ALL POSTS
The Unbelievable Privilege of Being a Male Director
To say this post is a long time coming would be an understatement. I’ve been thinking about it for months. But last night I was pushed over the edge so here we are. The line that women directors...
Louis CK’s “So Did the Fat Lady” Is Not The Last — Or The First — Word On Fat Women On TV
Louis CK is getting heaped with accolades for “So Did the Fat Lady,” the third episode of his current season of Louie, which aired Monday night. I get why: it is, in its way, a progressive move...
Trailer Watch: The Final Trailer for Maleficent
The final trailer for Maleficent has been released. As can be said of all of the footage revealed in the trailers, it looks beautiful; the film is gorgeously shot. In a previous featurette for the...
Sundance London Directors: Meet Sydney Freeland (Drunktown’s Finest)
Writer-director SydneyFreeland’s feature debut, Drunktown’s Finest, was shotagainst New Mexico’s mesmerizing landscape and explores life on the reservationin the 21st century. The film...
Callie Khouri Talks Nashville Season 2 Conclusion (No Spoilers)
I’ve been very lucky to be able to talk with Nashville creator Callie Khouri a bunch of times over the last two seasons. THe show has two more episodes (one airs tonight) and the team is still...
Amy Schumer and the Women of Broad City: Paving the Way for a Female “Golden Age”
Recently, a lot has been made of the so-called Golden Age of Television and the question of is it or isn’t it one. I tend to nod off during those kinds of articles because they so often turn into...
Watch: Kimberly Peirce Encourages the Next Generation of AFI Women Directors
As the keynote speaker at the 2014 AFI Directing Worshop for Women Showcase, Kimberly Peirce was upfront about the difficult road that her listeners had ahead of them while congratulating them for...
Why Leslie Jones’ Controversial Slavery Sketch on SNL Was So Important
On May 3rd, Leslie Jones made her debut on Saturday Night Live. Jones was one of the three black women that SNL hired in January in response to the criticism over the show’s lack of diversity, and...
Sundance London Women Directors: Meet Jane Lipsitz (Under the Electric Sky)
By way of England and New York City respectively, Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz joined forces in 2001 to form the television production company, Magical Elves, which has given us Top Chef, Project...
Ukraine is Not a Brothel Director Kitty Green Documents Where Feminism and Self-Objectification Meet
Ukraine is Not a Brothel is a portrait of Ukraine’s topless feminist sensation, Femen, which has stirred up a press frenzy across Europe. Outraged by the world’s image of Ukrainian women as...
Belle Director Amma Asante Explains Why She Wanted Tell a Jane Austen Story With a Black Protagonist
There’s nothing quite like Belle on the contemporary film scene — a luxurious period film and a sweet, gentle romance that wears its keenly insightful politics on its silk sleeves. Belle is...
SFIFF Women Directors: Meet Zeynep Dadak and Merve Kayan (The Blue Wave)
Zeynep Dadak was born in Balikesir, the midsize Turkish city where The Blue Wave is set. She has been making movies since 2001, is a contributor to the Turkish film magazine Altyazi, and lectures on...
Hollywood Men Star in White House PSA Against Sexual Assault
After releasing a depressing but unsurprising report that 1 in 5 female college students are sexually assaulted, the White House posted a PSA on its YouTube account starring President Obama and VP...
May 2014 Film Preview
If you’re lucky enough to live in a city with several arthouse theaters, May is a veritable banquet of indie and foreign gems by and about women. And if your choices are limited to the multiplex,...
Sundance London Women Directors: Meet Marjane Satrapi (The Voices)
MarjaneSatrapis’s fourth feature film, The Voices, stars Ryan Reynolds, AnnaKendrick and Gemma Arterton and was included in the Sundance London program this past weekend. Shecame to our attention...
Newport Beach FF Women Directors: Meet Regina Russell (Well Now You’re Here, There’s No Way Back)
After two decades and over fifty film and television roles as an actress, Regina Russell steps behind the camera as director and producer. A visual artist in many mediums, she has always had a...
The Tony Award Nominations: Women Writers Are Missing
The Tony Award nominations were handed out this morning. The thing I noticed immediately is that not a single play written by a woman was nominated. Turns out the problem is that a woman couldn’t...
Hot Docs Women Director: Meet Teodora Ana Mihai (Waiting for August)
Teodora Ana Mihai was born in 1981 in Bucharest, Romania, under Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship. In 1989, she came to Belgium and was reunited with her parents, who had fled the year before. In...
SFIFF Women Directors: Meet Sara Dosa (The Last Season)
Sara Dosa’s past projects include work as an associate producer on Elena and Jacob Kornbluth’s acclaimed documentary about Robert Reich, Inequality for All. A graduate of Wesleyan University,...
Argentine Director Lucia Puenzo Helps Her Country Come to Terms With Its Nazi-Sheltering Past
Writer-director Lucia Puenzo’s historical drama The German Doctor (opening April 25) became a sensation in Argentina last year, ultimately amassing nine Sur Awards (the Argentine Oscars),...
