#Festivals
From Dialogue to Action: Crowdfunding Picks
The question of turning dialogue into action is not a new one, particularly in an age where the internet allows millions of people around the world to participate in conversations about issues such...
Berlinale 2019 Women Directors: Meet Lone Scherfig – “The Kindness of Strangers”
Lone Scherfig is an award-winning writer and director. Her first feature, “The Birthday Trip,” screened at the 1991 Berlinale and won several awards at festivals worldwide. Her more recent...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet May el-Toukhy – “Queen of Hearts”
Writer-director May el-Toukhy worked in theater before moving to film. In addition to her feature directorial debut “Long Story Short,” she has directed radio dramas, stage plays, and...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Nanfu Wang – “One Child Nation”
Nanfu Wang is an Emmy-nominated and Peabody-winning filmmaker based in New York City. Wang’s feature debut, “Hooligan Sparrow,” premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. It was...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Cristina Gallego – “Birds of Passage”
Cristina Gallego is a producer, editor, and director. Through her production company Ciudad Lunar she produced “La Sombra del Caminante,” “The Wind Journeys,” and “Embrace of the...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Jacqueline Olive – “Always in Season”
Jacqueline Olive is an independent filmmaker and immersive media producer with more than a decade of experience in journalism and film. She co-directed and produced the award-winning short...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Bert & Bertie – “Troop Zero”
Bert & Bertie are a female writing-directing duo from London. Their combined backgrounds in photography and performance led them to filmmaking. Their credits include “Worm,”...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Janice Engel – “Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins”
Janice Engel is an award-winning filmmaker and showrunner. Engel has made numerous documentaries, non-fiction television specials, and series including “Jackson Browne: Going Home,”...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Britt Poulton – “Them That Follow”
Britt Poulton is a writer and director. After studying International Relations at UC Berkeley, she left politics to pursue film and completed her MFA at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She wrote...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Gurinder Chadha – “Blinded by the Light”
Gurinder Chadha’s award-winning films have earned over $300 million at the international box office. Her film credits include “Bhaji on the Beach,” “Bend It Like Beckham,” and...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Irene Taylor Brodsky – “Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements”
Irene Taylor Brodsky is an Oscar-nominated, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker. Her first feature film, “Hear and Now,” won the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award in 2007 as well as a...
Study: Sundance Boasts Impressive Pipeline of Women & POC Directors, But Still Has Work to Do
Sundance 2019 is in full swing but the Sundance Institute isn’t resting on its laurels. Far from it. The org released a study with the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, entitled...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Rachel Leah Jones – “Advocate”
Rachel Leah Jones is a critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker and producer whose work focuses on Israel and Palestine. Her directing credits include “500 Dunam on the Moon,”...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Mirrah Foulkes – “Judy and Punch”
Mirrah Foulkes is an award-winning Australian actor, writer, and director. Foulkes has directed three short films: “Dumpy Goes to the Big Smoke,” “Florence Has Left The...
Inclusive Film Programming Collective Launches at Sundance
Sundance 2019 is off to a great start. According to a press release, the fest saw the introduction of the Programmers of Colour Collective (POC2), a group of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ film...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Rachel Lears – “Knock Down the House”
Rachel Lears is a director, writer, producer, and cinematographer. She is a 2013 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow and director of the Emmy-nominated documentary “The Hand That Feeds,” which was...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Chinonye Chukwu – “Clemency”
Chinonye Chukwu is a filmmaker, educator, and social justice advocate. “Clemency” is her second feature film. The script was a 2017 Athena List winner for best feature script featuring a female...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe – “Greener Grass”
Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe are an award-winning writing and directing team. DeBoer and Luebbe recently directed two episodes of TruTV’s “Adam Ruins Everything,” and in 2017, they sold a...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Tayarisha Poe – “Selah and the Spades”
Tayarisha Poe is a storyteller from West Philly. She was chosen as one of the “25 new faces of independent film” by Filmmaker magazine in 2015, and in 2016 she received the Sundance...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Alice Waddington – “Paradise Hills”
Alice Waddington’s first short 2015’s “Disco Inferno,” was invited to 65 international film festivals, including Fantastic Fest, where it won Best Director and Best Feature...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Sacha Polak – “Dirty God”
Sacha Polak is an award-winning director and screenwriter. Her feature films “Hemel” and “Zurich” were both screened ata range of international film festivals. “Hemel” was awarded the...
