ALL POSTS
Meet Outlander, the Anti-Game of Thrones
Women and Hollywood is taking a break this week. Please enjoy one of our most popular posts of the year below. We will return with new features, editorials, and news stories on Monday, January 5....
Kristin Scott Thomas Quits Film
Women and Hollywood is taking a break this week. Please enjoy one of our most popular posts of the year below. We will return with new features, editorials, and news stories on Monday, January 5....
An Oscar-Nominated Director Gets Real About How Women Are Treated in Hollywood
Women and Hollywood is taking a break this week. Please enjoy one of our most popular posts of the year below. We will return with new features, editorials, and news stories on Monday, January 5....
The Most Important Feminist Film Moments of 2014
Women and Hollywood’s end-of-year coverage includes our “Best Women-Directed Documentaries of 2014 (That We Managed to See),” “Best Women-Directed Films of 2014,” “Best Films About Women...
The Big O: Want to Win Oscar’s Heart? Put Down the Mascara and Hide the Comb
Yep, they are falling for it again. Call it glamming down, uglifying, or letting yourself go, but more actresses than usual are forgoing makeup and regular shampoos in order to impress those...
The Best Women-Directed Documentaries of 2014 (That We Managed to See)
It’s very difficult to create a best-of-year list when you haven’t seen everything that’s available. More documentaries were released this year that can be seen by any reasonable person. But I...
The Sony Hack, Amy Pascal, and Gender and Power in Hollywood
It hasn’t been a good couple of weeks for Amy Pascal and the folks at Sony. I would even venture to say that these last couple of weeks have been the shittiest of Ms. Pascal’s 30-year career in...
The Big O: The Lone Craft Category That is Almost Always Sewn Up By Female Nominees
Quick: Name the one Oscar category outside of acting that’s routinely dominated not just by female nominees, but female winners. Here’s a hint: It involves dressing for success. Or, rather,...
Leslye Headland, Amy Berg, Jennifer Siebel Newsom to Debut Films at Sundance 2015
Nine women-directed narrative and documentary features (out of a total of 29 premieres) will make their debuts at next year’s Sundance Film Festival. Among the much-anticipated first-time...
‘Miss Julie’ Director Liv Ullmann on Adapting a Misogynistic 19th-Century Play for 21st-Century Sensibilities
After making her film debut as a teenager and gaining international fame by starring in ten of Ingmar Bergman’s movies (including Persona and Scenes from a Marriage), Liv Ullmann directed her...
Weekly Update for December 5: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening This Week Wild Based on Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir, Wild finds Reese Witherspoon au natural and reminds us that she is one of the best actresses of her...
‘Take Care’ Director Liz Tuccillo on Making a Movie About the Inevitable Awkwardness of Exes
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...
36% of 2015 Sundance Competition Films Directed by Women
In recent years, the Sundance Film Festival has come further than many other events of its kind in representing female directors. Sundance 2015 appears to be shaping up to its reputation as...
Bravo’s ‘Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce’: A Mixed Bag of Tricks from ‘Buffy’ Scribe Marti Noxon
Full disclosure: I have never been divorced (or married), or had kids, so I can’t attest to the veracity of the events in Bravo’s Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce on a personal level. As a viewer...
‘Belle’ Director Amma Asante: “No Industry Can Remain Sustainable Without New and Diverse Life Blood”
Despite a BAFTA win for her directorial debut (A Way of Life), it took nearly a decade for Amma Asante to make her sophomore picture (Belle). Asante was clearly speaking from first-hand experience...
Weekly Update for November 21 and 28: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening November 21 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night — Written and Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour Strange things are afoot in Bad City. The Iranian ghost town, home to...
IDFA Women Directors: Meet Hella de Jonge — ‘Don’t Lose Heart’
Sculptor and writer Hella de Jonge has published two books about her youth and her family: Los van de wereld (Apart from the World) and Spring (Jump). (Press materials) Don’t Lose Heart will play...
IDFA Women Directors: Meet Lia Jaspers — ‘Match Me!’
Munich-born Lia Jaspers is the director of the documentaries Tar Dakar (2005), You Drive Me Crazy (2012), and Match Me! (2014). She lives and works as a freelance author and writer in Munich. Match...
Pulitzer-Winning Playwright Marsha Norman on Trapped Girls and the Perils of New Play Development
Crossposted with permission from The Interval. “I’ve become an activist, which was kind of a surprise to me. I thought it was going to be enough that I do it [write, succeed]; that my example...
