ALL POSTS
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...
Kim Longinotto, Rose McGowan, and Erika Cohn Ink Deals at Sundance
Sundance 2015 is just getting underway, but there’s already a lot of exciting news coming in for female directors, novices and vets alike. Yesterday, the opening day of the festival, brought word...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Alexandra Shiva — ‘How to Dance in Ohio’
Alexandra Shiva is the founder of Gidalya Pictures, a Manhattan-based documentary production company. Shiva produced and directed Bombay Eunuch in 2001, which went on to win Best Documentary Feature...
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...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Anna Boden — ‘Mississippi Grind’
The first feature from the filmmaking team of Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden was Half Nelson, which world-premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before going on to win numerous prizes. Half Nelson was...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Leslye Headland — ‘Sleeping with Other People’
Leslye Headland started her writing career in theater, with such plays as Bachelorette (Second Stage), Assistance (Playwrights Horizons), and the rest of the “Seven Deadly Plays” series (IAMA...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Louise Osmond — ‘Dark Horse’
Director Louise Osmond started her career at the UK network ITN in their news journalism graduate trainee program, covering stories in Europe and Africa before moving into documentaries. Her most...
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 Friday Barkfors — ‘Pervert Park’
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...
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 Nikole Beckwith — ‘Stockholm, Pennsylvania’
Nikole Beckwith’s plays have been read and performed in Ensemble Studio Theater, LAByrinth Theater Company, The Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Barrow Street Theater, 3LD, The Flea, Lesser...
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...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Alanté Kavaïté — ‘The Summer of Sangaile’
Born in Lithuania, Alanté Kavaïté studied Beaux Arts in Avignon and in Paris, where she specialized in photography and video. Her first feature film, Ecoute le Temps (Fissures), was released in...
Greta Gerwig’s ‘Mistress America’ Sold at Sundance
Ten days before the launch of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, Park City’s first major deal has been struck. Fox Searchlight has bought Mistress America, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s...
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...
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...
Trailer Watch: Jennifer Kent’s Sundance Favorite ‘The Babadook’
When it debuted at Sundance this year, writer-director Jennifer Kent’s debut, The Babadook, became one of the festival’s breakout hits, with critics praising the film as a “flat-out...
Sundance Award-Winning Rich Hill Director Tracy Droz Tragos on the Injustice of Rural Poverty and How Motherhood Can Open Doors to Documentarians
“People expect me to have a better future than Ido. I don’t know what to do anymore.” So declares a twelve-year-old boy lessthan five minutes into this film, and at once we are ruthlessly...
Cross-Post: 5 Takeaways from the Sundance Institute’s Women in Film Financing Intensive
The following was originally published at Sundance.org. Money may not be the root of all evil, but it’s certainly a root cause of one: holding back women filmmakers. Financing was the most...
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...
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...
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...
Sundance’s Keri Putnam Shares What She’s Learned from the Women Filmmakers Initiative
As the Executive Director of the Sundance Institute, Keri Putnam oversees all of the organization’s programs, including the Women Filmmakers Initiative and its associatedresearch. Prior to taking...
Sundance Sale: Sony Classics Nabs Maya Forbes’ Infinitely Polar Bear
After debuting at Sundance to great reviews, Maya Forbes’ feature debut, Infinitely Polar Bear, has been bought by Sony Picture Classics. Starring Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana, the heart-tugging...
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....
Stephanie Soechtig’s Sundance Doc Fed Up Sold
Tracy Droz Tragos and Andrew Droz Palermo’s Rich Hill was the nonfiction jury favorite at this year’s Sundance, but the documentary that’s arguably received the most Park City attention is...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Kate Barker-Froyland
Kate Barker-Froyland is the writer and director of Song One, her first feature film. Her short film “Match” screened at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors/New...
Women Win Nearly a Third of Sundance Awards
The 2014 Sundance Film Festival came to a close yesterday, culminating in a two-hour awards ceremony hosted by Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally. Women directors, editors, cinematographers, and...
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...
Sundance Woman Directors: Meet Tracy Droz Tragos
Tracy Droz Tragos won an Emmy Award for her first documentary, Be Good, Smile Pretty, which aired on PBS’s Independent Lens and chronicled her journey to know her father, who was killed in...
Five More Women-Directed Films Sold at Sundance
Some deals for women directors coming out of Sundance. Sony Pictures Classics is the new home of Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz’s Land Ho! In her interview with Women and Hollywood, Stephens...
Infographic: Women in Filmmaking at Sundance
Though the 2014 lineup at the Sundance was disappointingly low on women directors, the festival remains committed to advancing the ranks of women directors in the industry. Two years ago, Sundance...
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 Geetu Mohandas
Geetu Mohandas is a filmmaker based in India. In 2009, along with her director/cinematographer husband Rajeev Ravi, she formed Unplugged, which produced her first short fiction film, “Kelkkunnundo...
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...
Sundance Women Producers: Meet Mel Eslyn
The One I Love producer Mel Eslyn began working on films and music videos in the Midwest in her teens, working her way up through the set hierarchies. Years later, she relocated to Seattle,...
Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child Sold at Sundance
Just a couple of days after it acquired Lynn Shelton’s Laggies, A24 (which has a good track record for releasing women directed films- last year they released Sally Potter and Sofia Coppola) has...
Sundance Women Producers: Meet Katie Stern
Listen Up Philip producer Katie Stern grew up in New York City. At a young age, she started making movies with her older brother, many of which have appeared on public access television. She has...
Sundance Women Directors: Meet Madeleine Olnek
Madeleine Olnek is a writer and director who honed her skills in New York venues with more than 20 produced plays, all comedies. Her Sundance Film Festival shorts “Countertransference” (2009)...
Sundance’s Women in Film Event Calls Out Hollywood Sexism, Awards $32k in Grants
There was apparently one running theme at the eighth Women in Film panel hosted by the Sundance Film Festival: entrenched industry sexism. Six women directors and producers, representing five...
No Meaningful Change Over Time in Female Filmmaker Participation at the Sundance Film Festival Among New Research Released Today at Sundance
This morning, Women in Film and the Sundance Institute released the next stage of research on female filmmakers. Last year they released an unprecedented first phase in the work that began the...
Lynn Shelton’s Laggies Sold at Sundance
Two days after its Friday premiere at Sundance, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that director Lynn Shelton’s arrested-development dramedy Laggies had been bought by A24 for approximately...
Sundance Women Producers: Meet Mynette Louie
Producer Mynette Louie has worked on the films Children of Invention, Cold Comes the Night, and California Solo. Louie is also the current president of Gamechanger Films, which funds women-directed...
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...