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 Gillian Greene (Murder of a Cat)
The daughter of veteran actor Lorne Greene,Gillian Greene grew up in Los Angeles on the sets of her father’s televisionshows. She attended USC and NYU before moving back to Los Angeles to...
Crosspost: What’s It Going to Take for Gender Equality to Come to Hollywood?
Crossposted with permission from Awards Daily. The WGA diversity report, released on April 15, delivered this rather devastating news about women screenwriters in Hollywood: While women and other...
Crosspost: The Time of Her Life
Crossposted with permission from DGA Quarterly. Lee Shallat Chemel was recently directing an episode of the critically acclaimed single-camera comedy The Middle when it suddenly dawned on her how...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Eva von Schweinitz (A Film Is a Film Is a Film)
Eva von Schweinitz is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist, working in theater, film, and interactive media. Holding a B.A. in screenwriting, she has expanded her interest in storytelling into...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Karen Leigh Hopkins (Miss Meadows)
Born in Sandusky, Ohio, and raised by an Italian factory-workermother whose dream of being an artist were squelched by a teacher who told hershe had not imagination, Karen Leigh Hopkins was not...
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 Melissa Johnson (Love in the Time of March Madness)
Melissa Johnson is a writer and filmmaker living in Venice, California. She is best known for her award-winning feature documentary, No Look Pass, about a Burmese lesbian basketball star, currently...
Guest Post: Getting to the Finish Line
I’ve worked on Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe A La Hache for years — three and a half years, to be exact. During that entire time, I so desired to have a woman on my team. There...
Guest Post: Write What You Don’t See
I started screenwriting five years ago because I was angry. Every time I watched a movie or TV show geared towards women, it had female friends fighting over a man or being catty to each other,...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Louise Ni Fhiannachta (Rubai)
Irishdirector Louise Ni Fhiannachta’s love affair with storytelling started whenshe discovered she could entertain her family at the age offour and a half. It wasn’t long beforeshe was...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Alexandra Liveris (Nocturnity)
Alexandra Liveris is currently an MFA Candidate in Stanford University’s Documentary Film Program. In 2013 she directed three shorts and is currently directing a documentary under the working...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Olivia Klaus (Life After Manson)
Olivia Klaus is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been seen on networks like CNN, HLN, Discovery, MTV and The History Channel. Sin by Silence, her 2009 directorial debut, went on...
Tribeca Women Directors: Meet Sofia Norlin (Broken Hill Blues)
Born in Njurunda in Sweden in 1974, Sofia Norlin studied film in Stockholm and Paris, where she now lives and works as a theater and film director. Her 2005 film Les Courants screened at numerous...
Tribeca Women DIrectors: Meet Elizabeth Swados (My Depression)
Perhaps best known for her Broadway and international smash hit Runaways, Elizabeth Swados has composed, written and directed for over 30 years. Some of her works include the Obie Award-winning...
Julianne Nicholson on August: Osage County, Masters of Sex, and Aging in Hollywood
August: Osage County offers apainfully intimate look at a family reuniting in the wake of tragedy. Deathbrings out the dysfunction in every family, but it’s clear that there have beengaping cracks...
Guest Post: When Violence is the Answer
About 7 months ago, I was readingthe Times while working as a researcher for ascreenwriter when I suddenly felt sick. My hands started shaking. I realized I feltviolent. All of the articles I...
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...
Orange is the New Black, Scandal, Borgen Among Peabody Winners
The Peabody Awards have named a record 46 winners this year in their ongoing efforts to recognizing “stories that matter.” Twenty of the awardees (43%) — which range from journalism to...
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...
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...
5 Reasons to Watch Broad City
Broad City, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s webseries-turned-Comedy Central show, wraps up its debut season next Wednesday. (Fret not: the Amy Poehler-produced series has already been renewed for...
Weekly Update for March 21: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs (doc) — Directed by Grace Lee American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs plunges us into...
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,...
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...
5 Reasons Why Those Star Wars Casting Rumors about Lupita Nyong’o Are Worth Celebrating
Let me put all my cards down on the table. I want Lupita Nyong’o to succeed beyond her wildest dreams. I want her to enjoy a career like Jessica Chastain’s — another actress who was...
Trailer Watch: Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep Season 3
In the third season of HBO’s Veep, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) will run to become the first female president of the United States of America. If you think there’s anything remotely...
Rated SR for Socially Relevant: The Birth of a New NYC Film Festival
The inaugural edition ofRated SR Socially Relevant Film Festival New York (March 14–20 at New York’sQuad Cinema) assembles 55 films from 18 countries, offering an uplifting,enlightening, and...
Why Shailene Woodley is Wrong to Blast Twilight
Shailene Woodley’s Divergent opens next week, which means the Descendants and Spectacular Now actress has been making the media rounds. Woodley certainly gave bloggers a lot to talk about on...
Reinventing A Life: Lies I Told My Little Sister
I’ve been a nonfiction writerall my life. I write books and humor essays. I never envisioned becoming ascreenwriter. But at age 60, I seem to have rewritten my obituary. I am ascreenwriter now,...