The LA Film Festival was an annual film festival that was held in Los Angeles, California, and usually took place in June. It showcased independent, international, feature, documentary and short films, as well as web series, music videos, episodic television and panel conversations.
Clara Law Cheuk-yiu is a Hong Kong Second Wave film director who currently resides in Australia.
Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre is a Montreal-based filmmaker most notable for her animated documentary films.
Lourdes Portillo was a Mexican film director, producer, and writer. The political perspectives of Portillo's films have been described as "nuanced" and versed with a point of view balanced by her experience as a lesbian and Chicana woman. Portillo films have been widely studied and analyzed, particularly by scholars in the field of Chicano studies.
Colin Archibald Low was a Canadian animation and documentary filmmaker with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was known as a pioneer, one of Canada's most important filmmakers, and was regularly referred to as "the gentleman genius". His numerous honors include five BAFTA awards, eight Cannes Film Festival awards, and six Academy Award nominations.
Patrick Smith is an American animator and YouTuber. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). His formative years were spent as a storyboard artist for Walt Disney, and animation director for MTV's Daria and the Emmy-nominated Downtown. Smith spent five years in Singapore as a professor at the graduate film program for New York University Tisch School of the Arts, under artistic director/filmmaker Oliver Stone. His 2019 film "Pour 585" is one of the 5 most viewed Animated Shorts on Youtube, and Smith is one of the few YouTubers that retains a consistent film festival release schedule, his films have screened at Tribeca Film Festival, Slamdance, Ottawa, and Annecy, and hundreds of other festivals world-wide. His most recent stop motion short "Beyond Noh" is currently part of the acclaimed traveling showcase "The Animation Show of Shows." Patrick is a fellow of the New York Foundation of the Arts and a curator for multiple international film and animation festivals. The beginning of his animation career has been told by himself like this:
In 1994, I was in college, and one night decided to animate something strange. I didn't know how to draw, let alone animate, so I just did something abstract. A friend of mine told me I should put an logo on it and send it to MTV. So I mailed a VHS of it to "MTV Networks" the address I got from the phone book. About two weeks later I got a call from a guy named Abbey, who said that they wanted to buy it. I remember the day he called, because it was the same day that I got my rejection letter from Cal Arts. I re-animated the same thing, a bit tighter. The spot won a BDA award and a Jury Prize at the 1995 Holland Animation Festival. After I finished the ID, MTV offered me a job on Beavis and Butthead, which was my first ever studio job, and which brought me to New York City.
To Touch the Soul is a 2007 documentary film directed by Ryan Goble and produced by Teresa Hagen. The film was written by Goble and Erin Henning, from a story by Hagen. The documentary is narrated by Cassandra Hepburn.
Candyjam is a 1988 7 minute 35mm short animated film animated collaboration by ten animators from four countries produced and directed by Joanna Priestley and Joan C. Gratz. The animation was made with clay painting, drawings, puppets and object animation.
Sarah R. Lotfi is an American filmmaker best known for her short film Menschen.
Nora Kirkpatrick is an American director, writer and musician.
Martin Villeneuve is a Canadian screenwriter, producer, director, actor, and art director. He was nominated at the Canadian Screen Award in 2013 for Best Adapted Screenplay, for Mars et Avril, his feature film debut. He is also known for The 12 Tasks of Imelda, his second feature film released in 2022, in which he portrays his own grandmother, and for his animated series Red Ketchup premiering in 2023. Villeneuve previously worked for Cirque du Soleil as an artistic director for commercials and films.
Bertha Bay-Sa Pan is a Taiwanese-American Director, Writer and Producer. Born in New Jersey and raised in Taiwan, Pan was educated at Boston University and the Columbia University Graduate Film School receiving a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Directing, while working as a Sales Executive in Film Distribution. Pan's graduate thesis short film at Columbia University, entitled "Face," garnered various awards from Film Festivals worldwide, including the Director's Guild Award for Best Asian American Student Filmmaker and the Polo Ralph Lauren Award for Best Screenplay.
Fright Night Film Fest, also known as Louisville Fright Night Film Fest, is an annual horror film festival in Louisville, Kentucky. The festival was first founded in 2005 by Ken Daniels and is typically held in July at the Galt House, which is famous for housing guests for the Kentucky Derby. The focus of the Fright Night Film Fest focuses on genre films such as horror, science fiction, fantasy, action, and cult from around the world including new films from Asia, Africa, Middle East, Latin America, Europe and North America.
The Arlington International Film Festival (AIFF) is an annual nonprofit film festival dedicated to promoting and increasing multicultural awareness and showcases world cinema and independent films in their original language with English subtitles. Independent film producers, directors and actors within the US and abroad are invited to participate in engaging panel discussions and Q&A sessions after the screenings. Each year the festival greets more than 2,000 movie aficionados and shows about fifty films from all over the world with an impressive lineup of premieres. The Arlington International Film Festival also includes a year-round events such as poster contest competitions, pre-festival screenings and art exhibitions with local artists and performances by musicians, singers and dancers.
Ky Dickens is a filmmaker, writer and director best known for her documentaries Show Her The Money, Zero Weeks, Sole Survivor, The City That Sold America and Fish out of Water.
Summer-Joy "SJ" Main Muñoz is an American filmmaker primarily known for directing television and award-winning short films often of the Western genre or featuring Latino themes.
The Platform Prize is an annual film award, presented by the Toronto International Film Festival to films of "high artistic merit that also demonstrate a strong directorial vision." Introduced in 2015, the award is presented to a film, selected by an international jury of three prominent filmmakers or actors, from among the films screened in the Platform program. The program normally screens between eight and twelve films; only one winner is selected each year, although as with TIFF's other juried awards the jurors have the discretion to give honorable mentions to other films besides the overall winner.
Sands of Silence: Waves of Courage is a 2016 documentary film that addresses the spectrum of sexual violence, from child sexual abuse and clergy abuse to rape and sex trafficking. It was directed, written and produced by filmmaker Chelo Alvarez-Stehle.
Bita Elahian (Alahyan) (Persian: بیتا الهیان), is an Iranian-American filmmaker and actress who lives in Los Angeles, California. She studied filmmaking at the New York Film Academy (NYFA). Elahian has received various awards for her directing in drama films. She is a member of Women in Film LA and New York Women in Film & Television.
The history of women's film festivals begins in the early 1970s during the second wave of feminism. The first international women's film festival took place in New York in 1972, and the occurrence of female film festivals soon spread to the rest of the world with festivals happening in Canada and Germany in 1973, France in 1974, and Iran in 1975. During the 1980s and the 1990s, the amount of international women's film festivals increased and today there are over 100 worldwide.
