The Gotham Independent Film Awards are American film awards, presented annually to the makers of independent films at a ceremony in New York City, the city first nicknamed "Gotham" by native son Washington Irving, in an issue of Salmagundi, published on November 11, 1807. Part of the Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), "the largest membership organization in the United States dedicated to independent film", the awards were inaugurated in 1991 as a means of showcasing and honoring films made primarily in the northeastern region of the United States.
Mad Hot Ballroom is a 2005 American documentary film directed and co-produced by Marilyn Agrelo and written and co-produced by Amy Sewell, about a ballroom dance program in the New York City Department of Education, the New York City public school system for fifth graders. Several styles of dance are shown in the film, such as tango, foxtrot, swing, rumba and merengue.
James Allan Schamus is an American screenwriter, producer, business executive, film historian, professor, and director. He is a frequent collaborator of Ang Lee, the co-founder of the production company Good Machine, and the former CEO of motion picture production, financing, and worldwide distribution company Focus Features, a subsidiary of NBCUniversal.
Street Fight is a 2005 documentary film by Marshall Curry, chronicling Cory Booker's 2002 campaign against Sharpe James for Mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Other credits include Rory Kennedy, Liz Garbus, Mary Manhardt, Marisa Karplus, and Adam Etline . Street Fight screened at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival and was later aired on the PBS series P.O.V. on July 5, 2005, and CBC Newsworld in Canada on May 7, 2006.
Andrea Arnold, OBE is an English filmmaker and former actor. She won an Academy Award for her short film Wasp in 2005. Her feature films include Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009), and American Honey (2016), all of which have won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Arnold has also directed four episodes of the Prime Video series Transparent, as well as all seven episodes of the second season of the HBO series Big Little Lies.
Austin Film Festival (AFF), founded in 1994, is an organization in Austin, Texas, that focuses on writers’ creative contributions to film. Initially, AFF was called the Austin Heart of Film Screenwriters Conference and functioned to launch the careers of screenwriters, who historically have been underrepresented within the film industry.
Jane Anderson is an American actress, playwright, screenwriter and director. She wrote and directed the feature film The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005), and wrote the Nicolas Cage film It Could Happen to You (1994). She won an Emmy Award for writing the screenplay for the miniseries Olive Kitteridge (2014).
Julia Bacha is a Brazilian documentary filmmaker.
Honey Irani is an Indian film actress and screenwriter, who works in Hindi cinema. She started her career as a child actor with roles in films such as Mahesh Kaul’s Pyar ki Pyas. It is said that Mr.Kaul kept her at his home so she would be comfortable during the film’s shooting. She was probably four to five years old when the shooting of the movies Chirag Kahan Roshni Kahan and Bombay Ka Chor started.
Josh Hyde is an American writer, director and independent filmmaker. His films, including the award-winning short Chicle, have been shown at the Berlin International Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival. Hyde's films are often character-driven narratives on the themes of cultural identity and global politics.
Marshall Curry is an Oscar-winning American documentary director, producer, cinematographer and editor. His films include Street Fight, Racing Dreams, If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, Point and Shoot, and A Night at the Garden. His first fiction film was the Academy Award-winning short film The Neighbors' Window (2019).
Semi Chellas is a writer and screenwriter who has written for film, television and magazines. She was born in Palo Alto, California and grew up in Calgary, Alberta.
Amy J. Berg is an American filmmaker. Her 2006 documentary Deliver Us from Evil (2006), about sex abuse cases in the Roman Catholic Church, was nominated for an Academy Award and won Berg the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay.
Alma Har'el is an Israeli-American music video and film director. She is best known for her 2019 feature film debut Honey Boy, for which she won a Directors Guild of America Award.
Sudath Mahaadivulwewa is an award-winning Sri Lankan film director. He is best known for his works in various feature films, documentaries, social awareness campaigns, and theatre work in Sri Lanka.
Azazel Jacobs is an American film director and screenwriter. He is the son of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs. His short films include Kirk and Kerry and Message Machine, and his features include the acclaimed Momma's Man,Terri,The Lovers, and French Exit.
Amy Virginia Talkington is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and author.
Nisha Pahuja is an independent Canadian filmmaker, born in New Delhi and raised in Toronto, Ontario. This writer/artist/director was introduced to film through studying English literature, working in social services and through working as a documentary researcher. She is currently a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow. Nisha's first full-length film debut was in 2003 in Bollywood Bound, and more recently she produced a film The World Before Her (2012) which explored the diverse lifestyles of women competing to become Miss India and juxtaposing it with Hindu Nationalists fighting for their beliefs.
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi is an American documentary filmmaker. She was the director, along with her husband, Jimmy Chin, for the film Free Solo, which won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film profiled Alex Honnold and his free solo climb of El Capitan in June 2017.