IDFA Women Directors: Meet Eva Tomanova — ‘Always Together’
Eva Tomanova is a Czech author and director with abackground in journalism. For the last eight years, she has worked for Czech TV,Febio s.r.o., and TV Barrandov, and as a director of documentary...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Kirsten D’Andrea Hollander — ‘Us, Naked: Trixie and Monkey’
Kirsten D’Andrea Hollander is a full-time professor at the MarylandInstitute College of Art (MICA), where she teaches in Foundation; Film andVideo; and Community Arts. She has received numerous...
DOC NYC Women Directors: Meet Olga Lvoff — ‘When People Die They Sing Songs’
Olga Lvoff received an MFA in Social Documentary from the School of Visual Arts in 2013. She has worked as an independent film director since 2009. Her recent short documentary film, Two Travelers,...
Weekly Update for November 14: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Beyond the Lights — Written and Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood Writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball and The Secret Life of Bees) humanizes...
‘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...
The Big O: Oscar Needs to Honor More Women With the “Write” Stuff
As the Academy Awards prepares for its 87th edition, a nagging fact continues to rear its gender-biased head: the astonishing fact that only four women have ever been nominated for Best Director and...
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: 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 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...
Guest Post: Preserving the Excitement of 1990s’ Independent Filmmaking
From 1991–2002, I wrote regularly about American independentand foreign films for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine. I did interviews with filmmakers when their movies were releasedtheatrically and...
Cindy Chupack’s Directorial Debut to Star Allison Janney and Susan Sarandon
Cindy Chupack, the two-time Emmy-winning writer for Sex and the City and Modern Family, will make her feature directorial debut with the mom com Whatever Makes You Happy. Susan Sarandon and Allison...
The Big O: Can Hilary Swank stake a third claim on an Oscar?
You can have your SAGs and Golden Globes. But the ultimate acting prize in the movie biz has been and remains an Oscar for a lead performance. And if owning one is impressive, having two on your...
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...
November 2014 Film Preview
The month of November arrives under thesign of the Mockingjay, promising the keenly anticipated return of KatnissEverdeen to our screens in The HungerGames: Mockingjay — Part 1. The hype has...
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...
Guest Post: Doc Director Edet Belzberg: “If You Find a Good Enough Story, It’s Impossible to Quit”
Young women often ask me what my greatest challengeis when making a film. It is hard to choose just one. I’m very instinctual in my work. I followstories and characters that hit me on a gut...
‘The Affair’ Rewrites the Femme Fatale Script
Mild spoilers below for the first two episodes of The Affair. Is Showtime’s The Affair more about her side than his? Co-creator Sarah Treem (with In Treatment colleague Hagai Levi; like the show,...
‘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...
Disney’s Giving Us Another Female Protagonist, But ‘Moana’ Will Be Written and Directed by Dudes
Walt Disney Animation Studios has finally released some information about Moana, an animated adventure set in the South Pacific expected to arrive in late-2016. The film will focus on its titular...
The Big O: Will Keira Knightley’s Image Switch Convince Oscar She’s Worthy?
Take a look at Keira Knightley in her most recent perfume ad for Chanel from earlier this year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZAZD3ylG6Y So gorgeous. So come hither-y. So female James Bond in...
Book Excerpt: The Psychology of Fear in Ida Lupino’s ‘The Hitch-Hiker’
Ida Lupino was the first mainstream American female filmmaker to make movies within the Hollywood system since thebeginning of film censorship in the 1930s. She is often cited by feministfilm...
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...
43% of 2014 DOC NYC Features Directed by Women, But Where Are the Films About Women?
It’s generally not hard to find female-directed features at documentary film festivals, since women filmmakers face less obstacles in the nonfiction world. This year’s DOC NYC Film Festival...
Learning from ‘Transparent’ and ‘OITNB’: There’s No Single Right Way to Do Diversity
We often talk about the need for diversity in Hollywood, but we rarely talk about how to do it. This leaves us with the clumsy approach in practice today, as writer Beejoli Shah discovered last...
The Big O: Watch Out, Rosamund Pike — Oscar Doesn’t Fall for Amy’s Type
Spoilers for Gone Girl ahead. As the iconic silver-screen siren Mae West once said, “When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better. ” Since Hollywood’s earliest days,...
GamerGate: A War on Women Hiding Behind a Mask of “Ethics”
Being a woman in the gaming community is scary. For pointing out demeaning stereotypes of female characterswithin video games in a series of YouTube videos, feminist cultural critic AnitaSarkeesian...
Guest Post: You Don’t Need Anyone’s Permission to Make a Film But Your Own
Throughout my life as anactor, I have waited for people to give me permission. Waited for someone towrite something, someone to produce it, direct it, and hopefully, eventually, hire me. Until...
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....