The Provincetown International Film Festival and the Juice Fund will bestow P-town’s inaugural Juice Award to one of six eligible women-directed films.
According to a press statement, the Juice Fund was developed by Tangerine Entertainment as a crowd-sourced, grassroots initiative to recognize and reward women feature-film directors. The Provincetown International Film Festival is one of ten festivals to present an inaugural Juice Award, generously providing $1000 cash and four hours of consulting from Tangerine’s partners — Amy Hobby and Anne Hubbell — to the winning female director for her first or second narrative feature.
Festival artistic director Connie White told Women and Hollywood, “PIFF has a strong history of showcasing women-directed films, including fourteen features by women this year, so partnering with Tangerine Entertainment in this new initiative is a perfect fit. Director Jane Campion, as President of the Jury at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, lamented that she was still the only female director to have won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. While women are as rigorously active and as ferociously creative as men in feature filmmaking, there is still much to do to address the inequity in which films are programmed and distributed, those of us at PIFF are doing everything we can to support that goal and share the work of these talented artists with audiences in Provincetown.”
This year’s festival, which will run from June 18 to 22, will also honor Debra Winger and Patricia Clarkson. Clarkson will receive the Excellence in Acting Award, and her most recent film, the dark comedy Last Weekend, will open the festival. Winger will collect the Faith Hubley Career Achievement Award. Her last significant role was in 2008’s Rachel Getting Married, in which she played Anne Hathaway’s mother.
Here are the six films in the running for the Juice Award:
52 TUESDAYS
director: Sophie Hyde
APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR
director: Desiree Akhavan
DRUNKTOWN’S FINEST
director: Sydney Freeland
OBVIOUS CHILD
director: Gillian Robespierre
STAY THEN GO
director: Shelli Ainsworth
FORT TILDEN
co-director: Sarah Violet-Bliss
