Silga's Favorite Women Directors for ICM

Sarah Polley is an actress and director renowned in her native Canada for her political activism. Blessed with an extremely expressive face that enables directors to minimize dialog due to her uncanny ability to suggest a character's thoughts, Polley has become a favorite of critics for her sensitive portraits of wounded and conflicted young women in independent films.

She was born into a show business family: her stepfather, Michael Polley, appeared with her in the movie The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) and on the television series Avonlea (1990); and her mother, Diane Polley, was an actress and casting director. It was her mother's connections that launched Sarah, at her own insistence, on an acting career at the age of four, following in the footsteps of her older half-brother Mark Polley. A second half-brother, John Buchan, is a casting director and producer.

Her career as a child actress shifted into high gear when she was cast as the Cockney waif Jody Turner in Lantern Hill (1989), for which she won a Gemini Award, the Canadian equivalent of the Emmy, in 1992. Produced by Kevin Sullivan, the film was based on the book by Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables (1985). When Sullivan created a television series based on Montgomery's work, he cast Polley in the lead role of Sara Stanley in Avonlea (1990). The series propelled Polley into the first rank of Canadian TV stars and made her independently wealthy by the age of fourteen.

Her personal life was deeply affected by the death of her mother Diane from cancer shortly after her 11th birthday, a development that ironically paralleled the fictional life of her character Sara. Highly intelligent and politically progressive at a young age, Polley eventually rebelled against what she felt was the Americanization of the series after it was picked up by the Disney Channel for distribution in the US, eventually dropping out of the show. Though she does not blame her parents, she remains publicly disenchanted over the loss of her childhood and, in October 2003, said she is working on a script about a twelve-year-old girl on a TV show.

Polley, who picked up a second Gemini Award for her performance in the TV series Straight Up (1996), subsequently quit acting and high school to turn her attention to politics, positioning herself on the extreme left of Canada's left-of-center New Democratic Party. The publicity ensuing from her losing some teeth after being slugged by an Ontario policeman during a protest against the Conservative provincial government, plus the stinging cynicism from some other activists unimpressed by her celebrity, led her to lower her political profile temporarily and return to acting in Atom Egoyan's film The Sweet Hereafter (1997). It was her appearance as Nicole, the teenage girl injured in a school bus accident who serves as the conscience of the small town rent by the tragedy, that first brought her to the attention of critics in the US. In Canada, the role was heralded by critics as her successful breakthrough to adult roles. It was her second film with Egoyan, who wrote the part with her in mind when he adapted the novel by Russell Banks, who, ironically, is American. Predictions of an Academy Award nomination and future stardom were part of the critical consensus, and she received her first Best Actress Genie nomination from Canada's Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television and the Best Supporting Actress award from the Boston Society of Film Critics. It was the buzz created at the Sundance Festival, where her starring role in the film Guinevere (1999) was showcased, when the entertainment media crowned her the it-girl of 1999.

Intensely private and extremely ambivalent about the personal cost of celebrity and the Hollywood ethos Fame is the Name of the Game, Polley could be seen as rebelling against the expectations of mainstream cinema when she embarked on a career path that took her out of the spotlight thrown by the harsh lights of the Hollywood hype/publicity machine after shooting the film Go (1999). She dropped out of Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous (2000), the US$60 million mega-hyped vehicle that was supposed to make her a mainstream star in the US, choosing to return to Canada to make the CDN$1.5 million The Law of Enclosures (2000) for Genie Award-winner John Greyson, a director she admires greatly. The film grossed poorly in Canada and was not released in the US, but it did garner Polley her second Genie nomination for Best Actress. While her replacement in Almost Famous (2000) went on to win an Oscar nomination and a career above the title in glossy Hollywood films, she took a wide variety of parts, large and small, in independent films, including significant roles in the ensemble pieces The Claim (2000) and The Weight of Water (2000); bit parts in eXistenZ (1999) and Love Come Down (2000); and the lead in No Such Thing (2001). Her choice of projects showed her to be a questing spirit more focused on learning the art of her craft than on stardom.

