ALL POSTS
Patti Smith on ‘Twilight’-Haters: “F*ck Them”
Patti Smith: singer, poet, artist, Twi-hard? We jest, but it’s certainly refreshing to see the punk goddess defend the success and popularity of the much-maligned “Twilight” movies. In a...
The Big O: When Actresses Are Given Their Just Rewards — And It Feels So Good
Ten screenwriting contenders, all men. Eight best-picture nominees, each revolving around male characters. Five directing slots, and no women allowed. Oscar, you have done the ladies wrong. It’s...
Amma Asante on Channeling the Warrior Queen to Make ‘Belle’
In the midst of the 2015 Berlinale, Amma Asante gave the closing speech at an International Women’s Film Festival Network (IWFFN) event on February 12. The director was candid about the...
Oscar 2015 Spotlight: 6 Nominees You Should Know About
When this year’s Oscar nominees were announced, we noted that Academy voters had given us the whitest, malest, most deflating awards season in recent history. As an infographic from the Women’s...
Weekly Update for February 13: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening This WeekFifty Shades of Grey — Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson; Written by Kelly Marcel Forget the haters: the highest-profile woman-directed film of 2015 is a...
HBO’s Painfully Underrated Comedy ‘Getting On’ Renewed for Third and Final Season
HBO’s hospital comedy “Getting On” has never received the praise and attention it deserves from critics or audiences. The workplace sitcom stars a trio of veteran comediennes at the top of...
Amy Pascal Discusses Getting “Fired,” Explains Unequal Pay for Women Under Her Tenure
Amy Pascal has quite a busy producing schedule ahead of her, but her future projects didn’t stop her from being surprisingly candid at the Women in the World conference in San Francisco yesterday....
19% of SXSW Film Lineup Directed by Women
As we reported last week, a quarter of the films that will be in competition at SXSW 2015 (March 13–21) are directed by women. The percentage of women-helmed features being screened outside of...
Feminism at the Rotterdam Film Fest: Sex Tourists, Mad Scientists, Psychopath Kidnappers
The last week of January saw one of thebiggest international festivals, the Rotterdam Film Festival, dedicate theentirety of one of its program sections to feminism. An array of directorsfrom all...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Silvina Landsmann — ‘Hotline’
Born in Argentina in 1965, Silvina Landsmann emigrated to Israel with her family at the age of eleven. After studying psychology in Paris and math in Tel Aviv, she graduated from Tel Aviv...
Weekly Update for February 6: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening This Week Jupiter Ascending — Co-Written and Co-Directed by Lana Wachowski Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) was born under signs that predicted future greatness, but her...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Sanna Lenken — ‘My Skinny Sister’
Sanna Lenken studied film directing at the National Film School, Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm. She has also studied film at the European Film College in Ebeltoft, Denmark, and the Dramatiska...
Guest Post: Should There Be a Best Female Director Category at the Oscars?
If wewant greater gender equality in Hollywood, should the Academy Awards still besplitting its acting awards along gender lines? This wasa question posed to me by a friend a few weeks ago as we...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Ella Manzheeva — ‘The Gulls’
Director Ella Manzheeva graduated from the St. Petersburg State University of Film and Television in 2005, specializing in TV and film sound engineering. In 2007, she enrolled at the Higher Courses...
‘Agent Carter’ Showrunners Tara Butters & Michele Fazekas Sign Development Deal With ABC
Resurrection and Marvel’s Agent Carter showrunners Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas have signed a new development deal with ABC. Under the two-year arrangement, the long-time writing partners...
Weekly Update for January 23: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening This Week Girlhood — Written and Directed by Celine Sciamma French writer-director Céline Sciamma has a small but sturdy body of work that addresses how girls...
Tony Winner Laura Benanti on ‘Nashville,’ ‘Parade,’ and the Importance of Female Mentors
“Thank God we’re interviewing Laura Benanti,” was a phrase we were proclaiming a lot the past two weeks. It’s only the middle of January, but so far 2015 hasn’t exactly been a banner year...
February 2015 Film Preview
February is known as a month for lovers, but the films set to debut at the box office next month are much more varied than that particular stereotype would suggest. Fifty Shades of Grey is perhaps...
