Allison Anders

Allison Anders has established herself as one of the few women directing films with strong female characters; films whose central themes have dealt with working class people, women in relation to men, and women raising kids without a male partner.

While still at film school, Anders made the cult film, "Border Radio", a dark story about the Los Angeles punk rock scene, co-written and co-directed with fellow students Kurt Voss and Dean Lent. Starring John Doe of X and Dave Alvin of the Blasters, "Border Radio" was nominated for Best Feature of 1989 by the Independent Feature Project.

In 1989, Anders was approached to turn an obscure paperback, "Don't Look and It Won't Hurt", into a film, which became "Gas Food Lodging" after Anders completely reworked the story and characters to match her own perspective. The critically-acclaimed feature, released domestically in 1992, starred Brooke Adams, Ione Skye and Fairuza Balk. After debuting at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as the Berlin Film Festival, Fairuza Balk won the IFP/W Spirit Award for Best Actress of 1992. Anders also won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best New Director for "Gas Food Lodging".

Anders' "Mi Vida Loca", a romantic love story set in the barrios of Los Angeles, made its world premiere at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival and opened nationally in the summer of 1994. In 1995, Anders collaborated with independent filmmakers Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino to create "Four Rooms". That same year, she won a Macarthur Fellowship, also known as "the genius grant."

Anders next wrote and directed "Grace of My Heart", the story of a woman struggling to find her own voice in the male-dominated world of music, starring Illeana Douglas, John Turturro, Eric Stoltz, Bruce Davison, Patsy Kensit, Matt Dillon and Jennifer Leigh Warren, with original music written by song-writing teams both past and present including Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, Dave Stewart and Carol Bayer Sager, Los Lobos and Gerry Goffin as well as David Baerwald, Larry Klein and Leslie Gore.

Anders' "Sugar Town" "also written with Kurt Voss", looks at the has-beens and wanna-bes of the rock and roll industry, starring Rosanna Arquette, Ally Sheedy, Lucinda Jenney, Beverly D'Angelo, John Taylor, Martin Kemp, Michael Des Barres and Larry Klein. The film was featured as the centerpiece premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999.

Raised in rural Kentucky, Anders spent her teens hitchhiking across the country, resulting in a series of adventures that often ended in jails and foster homes -- experiences she credits with giving her raw inspiration for her cinematic portraits of rural Americans.

At 18, Anders moved to England and returned pregnant with her first child. While raising her children in Los Angeles, she worked as a waitress and enrolled in UCLA Film School, where she won several prestigious awards, including the $20,000 Nicholas Fellowship from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Samuel Goldwyn Award for her screenplay, "Lost Highway".

While at UCLA, Anders became enamored of German director Wim Wenders and, after writing him sheaves of letters, he took time out from a trip to Los Angeles to see her first Super-8 film. Wenders immediately invited Anders to work on his acclaimed feature "Paris Texas".