She has said that her choice of film roles, eschewing mainstream Hollywood movies for chancier, non-commercial independent fare, was the result of an ethical decision on her part to make films with social importance. A less-observant viewer might think that the rebel Polley played in her political life that had previously manifested itself in her profession was now driving her to the verge of career suicide in terms of popularity, marketability, and choice of future roles. However, that interpretation does not recognize the extraordinary talent that will always keep her in demand by directors, if not casting agents, with an eye on the opening weekend box office. One must understand Polley's career progression in light of her attendance at the Canadian Film Centre's directors program and her production of short films, including Don't Think Twice (1999) and the highly praised I Shout Love (2001). Polley is a cinema artist. This woman wants to make, and will make films. Thus, we can understand her career choices as a desire to work with and understand the technique of some of the best directors in film, including David Cronenberg, Michael Winterbottom, and Hal Hartley.

Polley is as renowned for her intelligence as for her remarkable talent. The problem of the intelligent person in the acting field is that the actor, as artist, in not ultimately in control of their medium, and it is artistic control that is the hallmark of the great artist. The controlling intelligence on a movie set is the director, and her attendance at the Canadian Film Centre has given her a new perspective on acting. The actor, she says, should not try to give a complete performance for the camera (that is, control the representation on film) but must remember that the function of the actor is to give the director as much coverage as possible as a film, as well as a performance, is made in the editing room. According to Polley, this realization, that the film actor exists to serve the director, has given her new enthusiasm for acting. Thus, her career, and her career choices, can be seen as a quest for knowledge about the art of cinema, a journey whose fruition we will see in her future feature work as both actor and director.

Sofia Coppola was born on May 14, 1971 in New York City, New York, USA as Sofia Carmina Coppola. She is a director, known for Somewhere (2010), Lost in Translation (2003), and Marie Antoinette (2006). She has been married to Thomas Mars since August 27, 2011. They have two daughters, Romy and Cosima. She was previously married to Spike Jonze.

Kelly Reichardt was born and raised in Miami-Dade Country, Florida, to a family of police officers. She had an interest in photography from a very young age. She started by using her father's camera, which he used for photographing crime scenes. She went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. In the summer of 2005, Reichardt directed Old Joy (2006), which premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. It was the first American film to win the Tiger award at the Rotterdam Film Festival and opened at the Film Forum in New York City. Reichardt's first feature, River of Grass (1994), a sun-drenched noir that was shot in her home town of Dade County, was cited as one of the best films of 1995 by the Boston Globe, Village Voice, Film Comment, the New York Daily News, Paper Magazine, and the San Francisco Guardian.

Jane Campion was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and now lives in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Having graduated with a BA in Anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington in 1975, and a BA, with a painting major, at Sydney College of the Arts in 1979, she began filmmaking in the early 1980s, attending the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS). Her first short film, Peel (1982) won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. Her other short films include A Girl's Own Story (1984), Passionless Moments (1983), After Hours (1985) and the tele-feature 2 Friends (1986), all of which won Australian and international awards. She co-wrote and directed her first feature film, Sweetie (1989), which won the Georges Sadoul prize in 1989 for Best Foreign Film, as well as the LA Film Critics' New Generation Award in 1990, the American Independant Spirit Award for Best Foreign Feature, and the Australian Critics' Award for Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress. She followed this with An Angel at My Table (1990), a dramatization based on the autobiographies of Janet Frame which won some seven prizes, including the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1990. It was also awarded prizes at the Toronto and Berlin Film Festivals, again winning the American Independent Spirit Award, and was voted the most popular film at the 1990 Sydney Film Festival. The Piano (1993) won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, making her the first woman ever to win the prestigious award. She also captured an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 1993 Oscars, while also being nominated for Best Director.