Guest Post: Spending A Year With Women Filmmakers
In 2013, I saw two films thatdeeply affected me: Judy Chaikin’s The Girls In The Band andSini Anderson’s The Punk Singer. In both films, the women interviewed talk aboutlooking for artists,...
Guest Post: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome through the Power of Inclusion
Last fall, I was fortunate enough to be nominated by Women in Hollywood for the inaugural year of the Fox Global Directors Initiative. I reacted with disbelief when I received notice that I was...
Slamdance Women Directors: Meet Gabrielle Demeestere — ‘Yosemite’
Born and raised in Paris, Gabrielle Demeestere is a New York-based filmmaker. Most recently, she wrote and directed a segment of the feature film The Color of Time, based on the poetry of C.K....
The Big O: How Nora Grossman of ‘The Imitation Game’ Broke the Code of Becoming a Woman Producer
Of the top 250 movies that were released last year, women made up only 23% of the producers involved with those titles — down 1% from 1998 — according to the Center for the Study of...
SAG Award Winners: Viola Davis & Uzo Aduba Make History
While all 20 acting nominees competing for an Oscar thisyear are white — for the first time in nearly 20 years — twowomen of color made history at the SAG Awards last night for their...
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 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 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...
Weekly Update for January 23: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening This Week Song One — Written and Directed by Kate Barker-Froyland Song One begins with anthropology grad student Franny (Anne Hathaway) immersed in Moroccan...
Guest Post: How the Female-Heavy Crew Making ‘Little Accidents’ Probably Saved the Production
Although it was never an intentional goal, one of the best aspectsof making Little Accidents was making a film with so many strong women up anddown the ladder of production and finance. I became...
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 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...
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...
Guest Post: Earning My Invitation into the Highly Secretive, Male-Dominated Fraternity of Magicians
Ricky Jay, the subject of my American Mastersdocumentary DeceptivePractice (premieres Friday, January23 at 9 PM on PBS), told me that the field of sleight of hand is one of theworld’s few true...
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...
The Big O: Ava DuVernay’s Sisterhood of Un-Nominated Women Directors — and How They’ve Fared Since
As the country celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this week, it was difficult not to think about what could have been when the nominations for the 87th Academy Awards were announced last...
Sundance 2015: The Films We Can’t Wait to See
As we reported back in December, ninewomen-directed narrative and documentary features (out of a total of 29premieres) will make their debuts at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. 36%, or more...
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 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...
Spring 2015 Theatre Preview: Women on Broadway
Broadway can be a disheartening place forwomen. Too few are represented as writers and directors, and women’s stories don’toften make it to the stage. The previous 2013–2014 season did not...
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 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...
Thoughts on the Oscar Noms from Female Film Writers and Experts
Here are some thoughts from some people I reached out to earlier today about the Oscar nominations, in alphabetical order. Thelma Adams, Film Editor at ZEALnyc: First of all, I welcome more voices...
2015 Oscar Nominations: A Dark Day for Women in Hollywood
I couldn’t sleep at all last night because I knew in the pit of my stomach exactly what was going to happen this morning. Based onthe wind and on the hatchet job against Selma, I knew that Ava...
Suffragettes, Action Heroines, and BDSM: Most Anticipated Films By and About Women in 2015
Our 2014 end-of-year coverage highlighted the good and the bad for women and Hollywood in 2014. As we usher in a new year, let’s focus on some of the exciting female-centric films that await us in...
Guest Post: How I Met My Mother By Making My Family History Doc ‘Farewell Herr Schwarz’
After two hours of interviews, thecinematographer signals that the battery is running out and that we need tostop. Thank God. I have been interviewing my mother for what feels like aneternity now,...
Guest Post: Inside the Fox Global Director’s Initiative
When I found out that I was invited to take part in the Fox Global Director’s Initiative, I was in Beirut, on my way to the Bekaa Valley. The lab would commence in just seven days — by which...
January 2015 Film Preview
January is widely considered to be a dumping ground for bad movies, but there’s actually an embarrassment of art-house riches to be found this month in theaters, from Oscar vehicles to impressive...