ALL POSTS
TIFF Women Directors: Meet Tala Hadid — ‘The Narrow Frame of Midnight’
Tala Hadid was born in London, graduated from Columbia University in NewYork City, and participated in the Sundance Institute Directors Lab. Her filmsinclude the documentary feature Sacred Poet, the...
Weekly Update for August 22 & 29: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Women and Hollywood is going on vacation next week, so this weekly update encompasses the next two weeks.Films About Women Opening Opening August 22 If I Stay Mia Hall (Chloë Grace Moretz) thought...
‘May in the Summer’ Writer-Director Cherien Dabis on Hiring Herself to Star in Her Film
May in the Summer is Cherien Dabis’ second film about people who live in two worlds. (Her debut was the Sundance hit Amreeka.) In addition to writing and directing, Dabis went in front of the...
Chicken & Egg to Honor Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Lesli Klainberg and Eugene Hernandez
Chicken & Egg Pictures, the only nonprofit film fund dedicated to women’s documentaries, will present its 2014 Good Egg Award to Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Lesli Klainberg and Eugene...
Desiree Akhavan’s ‘Appropriate Behavior’ Finds Distribution
We’ve been waiting for Desiree Akhavan’s wry, adventurous debut, Appropriate Behavior, to be released since we put the Sundance favorite on our “Most Anticipated Films of 2014” list back in...
Guest Post: Film Fatales Give Back: The Importance of Community Outreach
Film Fatales is a collective of female writers/directors who meet regularly to support each other’s work and promote the creation of more films by and about women. Several of us recently...
Watch: Actual Superheroine Can’t Get a Movie Made About Her in Hollywood
Angelfire is a superheroine who knows her worth. And that worth? The center spotlight in a movie all about her — not as a sidekick, a recurring pair of boobs, or a sacrificial love interest to...
Weekly Update for August 1: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Around the Block — Written and Directed by Sarah Spillane Writer-director Sarah Spillane explores Australian racism today in Around the Block, a drama about an...
August 2014 Film Preview
The summer blockbuster movie season may be winding to an end, but the multiplexes offer a refreshingly diverse selection of films by and about women for August. The month blasts off (literally) with...
Director Leigh Silverman on Mounting the Broadway Musical Violet and Working with Sutton Foster
Violet is one of those rare Broadway shows where less is more. The sparsely set stage is a perfect showcase for veteran Broadway actress Sutton Foster to soar in her Tony-nominated role. Foster...
Very Good Girls’ Naomi Foner on What She Learned as a First-Time Filmmaker and Why There Are So Few Women Directors
Very Good Girls, the first directing effort from veteran screenwriter Naomi Foner, is a nostalgic look at girls on the cusp of womanhood. While it is set in contemporary times, the girls, with...
Trailer Watch: Dear White People Tackles the Myth of Post-Racial America
I don’t know about you, but I can’t get enough of angry women in pop culture. Thus it’s refreshing to see rising star Tessa Thompson take center stage in writer-director Justin Simien’s...
First-Time Female Filmmakers Take Home Best Film and Best Screenplay Awards at Outfest
Director Sydney Freeland’s Drunktown’s Finest was named Outfest’s Best US Dramatic Feature Film at the festival’s awards ceremony this past Sunday. The reservation-set drama also won the...
Trailer Watch: Keira Knightley As You’ve Never Seen Her Before in Lynn Shelton’s Laggies
Keira Knightley recently swore off the corsets and wigs that have made her a star in period films like Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina. Not all her forays into playing people born in the 20th...
Trailer Watch: Director Cherien Dabis Makes Her Screen Debut in May in the Summer
A month before her wedding, Jordanian-American May (Cherien Dabis) visits her mother (Hiam Abbass) in Amman to convince her to attend the big day. A successful writer back home in New York, May...
The Big O: 2015 Oscar Preview: Expect Reese to Rise Again and a Woman to Crash the Directing Category
Wow, that was fast. The movie year is already half over, and if you are a fan of Legos, sequels to bombastic blockbusters, and just-OK comedies, you probably think everything has been awesome in...
Weekly Update for July 11: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Audrey — Co-Written by Sybil Darrow “Too old, too ugly, too stupid, too fat — 34-year-old single gal Audrey (Sybil Darrow) is none of these, not that...
Director Courtney Hunt Begins Shooting Follow-Up to Frozen River
Frozen River writer-director Courtney Hunt has begun shooting her second film, the courtroom drama The Whole Truth. The Keanu Reeves vehicle sounds just as compassionate and as unflinching as...
Keira Knightley Explains Why She Enjoys Working With Female Directors
Keira Knightley is perhaps most recognized for her period collaborations with director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina), but she’d like to be known for something else as...
Review: The Lost Women of The Leftovers
I’ll say this for The Leftovers: it is equal-opportunity sad. Men, women, children: there is enough existential despair in HBO’s new drama to go around, and then some. Damon Lindelof’s...
Trailer Watch: Maggie Gyllenhaal is a British Arms Dealer in The Honorable Woman
Maggie Gyllenhaal has joined the mass migration of prestige film actresses to television. The Dark Knight and Crazy Heart co-star has finally found a role worthy of her considerable talents in...
Human Rights Watch Women Directors: Meet Anne de Mare & Kirsten Kelly (The Homestretch)
Filmmakers and theater artists Anne de Mare and Kirsten Kelly have been making documentaries together for over a decade. Their work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, Sundance...
AFI Docs Women Directors: Meet Laura Naylor (The Fix)
Writer-producer Laura Naylor first discovered her interest in documentary-style representation while studying visual arts and art history at Columbia University in New York City. In 2011, she...