Julia Reichert to Receive Outstanding Achievement Award at Hot Docs 2019
Documentarian Julia Reichert will soon have another honor to go with her Emmy and three Oscar noms. Hot Docs has announced it is presenting the director with its Outstanding Achievement Award at...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Debra Eisenstadt – “Imaginary Order”
Debra Eisenstadt is a writer, director, producer, and editor. She wrote, produced, directed, shot, and edited the feature film “Daydream Believer,” which won a 2002 Independent Spirit...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Ursula Macfarlane – “Untouchable”
Ursula Macfarlane is an award-winning UK-based documentary filmmaker. Her films include “One Deadly Weekend in America,” “Charlie Hebdo: Three Days That Shook Paris,” and...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Penny Lane – “Hail Satan?”
Penny Lane has previously directed feature documentaries “The Pain of Others,” “Our Nixon,” and “Nuts!” Her work has screened at International Film Festival...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Lulu Wang – “The Farewell”
Lulu Wang is a classical-pianist-turned-filmmaker. Born in Beijing, raised in Miami, and educated in Boston, Wang is a recipient of the 2014 Chaz and Roger Ebert Directing Fellowship, awarded at the...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Martha Stephens – “To the Stars”
Martha Stephens is a writer and director. Her micro-budget feature films “Passenger Pigeons” and “Pilgrim Song” premiered at the SXSW Film Festival. She co-wrote and co-directed “Land...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Jennifer Baichwal – “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch”
Jennifer Baichwal has been directing and producing documentaries for over 20 years. Her award-winning films include “Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles,” “Watermark,”...
Sundance 2019 Women Directors: Meet Kim Longinotto – “Shooting the Mafia”
Kim Longinotto is an award-winning documentarian known for making films about female outsiders and rebels. Among her 20 films, she has followed a teenager struggling to become a wrestling star in...
The Year in Women and Hollywood
Dear Friends, This has been quite a year. The reckoning that began in October 2017 has continued to push the industry in ways no one could have ever imagined. The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have...
Under the Radar: Aube Giroux’s “Modified” Is a Personal, Political Exploration of Food Policy
By Antora Majumdar and Keno Katsuda “If you add water to a food product, you must add ‘water’ to the food label. But if you add insecticide [to food] through genetic engineering, you...
DOC NYC 2018 Women Directors: Meet Benedetta Argentieri – “I Am the Revolution”
Benedetta Argentieri is an independent journalist and director who has been covering the Iraqi and Syrian war since 2014. She produced “Capulcu-Voices from Gezi,” a documentary about the revolt...
DOC NYC 2018 Women Directors: Meet Bridgette Auger – “We Are Not Princesses”
Bridgette Auger has covered the Arab Spring in Egypt and Libya, as well as the refugee crisis as a result of the war in Syria, through photography and video. She was a 2016 National MediaMaker Fellow...
DOC NYC 2018 Women Directors: Meet Tracy Droz Tragos – “The Smartest Kids in the World”
Tracy Droz Tragos is a documentary filmmaker whose credits include the HBO film “Abortion: Stories Women Tell,” about personal stories of unplanned pregnancies, which premiered at the 2016...
DOC NYC 2018 Women Directors: Meet Ruth Leitman – “Lady Parts Justice in the New World Order”
Ruth Leitman has directed six feature length documentary films including “Alma,” which won the Documentary Feature Jury Prize at the Hamptons Film Festival. Her other credits include “Lipstick...