Margarethe von Trotta was born in Berlin in 1942. In the 1960s she moved to Paris where she worked for film collectives, collaborating on scripts and co-directing short films. She also pursued an acclaimed acting career, starring in films by well known German directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Volker Schlöndorff. In 1971, von Trotta divorced her first husband Juergen Moeller (with whom she had a child) and married Schlöndorff. She co-wrote many of the scripts for his films, and in 1975 the two of them co-directed The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975). In 1977, von Trotta directed her first solo feature The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978). With her third film, Marianne & Juliane (1981), von Trotta's position as New German Cinema's most prominent and successful female filmmaker was fully secured.

Her films feature strong female protagonists, and are usually set against an important political background. Themes in her work include the effect of the political on the personal, and vice versa, as well as the relationships between female characters, often sisters.

A very talented painter, Kathryn spent two years at the San Francisco Art Institute. At 20, she won a scholarship to the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program. She was given a studio in a former Offtrack Betting building, literally in an old bank vault, where she made art and waited to be critiqued by people like Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Sontag. Later she earned a scholarship to study film at Columbia University School of Arts, graduating in 1979. She was also a member of the British avant garde cultural group, Art and Language. Kathryn is the only child of the manager of a paint factory and a librarian.

Athina Rachel Tsangari was born on 2 April 1966 in Aspra Spitia, Greece. She is a producer and director, known for Attenberg (2010), Chevalier (2015) and The Slow Business of Going (2000).

Andrea Arnold was born on 5 April 1961 in Dartford, Kent, England, UK. She is an actress and director, known for American Honey (2016), Fish Tank (2009) and Red Road (2006).

Ildikó Enyedi was born on 15 November 1955 in Budapest, Hungary. She is a director and writer, known for On Body and Soul (2017), Simon, the Magician (1999) and My Twentieth Century (1989).

Céline Sciamma was born on 12 November 1978 in Pontoise, Val-d'Oise, France. She is a writer and director, known for Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Petite Maman (2021) and Tomboy (2011).

Chloé Zhao or Zhao Ting (born March 31, 1982) is a Chinese film director, screenwriter, and producer. Her debut feature film, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), premiered at Sundance Film Festival. Her second feature film, The Rider (2017), was critically acclaimed and received several accolades including nominations for Independent Spirit Award for Best Film and Best Director.

Zhao was born and raised in Beijing, China, to father and stepmother, Chinese actress Song DanDan. Growing up, she was very rebellious, and drawn to influences from Western pop culture. She attended a boarding school in London before moving to Los Angeles to finish high school. Zhao studied at Mount Holyoke College earning a bachelor's degree in political science. She worked odd jobs as a party promoter, in real estate, and bartending before studying film production at New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

In 2010, Zhao's short film Daughters premiered at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and won Best Student Live Action Short at the 2010 Palm Springs International ShortFest and Special Jury Prize at the 2010 Cinequest Film Festival.

In 2015, Zhao directed her first feature film, Songs My Brothers Taught Me. Filmed on location at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the film depicts the relationship between a Lakota Sioux brother and his younger sister. The film premiered as part of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance Film Festival. It later played at Cannes Film Festival as part of the Director's Fortnight selection. The film was nominated for Best First Feature at the 31st Independent Spirit Awards.

In 2017, she directed The Rider, a contemporary western drama which follows a young cowboy's journey to discover himself after a near-fatal accident ends his professional riding career. Similar to her first feature, Zhao utilised a cast of non-actors who lived on the ranch where the film was shot. Zhao's impetus for making the film came when Brady Jandreau - a cowboy whom she met and befriended on the reservation where she shot her first film - suffered a severe head injury when he was thrown off his horse during a rodeo competition. Jandreau later starred in the film playing a fictionalised version of himself as Brady Blackburn. The film premiered at Cannes Film Festival as part of the Directors' Fortnight selection and won the Art Cinema Award. The film earned her nominations for Best Feature and Best Director at the 33rd Independent Spirit Awards. At the same ceremony, Zhao became the inaugural winner of the Bonnie Award, named after Bonnie Tiburzi, which recognizes a mid-career female director. The film was released on April 13, 2018 by Sony Pictures Classics and was critically acclaimed.