LAFF Women Directors: Meet Gren Wells (The Road Within)
Gren Wells was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and raised in Greenwich, Connecticut. After attending Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY, Wells moved to New York City, where she starred in six...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Rachel Beth Anderson (First to Fall)
Rachel Beth Anderson, a Sundance Award-winning cinematographer, has filmed around the world in several conflict zones, including Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, and South Sudan, for...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Cynthia Hill
Cynthia Hill crafts documentaries that take a complex approach to critical contemporary issues, creating story-driven and visually rich films. Private Violence is Hill’s fourth feature...
Human Rights Watch FF Women Directors: Meet Katy Chevigny (E-Team)
Katy Chevigny is an award-winning filmmaker and partner at Big Mouth Productions. She has produced a dozen feature-length documentaries as well as short-form films, videos and webisodes. Her credits...
After Tiller Director Lana Wilson to Helm Doc About Suicide in Japan
After tackling late-term abortions in After Tiller, documentarian Lana Wilson will delve into an equally difficult and complex subject in her next project: suicide. Wilson’s follow-up to Tiller,...
Obvious Child Director Gillian Robespierre: “We Don’t Make Abortion Funny. We Make a Character Funny.”
Obvious Child is the kind of movie that helped me remember why I love movies. I was laughing my ass off even before the credits, and that’s when I knew I was in for a treat. In this tightly...
Cannes Sales Roundup: Films Starring Brie Larson, Anne Hathaway Get Distribution Deals
Several more films by/about women have found distribution deals at the “seller’s market” in Cannes. Among them are: — Anne Hathaway’s romantic drama Song One. Kate Barker-Froyland’s...
Guest Post: For Female Indie Filmmakers, The Woman-Child Wins: Obvious Child and Zero Motivation
As readers of Women & Hollywood, you’re fully aware of the bleak statistics concerning women working in the film industry, onscreen and behind-the-scenes. In spite of those incredible odds,...
Special Report: Women Directors at the Box Office in April 2014
The Aprilreleases directed by women were dominated by non-fiction, with elevendocumentaries to six features and one anthology film. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, from married...
Obvious Child Director Gillian Robespierre Signs Second Picture
Apparently not content with successfully combining abortion and romance in her debut film Obvious Child, writer-director Gillian Robespierre has announced that she’ll attempt to make divorce funny...
SFIFF Women Directors: Meet Jane Pollard (20,000 Days on Earth)
Artist and filmmaker Jane Pollard met her collaborative partner Iain Forsyth at Goldsmiths College in the early 1990s. After the duo earned early acclaim with A Rock ’N’ Roll Suicide (1998), a...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Farihah Zaman (This Time Next Year)
This Time Next Year is Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman’s first feature documentary as co-directors. Their short film “Remote Area Medical” premiered at the 2013 Full Frame Documentary Film...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Megan Griffiths (Lucky Them)
Megan Griffiths has been a director, writer, and producer in the independent film community for over a decade. Her film, The Off Hours, premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and went on to...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Jessica Yu (Misconception)
Jessica Yu’s award-winning body of work includes her film “Breathing Lessons,” which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short; her documentary for Participant Media on the water crisis,...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Amy Berg (Every Secret Thing)
Amy Berg is a critically acclaimed, Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her documentary Deliver Us From Evil (2006). The film tells the...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Kate Davis (Newburgh Sting)
Kate Davis’ documentary Southern Comfort, a 2001 Sundance Film Festival Grand Prize winner, has won over 25 awards and continues to be screened as a seminal work aimed towards overcoming...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Susanna Fogel (Life Partners)
Susanna Fogel began writing and directing short films as a teenager, premiering her first two, “For Real” and “Words of Wisdom,” at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1995 and 1997....
Trailer Watch: Jenny Slate in Obvious Child
Here’s the 21st-century romantic comedy you’ve been waiting for. Writer-director Gilian Robespierre’s Obvious Child features former SNL castmember Jenny Slate as a stand-up comedienne named...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Talya Lavie (Zero Motivation)
Talya Lavie is a director, screenwriter, and comics artist. She studied animation at the Bezalel Art Academy and graduated with merit from the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem. She has also...
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...
Special Report: Women Directors at the Box Office in March 2014
A much-needed profileof Anita Hill is one of the top-grossing films directed by women in March, withthe highest monthly gross of a female-directed documentary so far this year. Anita has made...
Guest Post: The Celluloid Ceiling is Much Lower Than You Think
After many years working in the film industry, I am struggling in to find work. It’s hard for me to admit when I need help, and even harder to ask for it. I got into film so I could tell stories...
Women and Hollywood Summer 2014 Preview
Mark Wahlberg gave us all something to laugh about when he declared the Transformers movies to be “the most iconic franchise in movie history” at this year’s Cinema Con, the annual convention...
Review of Freida Mock’s Anita: The Story of a Hero
The following review was originally published as part of Women and Hollywood’s Sundance 2013 coverage. When I was a young woman just starting my career, I encountered sexual harrassment like so...
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...
Women in Film’s Finishing Fund Application Process Now Open
Women in Film is currently accepting applications for its Film Finishing Fund. Projects that are by, for, or about women and have completed 90% of principal photography with a rough cut on hand are...
Special Report: Women Directors at the Box Office in February 2014
Opening onValentine’s Day, the teen romance EndlessLove was the first wide release (2,872 theaters) from a female director in2014. The original, starring teen queen Brooke Shields, was released in...
NYU’s Fusion FF: Celebrating Women in Film, Television, & New Media
Women behind the camera are rarelyacknowledged in the film industry. As a reader of Women and Hollywood, you already know this. In fact, weall know the sad statistics generated by the recent...