DOC NYC 2018 Women Directors: Meet Maxine Trump – “To Kid Or Not To Kid”
Maxine Trump directed the 2012 feature “Musicwood,” which was a New York Times Critics’ Pick. She’s directed short documentaries for TNT, Sundance Channel, BBC, and TLC. Her...
DOC NYC 2018 Women Directors: Meet Jennifer Deschamps – “Inside Lehman Brothers”
In 2005, Jennifer Deschamps directed “Is God in Rwanda?,” which focused on people who lost their faith after the Rwandan Genocide. As an editor of documentaries since 2015, Deschamps is...
DOC NYC 2018 Women Directors: Meet Alexandra Stergiou and Lexi Henigman – “The Candidates”
Alexandra Stergiou’s work has been recognized by the Wasserman Awards, National Board of Review, and British Council. Her commercial credits as a director and cinematographer include John Frieda,...
DOC NYC 2018 Women Directors: Meet Joy E. Reed – “Little Miss Westie”
Joy E. Reed brings over a decade of experience in documentary filmmaking as an associate editor and animator. She has been on the creative team of a number of films that have premiered at Sundance,...
DOC NYC 2018 Women Directors: Meet Havana Marking – “The Kleptocrats”
Havana Marking is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker known for filming in dangerous locations and getting on the inside of criminal or subculture groups. She wrote and directed “Smash...
DOC NYC 2018 Women Directors: Meet Alyssa Bolsey – “Beyond the Bolex”
Alyssa Bolsey began and writing short films as a kid. While still in high school, she directed a short documentary entitled “Wild Horses.” This work was screened at various art galleries...
1972 Aretha Franklin Doc Will Finally Receive Theatrical Release
The Queen of Soul’s “most transcendent” gospel performance will be making its way to theaters. Shot in 1972, the Aretha Franklin documentary “Amazing Grace” will receive...
Under the Radar: Rima Das’ “Bulbul Can Sing” Examines the Joy and Pain of Growing Up
Last year, director Rima Das premiered her film “Village Rockstars,” which went on to become India’s official submission to the 91st Academy Awards. In her latest feature, “Bulbul Can...
Sheila Nevins Will Receive Hamptons Doc Film Fest’s Career Achievement Award
Sheila Nevins is adding the Lumiere Career Achievement Award to her dozens of Emmys and Peabodys. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the former president of HBO Documentary Films will receive the honor at...
Glenn Close to Be Honored at 2019 Santa Barbara International Film Festival
Glenn Close might portray a perpetually-in-the-shadows spouse in “The Wife,” but she’s anything but in real life. A press release has announced the six-time Oscar nominee will be...
Under the Radar: “Quiet Killing” Delves into Canada’s Mistreatment of Indigenous Women
Many people in the United States often joke about “moving to Canada,” as if doing so will free themselves of enduring legacies of capitalism and imperialism. Moving north, even in the...
Submit Your Script to the 2019 Athena IRIS Screenwriting Lab
The Athena IRIS Screenwriting Lab is accepting scripts for its 2019 edition. If you’re a female-identifying writer with a feature-length screenplay centering on at least one woman in a...
Join Women and Hollywood for a #MeToo Panel Discussion at Hamptons Film Fest
The Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF) is commemorating the #MeToo movement. It’s been nearly a year since the Harvey Weinstein stories broke and #MeToo became part of our everyday...
Guest Post: How I Sought to Improve Black Representation with My First Feature “Solace”
Guest Post by Tchaiko Omawale Being a Black female filmmaker, I carry the privilege and responsibility of creating the things I wish I had seen when I was growing up. My two favorite movie genres...
You’re Invited: Join Women and Hollywood at the Women Sports Film Fest in San Francisco
If you’ll be in the Bay Area next week, you should swing by the 3rd Annual Women Sports Film Festival (WSFF). Women and Hollywood is co-presenting the fest, whose mission is to advance gender...
TIFF 2018 Women Directors: Meet Paprika Steen – “That Time of Year”
Paprika Steen is an award-winning Scandinavian actress and director. She made her directorial debut in 2004 with the tragedy-drama “Aftermath” and followed it up with 2007’s...