In April 2018, it was announced that Amazon Studios greenlit Zhao's upcoming untitled Bass Reeves biopic, a historical Western about the first black U.S. Deputy Marshal. Zhao is set to direct the film and write the screenplay. In September 2018, Marvel Studios hired her to direct a film based on the Eternals.

A one-time pin-up beauty and magazine story model, Barbara Loden studied acting in New York in the early 50s and was on the Broadway boards within the decade. She was discovered for films by legendary producer/director Elia Kazan who was impressed with what she did in a small role as Montgomery Clift's secretary in Wild River (1960). He moved her up to feature status with her next role as Warren Beatty's wanton sister in his classic Splendor in the Grass (1961). As Kazan's protégé, she appeared as part of Kazan's stage company in the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater's production of After the Fall, winning the Tony and Outer Critic's Circle awards for that dazzling performance. An oddly entrancing, delicate blonde beauty possessed with a Marilyn Monroe-like vulnerability, she impressed in two of his other stage productions as well - But For Whom Charlie and The Changeling . After appearing in the failed movie Fade In (1973) with Burt Reynolds, she married Kazan and went into semi-retirement. Barbara wrote, directed and starred, however, in a bold independent film entitled Wanda (1970) and became an unexpected art house darling, distinguishing herself as one of the few woman directors whose work was theatrically-released during the period. She won praise in all three departments, nabbing the Venice Film Festival's International Critics Prize. Supposedly discouraged by a doubting, perhaps even resentful Kazan, Barbara never followed up on this success. She expressed interest and was in the midst of putting together another film, based on the novella The Awakening by Kate Chopin, when she learned in 1978 she had breast cancer. Barbara died two and a half years later, at age 48, after the cancer spread to her liver - before the project ever came to fruition. The Hollywood industry lost a burgeoning talent who just might have opened doors for other women directors had she been given the time.

Tamara Jenkins was born on 2 May 1962 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. She is a director and writer, known for The Savages (2007), Private Life (2018) and Slums of Beverly Hills (1998). She has been married to Jim Taylor since 2002. They have one child.

Nicole Holofcener was born on 22 March 1960 in New York City, New York, USA. She is a director and writer, known for Enough Said (2013), Friends with Money (2006) and Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018). She was previously married to Benjamin Allanoff.

Born into a family of doctors and educated in China at the Shanghai Film Academy and the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Languages, Joan Chen was discovered by veteran Chinese director Jin Xie while observing a filming with a school group. Her performance in Xiao hua (1979) (A.K.A. "The Little Flower") won China's Best Actress award, and resulted in the Chinese press dubbing her "The Elizabeth Taylor of China" for having achieved top stardom while still in her teen years. She came to the U.S. to attend college in 1981, first at the State University of New York at New Paltz, later at California State University at Northridge. She a succession of small parts in movies and T.V., with her first break coming in 1986 when, in true Hollywood legend, producer Dino De Laurentiis noticed her in the parking lot of Lorimar Studios and cast her in Tai-Pan (1986). The film bombed, but it led to her being cast as the ill-fated Empress in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987), which won critical acclaim. This, and her role as enigmatic mill owner Josie Packard in the cult TV series Twin Peaks (1990), are her best-known roles in Europe and North America. However, Hollywood's practice of type-casting East Asians has led to a dearth of major roles for Chen since then, and in recent roles, she has often been cast as a villainess.

After taking a few years off to start a family, Joan returned to the screen in important supporting roles playing women in early middle age, such as the mother of a principle adult character. As a result, her career is flourishing again on both sides of the Pacific. Her two directing efforts were well-received critically, and in a 2008 interview she revealed she planned to direct again but was putting that off until her daughters were grown, since directing took her away from them too much, whereas acting could be done on a part-time basis.

