ALL POSTS
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Doris Dorrie
Doris Dorrie has made more than 30 feature films since 1976 to become one of the most famous filmmakers in her native Germany. Her films include Bliss, How to Cook Your Life, Naked, and Am I...
Lynne Ramsay and Jane Got a Gun Producers Settle Lawsuit
Screen Daily reports that director Lynne Ramsay and the producers of Jane Got a Gun have reached a settlement. Ramsay signed on to helm the 2011 Black List action western in March 2012, but...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Sandy McLeod
Sandy McLeod is an acclaimed independent filmmaker, having directed numerous music videos and short films in her 25-year career. Her short documentary “Asylum” was nominated for an Academy Award...
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...
War Zone/ Comfort Zone: Confronting the Issue of Homeless Women Veterans
Making a movie is like walking across a tightrope. It requires balance, will and muscles you never even knew you had. I’ve spent the last few years making a documentary about homeless women...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Diana Whitten
Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts made waves in 1999 when she announced that she would provide abortions on international waters to women living in countries like Ireland and Poland. When her...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Kitty Green
Kitty Green’s short films have screened at film festivals internationally. After graduating film school, Green worked for ABC in Australia producing content for national broadcast. Green spent the...
In Honor of International Women’s Day: Here Are the Things You Can Do to Support Female Filmmakers and Female Films
This has been a big week for people paying attention to women and the film business. From Ellen DeGeneres pulling in great ratings for the Oscar show to Cate Blanchett using her Oscar win as a bully...
SXSW Women Directors: Meet Margaret Brown
Alabama native Margaret Brown is a Peabody Award-winning director whose last documentary feature, The Order of Myths, received the Truer Than Fiction Award at the 2009 Independent Spirit Awards and...
Suck It, Haters: Female-Led Films Make More Money
“Sorry, Cate Blanchett: ‘Films with women at the center’ don’t make money,” proclaims an embarrassing editorial by Marcus James Dixon at the Gold Derby today. Dixon was referring, of...
The World is Round, People and Other Thoughts from a Potentially Game Changing Oscars
I don’t know about you, but things felt a bit different last night. In fact, let’s be honest, they’ve felt different for some time now. It’s not just one thing. It’s Tina and Amy at the...
March 2014 Film Preview
This year’s March Madness comes courtesy of the Veronica Mars movie, which will receive a day-and-date release on March 14. Kristen Bell’s noir detective, now a decade out of high school,...
TV: 5 Reasons to Watch HBO’s Just Renewed Getting On
HBO finally showed the terrifically unsentimental hospital sitcom Getting On some tender, loving care last week by renewing it for a second season. The network had previously disserved its most...
Women and the Oscars 2014
It’s Oscar week and on the surface this year feels different. Ellen DeGeneres will host the ceremony, and while I’m sure she will be biting, I doubt that I’m going to feel the need to take a...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Feo Aladag
Writer-director Feo Aladag’s In Between Worlds was one of four German films to compete for the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale. The Vienna-born filmmaker has been a European director to...
SXSW’s New Gamechanger Award to Help Fund Women-Directed Films
Men and women may enter film school at the same rate these days, but 90–95% of the directing jobs in Hollywood still go to male filmmakers. Gamechanger Films is one of the many players trying to...
A Third of New Directors/New Films FF Lineup Directed by Women
Nine emerging female helmers will have their works featured at the 43rd New Directors/New Films at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Women-directed films...
The Big O: In Praise of the 10 Actress Nominees
It is all too easy at this late point in the Oscar season to only focus on the shifting standings in the 24 categories and to ignore the big picture of what this collection of contenders actually...
How The Mary Tyler Moore Show Got Women’s Stories Just Right
If you grew up in the 1970s, chances are you remember watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show on Saturday nights, most likely with other female members of your family. You probably also remember the...
Real Talk on the Women of True Detective
It’s impossible to deny the pleasures of watching long-time friends and sometime acting partners Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson onscreen together. Currently, the two men are starring in...
Berlin Women Directors: Meet Sudabeh Mortezai
German-born Sudabeh Mortezai grew up in Tehran and Vienna. Her film debut was the documentary Children of the Prophet, a look at Iranian mourning rituals for Imam Hossein, the Prophet Mohammad’s...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Celina Murga
Argentine director Celina Murga was thrust into the international film scene when she was chosen by Martin Scorsese to participate in the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative several years ago....
Of Animal Crackers and Mr. Bojangles: When I Got to Talk to My Idol, Shirley Temple
Shirley Temple, one of the biggest — and littlest — stars that Hollywood ever produced, and who raised the spirits of a nation through the Great Depression and mine throughout childhood,...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Rebecca Chaiklin
The Occupy Wall Street movement receives a loving eulogy in the documentary Another World, directed by Rebecca Chaiklin and Fisher Stevens. Chaiklin is also the co-director of two other politically...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Sophie Fillieres
Paris-born Sophie Fillieres is the director of five films and the screenwriter of several other features. Her latest work, If You Don’t, I Will, follows a long-time couple, played by Emmanuelle...
Athena FF: Callie Khouri on the Difference between Women Characters in Film vs. TV
Thelma and Louise screenwriter and Nashville creator Callie Khouri set out to be an actress, but soon realized that wasn’t for her. Staring out at the crowd from under a blinding spotlight, she...
Weekly Update for February 7: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening The Pretty One — Written and Directed by Jenee LaMarque Zoe Kazan (Ruby Sparks) stars as a pair of identical twins in this pleasantly quirky dramedy. As much a...
