ALL POSTS
Sundance 2016 Movies, Part 1
So I’ve been here on the ground at Sundance for a little over three days, and it feels like it’s been three weeks. This is my second real Sundance, and I’m finding it to be an acquired taste....
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Maya Goded — ‘Plaza de la Soledad’
Through her photographs and now on film, Maya Goded explores the subjects of female sexuality, prostitution and gender violence in a society in which the role of women is narrowly defined and...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Stephanie Soechtig — ‘Under the Gun’
Stephanie Soechtig is an award-winning writer, producer and documentary-film director. Her most recent film, “Fed Up,” premiered at Sundance and was acquired by Radius-TWC. It also received a...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Chris Hegedus — ‘Unlocking the Cage’
Chris Hegedus has been making films as a director, cinematographer and editor for 40 years. She received the 2001 DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement for “Startup.com.” With her...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami — ‘Sonita’
Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami studied filmmaking and animation at Tehran Art University. Ghaemmaghami is the author of “Animated Documentary, a New Way to Express,” which is a product of her research on...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Elite Zexer — ‘Sand Storm’
Elite Zexer received her BFA and MFA from Tel Aviv University, the latter in film directing. Her previous short films are “Take Note,” which won the Best Fiction Film Award at the Tel Aviv...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Dawn Porter — ‘Trapped’
Dawn Porter is an award-winning filmmaker whose 2013 documentary, “Gideon’s Army,” won the Sundance Film Festival Editing Award, the Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award and was nominated...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Elizabeth Wood – ‘White Girl’
Elizabeth Wood, an Oklahoma City native, moved New York City to study writing at The New School. After a few years of making experimental and documentary films, Wood received a screenwriting...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Frankie Shaw – ‘Too Legit’
Frankie Shaw is an actress/writer/director from Brookline, Massachusetts. She graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University with a degree in English literature. She wrote, directed and...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Liz Garbus – ‘Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt & Anderson Cooper’
Oscar-nominated director Liz Garbus is one of the most celebrated American documentary filmmakers working today. Her films have been acclaimed worldwide and have garnered multiple Academy...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Milica Zec – ‘Giant’
Milica Zec is a New York City-based film and virtual reality director. Raised in war-torn Serbia, Zec’s work is deeply rooted in issues of conflict, identity and the human struggle. Highlights of...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Maggie Greenwald – ‘Sophie and the Rising Sun’
Writer, director and producer Maggie Greenwald is an award-winning filmmaker who began her career as a picture and sound editor. Her 1987 film "The Kill-Off," a noir thriller based on a...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Penny Lane – ‘NUTS!’
Penny Lane was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in 2012. Her debut feature-length documentary, "Our Nixon," world-premiered at International...
Join Us at the Women and Hollywood/The Director List Sundance Meet-Up
Please come, mingle, and network at Women and Hollywood and The Director List’s Sundance meet-up on Wednesday, January 27. We’re gathering at the No Name Saloon on 447 Main from...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Siân Heder – ‘Tallulah’
Siân Heder writes and produces on the acclaimed Netflix series "Orange is the New Black," for which she has received multiple WGA nominations. Her first short film,...
Sundance 2016 Women Directors: Meet Nanfu Wang – ‘Hooligan Sparrow’
Nanfu Wang is an independent filmmaker based in New York City. Wang was born in a remote farming village in Jiangxi Province, China. Realizing that she wanted to help tell the stories of people who...
Sundance 2016 Preview: Eagle Huntresses, Toddler Kidnappers, Other Festival Gems By and About Women
January hasn’t been a great — or even remotely good — month for films by and about women in theaters, as our January Film Preview proves. But tomorrow marks the beginning of the...
Sundance Selects Acquires Elyse Steinberg and Josh Kriegman’s Anthony Weiner Doc
Elyse Steinberg and Josh Kriegman’s doc portrait of Anthony Weiner documentary has found a buyer in Sundance Selects days ahead of the film’s January 24 premiere at the 2016 Sundance...
All-Female Ebert Fellows Cohort Announced for Sundance 2016
The recipients of the third annual Roger Ebert Fellowship for Film Criticism have been announced, and all three aspiring film critics this year are young women: Hunter Harris, Sara Alexandra Pelaez...
Elite Zexer’s Sundance Competitor “Sand Storm” Acquired by Beta Cinema
Two weeks ahead of its world premiere at Sundance 2016, the Israeli family drama "Sand Storm" has landed a distribution deal. Written and directed by first-timer Elite Zexer, the...
Sundance’s Shorts Program is 39% Female-Helmed
The short film programs at Sundance 2016 have been announced, and of the 72 shorts being screened across various subsections, 28 are directed or co-directed by women. That means that, overall, the...
Sundance Announces Its 2016 Premieres
Sundance has revealed the lineups for its narrative and nonfiction Premieres sections. Seventeen narrative films will be making their world premieres at Sundance next year. Only three (or 18% of the...
Trailer Watch: Working-Class Pals Breed a Racehorse in Sundance Winner ‘Dark Horse’
Louise Osmond’s “Dark Horse” has a new trailer, and this is an underdog story you won’t want to miss. The documentary, which won the World Cinema Documentary Award at Sundance, focuses on a...
Sundance 2016 Competition Lineup Unveiled, Over 40% Directed by Women
Sundance has released the competition slate for the 2016 installment of the festival, and nearly half of the program is women-directed. Of the 54 films that have been announced in competition with a...
Havana Marking Wins Sundance Institute and TED Award For Doc on Political Corruption
Havana Marking has been named the recipient of the Sundance Institute | TED Prize Filmmaker Award, an honor that includes a $125,000 grant. Making won for “Bloody Mary,” a documentary short...
