Female-led films swept the awards at this year’s edition of Sundance Film Festival: London. Coming-of-age comedy “Eighth Grade” scored the Audience Favourite Award and female director doc “Half the Picture” took home the #WhatsNextPrize, Deadline reports. The offshoot of the Utah fest ran from May 31-June 3.
“Eighth Grade” wowed audiences and critics alike when it premiered at the U.S. Sundance in January, and it looks like the American film has also found plenty of fans in the UK. An exploration of adolescence in the age of social media, the pic centers on Kayla (Elsie Fisher), a shy 13-year-old girl struggling to find confidence and make friends. “Eighth Grade” previously won the Audience Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. You can catch the film in theaters July 13.
“Half the Picture” director Amy Adrion received the special Picturehouse #WhatNext prize “for the way her documentary ‘Half the Picture’ represents key female voices and helps amplify the conversation around the treatment of female directors in Hollywood,” the source writes. The doc investigates the film industry’s discriminatory hiring practices and features interviews with Ava DuVernay (“A Wrinkle in Time”), Lena Dunham (“Girls”), and Karyn Kusama (“The Invitation”), among other women directors.
When we asked Adrion what inspired her to explore this issue, she explained, “I graduated from film school and was having trouble getting my feature off the ground, as were many of my female colleagues. Right around that time I felt bombarded by the statistics, reports, and articles about the lack of working women directors and was feeling overwhelmed by how impossible it seemed for women to have careers as directors,” she recalled. “But at the same time, women were speaking up and sharing their stories, University of Southern California and San Diego State University continued to publish extensive research, and the ACLU and EEOC had begun investigating systemic discrimination of women in the field of directing. It seemed that change was possible,” she observed. “I had to document this dynamic time.”
“Half the Picture” opens in NY June 8 and LA June 22.
Of 12 features to screen at Sundance Film Festival: London, seven were women-directed, amounting to 58 percent of the slate. Besides “Half the Picture,” other women-helmed titles included Jennifer Fox’s sexual abuse drama “The Tale” and Desiree Akhavan’s gay conversion drama “The Miseducation of Cameron Post.”