Susanna White is a BAFTA winning British film and television director. She attended Bromley High School and Oxford University before being awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study on the MFA Program at UCLA. Her work ranges from the hard-hitting HBO mini-series Generation Kill about the US invasion of Iraq and the John Le Carre thriller Our Kind of Traitor, to the CGI world of family film Nanny McPhee Returns with Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Dame Maggie Smith. She collaborated with Tom Stoppard on the mini-series Parades End (with Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall and Adelaide Clemens) and brought Ruth Wilson to the screen in another Emmy nominated mini-series Jane Eyre. Her early work includes the award-winning documentaries Volvo City (about the Hasidic Jewish community of London's Stamford Hill) and Tell Me The Truth About Love about the poet WH Auden. Her first screen drama was about another poet, Philip Larkin, Love Again, starring Hugh Bonneville, Tara Fitzgerald and Eileen Atkins and was made for only £200,000. The film appears to be much bigger budget than it was thanks to heavy snow in London during shooting which masked non-period detail on the streets.

After making several award - winning shorts in Turkey, Yesim Ustaoglu made her feature film debut with 1994's 'The Trace' (Iz). The film was presented at numerous international festivals, including Moscow and Gotenburg and won the Best Film Award at Istanbul Film Festival. Yesim Ustaoglu received international recognition for her 1999 film, 'Journey To The Sun' (Günese Yolculuk) which competed in Berlinale and received the Blue Angel Award (Best European Film) and the Peace Prize before sweeping the Istanbul Film Festival by winning Best Film, Best Director, the FIPRESCI Prize and the Audience Award. Launching her own production company Ustaoglu Film in 2003, her third film, 'Waiting for the Clouds' (Bulutlari Beklerken) premiered in 2014 Berlinale Panorama and was awarded NHK Sundance - International Film-maker's Award. Ustaoglu's fourth feature, 'Pandora's Box' (Pandora'nin Kutusu) premiered in Toronto (TIFF) and won Golden Shell for the Best Film and Silver Shell for the Best Actress Award in San Sebastian FF. Her fifth feature 'Somewhere in Between' (Araf, 2012) premiered in Orrizonti section in 69th Venice FF, won Best Film Award in Abu Dhabi FF and Split Mediterranean FF, as well as Best Performance in Moscow, Tokyo and Pune Film Festivals. Her latest film 'Clair Obscur' (Tereddut).

Audrey Diwan was born in 1980 in France. She is a writer and director, known for Happening (2021), Emmanuelle (2024) and Just the Two of Us (2023). She is married to Cédric Jimenez. They have two children.

A graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Dorota Kobiela was awarded the "Minister of Culture scholarship" for special achievements in painting and graphics for four consecutive years. Through friends Dorota discovered animation and film, and immediately threw herself into learning these new artistic disciplines, attending The Warsaw Film School, Direction Faculty. She has directed one live action short film, The Hart in Hand (2006) and five animated shorts - 'The Letter' (2004), 'Love me' (2004), 'Mr.Bear'(2005), Chopin's Drawings (2011) and Little Postman (2011). Little Postman was the world's first, and to her knowledge still only, Stereoscopic Painting Animation film, and won Stereoscopic Best Short Film at the LA 3D Film Festival, 3D Stereo Media (Liege), 3D Film & Music Fest (Barcelona).

For her sixth animated short, Loving Vincent, Dorota aimed to combine her passion for painting and film, and intended to paint the entire film herself. However once she expanded the project into a feature film the task of writing and directing was such that she has to content herself with directing the 95 painters. Loving Vincent is her feature film debut.

Julie Delpy was born in Paris, France, in 1969 to Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet, both actors.

She was first featured in Jean-Luc Godard's Detective (1985) at the age of fourteen. She has starred in many American and European productions since then, including Disney's The Three Musketeers (1993), Killing Zoe (1993), Three Colors: White (1994), and the "Before" series, alongside Ethan Hawke: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013).

She graduated from NYU's film school, and wrote and directed the short film Blah Blah Blah (1995), which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. She is a resident of Los Angeles.