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Gina Kim
South Korea-born director Gina Kim is best known for the critically acclaimed drama Never Forever (2007), starring Vera Farmiga as a woman struggling to conceive a child with her infertile husband....
Berlinale Women Directors: Meet Anja Marquardt
Writer-director Anja Marquardt was born and raised in Berlin when the city was still divided in two. Her personal and national background have strongly shaped her artistic interests. “Having felt...
The Pretty One Director Jenee LaMarque on Her Twin Obsession and Her Inspiration to Make Her Debut Feature
Being a sister is hard, but being the sister of your dead twin is way harder. That’s the sad predicament socially awkward Laurel (Zoe Kazan) finds herself in, but she’s so fed up with being...
Nancy Buirski’s Afternoon of a Faun Explores a Dance Legend
Photographer-turned-film festival founder- turned-director Nancy Buirski’s first film was the documentary The Loving Story, a look at the 1967 Supreme Court case that made interracial marriage...
Kristin Scott Thomas Quits Film
After racking up nearly 80 credits to her name, Kristin Scott Thomas has declared she’s tired of making movies. “I just suddenly thought, I cannot cope with another film,” she told The...
I Believe Dylan Farrow
There are a few fundamental beliefs that I hold, and one of them is that I believe women. We live in a world that does everything to protect the powerful, and when the powerless speak up, against...
SXSW Festival Lineup Features 20 Features from Women Directors
Of the 115 features that will play at the South by Southwest Festival in March 7–15, women filmmakers will be represented in 20, or about 17%, of them. Two of the eight films competing for the...
Women and Hollywood February 2014 Film Preview
There’s only a smattering of films directed, written, and about women on offer this upcoming month, but there’s a few gems in the mix, as well as a great deal of variety in quality and...
TV: Ellen DeGeneres’ Lesbian Sitcom, Nahnatchka Khan’s Asian Am Series, & More Pilot News
Good news continues to trickle in about the networks’ fall pilot season. In addition to new shows from Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Casey Wilson and June Raphael, we can now look forward to four...
Watch the Sundance Spotlight on Women Directors Panel
Indiewire’s Thompson on Hollywood founder, Anne Thompson moderated a women’s director panel at Sundance, and a video of the discussion was released earlier this week by SundanceNOW’s Doc Club....
TV: Margaret Cho Joins Tina Fey’s Women’s College Comedy
Tina Fey’s 30 Rock has only been off the air for a year, but it feels like a lot longer. TV has never been better, and yet nothing’s been able to replace the Lemon-sized hole 30 Rock’s...
Interview: Run and Jump Director Steph Green on Families in Flux and Discovering Will Forte’s Dramatic Side
The January doldrums are over. The first great movie of 2014 has arrived: Oscar-nominated director Steph Green’s Run and Jump, her feature debut. Run and Jump centers on an Irish woman named...
TV: The Staying Power of Veronica Mars
In the past year, Veronica Mars, Rob Thomas’ procedural about a high-school girl (Kristen Bell) who became a private investigator, has been back in the news cycle repeatedly. That’s not...
Producer Alix Madigan’s Sundance Keynote: Instability of Indie Film is Worth the Risk
Alix Madigan has produced some great (female-centric) films: the Anna Faris stoner vehicle Smiley Face, Debra Granik’s Jennifer Lawrence-launcher Winter’s Bone, and Lynn Shelton’s new comedy...
Slamdance Women Directors: Meet Nailah Jefferson
Born and raised in New Orleans, Nailah Jefferson created the production company Perspective Pictures in March 2010 to tell stories that shed light on little known issues. A month later, the BP oil...
Capturing Truth through Fiction in South Africa
The story of how I found my way to film is a funny one. I was living in Paris, and I had no money. I was working as a waitress and a babysitter, pretty much doing everything I could to feed myself....
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Sydney Freeland
Drunktown’s Finest is Sydney Freeland’s feature film debut and her response to a news story that characterized her hometown of Gallup, New Mexico, as “Drunktown, USA.” She has worked for a...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Rose McGowan
Actress-turned-director Rose McGowan (Grindhouse, TV’s Charmed) was born in Italy and raised on a steady diet of pasta, European cinema, and classic films. Along with her cinephile father, she...
To Sue Or Not to Sue: What History Teaches Us About Equality in Hollywood
When the Director Guild of America’s Women’s Steering Committee was officiallyestablished in 1979, women comprised just 0.5% of episodic TV directoremployment. One half of one percent! According...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Martha Stephens
Raised in the hills of Appalachian Kentucky, Land Ho! co-director Martha Stephens longed to create films celebrating and investigating her native land and people. A graduate of the North Carolina...
Weekly Update for January 17: Women Centric, Directed and Written Films Playing Near You
Films About Women Opening Band of Sisters (doc) — Written and Directed by Mary Fishman “I did exactly what the church asked me — and now, the church is looking at me like, where have...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Chelsea McMullan
Chelsea McMullan is a Canadian filmmaker and artist whose films have screened on the international festival circuit and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. McMullan is a member of...
Sundance Women Directors: Lynn Shelton on the Question that Shapes Her Work and the Beauty of Sundance
Laggies director Lynn Shelton is best known as the writer-director of the acclaimed comedy Your Sister’s Sister, starring Emily Blunt, which screened at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Her 2009...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Gillian Robespierre
Gillian Robespierre has written and directed several short films, including “Chunk” in 2006, which follows an overweight teen forced to attend fat camp, and “Obvious Child” in 2009. Her...