph Green’s Run and Jump, her feature debut. Run and Jump centers on an Irish woman named...
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...
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,...
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 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 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 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...
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...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Gillian Robespierre
Gillian Robespierre has written and directed several short films, including “Chunk” in 2006, which follows an overweight teen forced to attend fat camp, and “Obvious Child” in 2009. Her...
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...