Born in 1966 in Salta in the North of Argentina,Lucrecia Martel settled down in Buenos Aires where she attended the ENERC (National Film School). She started by directing a few shorts among which Historias Breves I: Rey muerto (1995), which garnered several awards in the international film festival circuit. From 1995 to 1998, she made a series of documentaries for TV as well as a children's TV programme, hailed by the Argentinian press for its unusual dark humor. From 2001 until today, Lucrecia Martel has managed to make three very personal feature films, The Swamp (2001), The Holy Girl (2004) and The Headless Woman (2008), in which she explores her favorite theme, troubled minds.

Patty Jenkins is a writer/director best known for directing Wonder Woman, the Warner Bros./DC Comics blockbuster of 2017, and her debut feature Monster. Patty also works in television where she is best known for the pilot and finale episode of AMC's hit show The Killing.

Patty began her career as a painter at The Cooper Union in New York City. Upon transitioning to filmmaking, she spent eight years as an Assistant Camera Person/Focus Puller on commercials and music videos. After attending the AFI in Los Angeles, she wrote and directed Monster.

Roger Ebert named Monster as The #1 Best Film of 2004 and #3 Best Film of the decade. AFI named it on the Ten Best Films of the Year. Patty also garnered a number of awards and nominations, including winning Best First Feature at the 2004 Independent Spirit Awards. Charlize Theron went on to sweep the awards circuit winning the Oscar, Golden Globe, SAG Award, and numerous critics' awards in the Best Actress category.

Jenkins went on to direct many commercials and TV programs including Fox's Arrested Development and HBO's Entourage and the pilot episodes for ABC's Betrayal and Exposed. She won the DGA award for best directing for The Killing pilot, as well as being nominated for an Emmy. She also received an Emmy nomination for her work on the final segment of FIVE - a series of short films about breast cancer.

In 2017, Jenkins broke the record for Biggest Grossing Live-Action Film Directed by a Woman, Domestic and Worldwide, with Wonder Woman. The film also received critical acclaim, broke several records and went on to become highest grossing film of the summer of 2017.

Céline Sciamma was born on 12 November 1978 in Pontoise, Val-d'Oise, France. She is a writer and director, known for Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Petite Maman (2021) and Tomboy (2011).

Danielle Krudy is known for Blow the Man Down (2019), Cowboys & Aliens (2011) and Stolen (2012).

Amy Meredith Poehler was born in Newton, Massachusetts, to high school teachers Eileen Frances (Milmore) and William Grinstead Poehler. Her brother is comedian Greg Poehler. She is of Irish (from her mother) and English, Irish, German, and Portuguese (from her father) descent. Amy was first involved with sketch comedy when she joined the group My Mother's Flea Bag when she was attending Boston College. In 1993, she went to Chicago where she studied at Second City and Improv Olympics. There, she met Del Close, who later became the voice of the UCB opening scene. In 1996, she joined the Upright Citizen's Brigade with Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh. Later on, the group moved to New York and became a Comedy Central show. The show went on only for three seasons. However, the group stayed together at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater. Today, the theater is one of the leading centers for improv and sketch shows.

After the Upright Citizens Brigade (1998) sketch show came and went, Amy joined the cast of Saturday Night Live (1975) in 2001. By the end of Christmas break of that year, she became a regularly featured performer. She has brought a slew of great performances on every show, such as impersonations of celebrities such as Kelly Ripa or Sharon Osbourne. When Jimmy Fallon left at the end of the 2003-04 season, Amy joined Tina Fey as a co-anchor for Weekend Update. Her Hollywood star is also growing bright, as she has done several feature films, including Blades of Glory (2007) with her then-real-life husband and Arrested Development (2003) star Will Arnett; and the Farrelly brothers-directed remake of The Heartbreak Kid (1993), in which she stars alongside another Arrested Development (2003) star, Jason Bateman.

Among her 2010s film starring roles are Sisters (2015), with Tina Fey, and The House (2017), with Will Ferrell. Having played one of her first roles in the indie Wet Hot American Summer (2001), she reprised her role in the television mini-series Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp (2015) and Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later (2017).

Amy was married to Canadian actor and comedian Will Arnett from 2003 to 2016. The couple have two children.