Women at Sundance Fellows Announced: Jennifer Phang, Lyric R. Cabral and More
The Sundance Institute has announced its six 2015–2016 Women at Sundance Fellows, a group of directors and producers culled from both the doc and narrative fields who will receive support to...
Help Send Two Young Women Directors to Sundance
An Indiegogo campaign is seeking funds to help send two young female filmmakers to the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. The goal is to raise $20,000, which will cover all of their Park City-related...
Trailer Watch: Mother and Daughter Clash Over Class Expectations in Sundance Hit ‘The Second Mother’
A devoted and hardworking live-in housekeeper’s professional and personal lives are turned upside down when her estranged daughter comes to stay with her in writer-director Anna Muylaert’s...
Sundance Launches New Resource Map for Female Filmmakers
There are dozens of grants, workshops, blogs, archives, film festivals, resource lists and mentoring programs out there for female filmmakers, but finding the ones relevant to you can be a...
Trailer Watch: Marielle Heller’s Hormone-Charged Sundance Hit ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’
Minnie’s life has, by her own admission, “gone really crazy as of late.” She has sex for the first time, and her partner in action isn’t a gangly, pimple-plagued adolescent peer struggling...
Alice Winocour’s ‘Disorder (Maryland),’ Starring Diane Kruger, Acquired by Sundance Selects
Following its world-premiere screening at the Cannes Film Festival, French writer-director Alice Winocour’s “Disorder (Maryland)” was acquired by Sundance Selects. The Un Certain Regard...
Watch: Sundance’s Inspiring ‘She is a Best Director’ Celebrates Women
A new video released by the Sundance Film Festival makes a powerful case for the importance of female voices in film and television, including inspiring bits of wisdom from women spanning...
Sundance 2015 Deals: Mora Stephens’s ‘Zipper’ and Louise Osmond’s ‘Dark Horse’
Two more Sundance favorites have found distribution deals. Mora Stephens’ thriller “Zipper” has found a home at Alchemy, which will release the film later this year. Starring Patrick Wilson...
At Sundance 2015, Filmmakers Break The Silence Of Sexual Trauma
“What are these films telling us?” According to Sundance Senior Programmer Caroline Libresco,that’s what festival programmers asked when they realized they’dchosen five films about...
More Sundance Deals: ‘Hot Girls Wanted,’ ‘10,000 Saints,’ ‘Songs My Brother Taught Me’
Three more Sundance titles from women directors have found distribution. Chloe Zhao’s well-received Native American drama Songs My Brothers Taught Me has found a home in Fortissimo Films. Zhao’s...
Sundance 2015 Winners: Kim Longinotto, Jennifer Phang, Alante Kavaite, Chai Vasarhelyi
Sundance 2015 proved to be an action-packed — and awards-heavy — time for female filmmakers. A number of female filmmakers, especially documentarians, left Park City with prizes from the...
More Deals at Sundance: ‘Mississippi Grind’, ‘City of Gold’, and ‘The Wolfpack’ Bought
Wednesday brought exciting news for two female directors at Sundance: Anna Boden and Laura Gabbert sold their respective pictures, Mississippi Grind and City of Gold, in Park City. Deadline is...
Sundance Women Producers: Meet Sophia Lin — ‘Z for Zachariah’
Sophia Lin is a producer and production manager. Her previous credits include Camp X-Ray, Take Shelter, and Friends with Kids. Z for Zachariah premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival on January...
Sundance Women Producers: Meet Naomi Scott — ‘The Overnight’
Naomi Scott is a London-born writer and producer. Her previous credits include The Greatest Event in Television History, The Andy Milonakis Show, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! Scott produced The Overnight,...
Sundance Deals Update: Debut Films Starring Nicole Kidman and Kristen Wiig from Women Directors Sold
A trio of films by emerging female filmmakers have been sold at Sundance. Perhaps generating the most buzz among the three is Marielle Heller’s directorial debut, The Diary of a Teenage Girl,...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Chloé Zhao — ‘Songs My Brothers Taught Me’
Chloé Zhao was raised in Beijing and England, and is currently a MFA thesis student at New York University’s graduate film program. She was selected as a fellow at the 2012 Sundance Directors and...
Women In Film Awards $33,000 to Filmmakers in Sundance
More good news for female filmmakers at Sundance: Women In Film, Los Angeles awarded over $33,000 in cash and in kind-grants at “Unstoppable — The Road to Yes,” its 9th Annual Women in...
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 Directors: Meet Kristina Goolsby and Ashley York — ‘Tig’
Kristina Goolsby’s producing credits include Intervention and Who Do You Think You Are? Ashley York previously served as a producer on Inside Deep Throat and TransGeneration, and she directed the...
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 Directors: Meet Jenni Olson — ‘The Royal Road’
Jenni Olsen is a pioneering filmmaker, journalist, curator and film historian. She is also one of the world’s leading experts on LGBT cinema history. In addition to The Royal Road, Olson has had...
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...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Marielle Heller — ‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’
Marielle Heller is a writer, director, and actor. She was selected as a2012 Sundance Screenwriting Fellow and a 2012 Sundance Directing Fellow, and washonored with the Lynn Auerbach Screenwriting...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Kris Swanberg — ‘Unexpected’
Kris Swanberg began her film career at Southern Illinois University, where she studied documentary film production. Her first feature, It Was Great, But I Was Ready to Come Home, played in...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Jennifer Phang — ‘Advantageous’
Jennifer Phang is a San Francisco-based filmmaker with more than ten years of experience (Half-Life, Crazy Beats Strong Every Time, Glass Butterfly). The Berkeley-born daughter of Chinese-Malaysian...