The Hollywood Women’s Film Festival
The Hollywood Women’s Film Festival is June 14–18th
We invite you to join us walking in the footsteps of the women pioneers in writing, directing and producing, Mary Pickford, Alice Guy Blache, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, Hedy Lamar, Lucille Ball, Marion Davies, Tressie Souders, Lillian Gish, Marion Wong and all the women film pioneers.
In Their Footsteps: Women Pioneers of Old Hollywood — Light the Way For the Women of New Hollywood
The Hollywood Women’s Film Festival is presented by The Hollywood Women’s Film Institute. Keeping the vision of the women pioneers of Hollywood’s golden era alive by re-inventing Hollywood is a homage to their genius.
The Institute
The Hollywood Women’s Film Institute is a non-profit feminist organization created to support and facilitate programs and opportunities for women filmmakers and student filmmakers in film, TV, and media. Together with our sponsors and celebrity hosts, our goals include helping women to create, distribute, screen and promote their works in various formats and to provide educational workshops. Our panels and workshops are designed to educate and inform woman in film financing, distribution, writing, directing and producing.
Additional panels and workshops are designed to help support women in navigating within the industry, fighting sexism, racism and homophobia, in order to balance the scales of power and opportunity.
We have brought on advisory board members, both men and women, from across the creative, business, media and academic spectrum, to bring a balanced perspective to our programming. Our advisory members include, professors, business owners, filmmakers, writers, directors, producers, actors, composers, costume designers, techs, film consultants, academics, journalists and attorneys. The Institute was created to serve women in film, TV, academia, music and media, internationally. Our main program event is the Hollywood Women’s Film Festival. Next year in 2020 we will be expanding our music and new media programming.
Our International Film Festival
The mission of the Hollywood Women’s Film Festival is to provide affordable, quality, film festival programs to empower women filmmakers from all over the world, in all aspects of motion pictures, television and media. Through our screenings, educational panels, festival events and guest speaker programs we will help our filmmakers broaden their scope of knowledge, visibility and opportunity.
Our focus is to provide a forum for women from all countries to come to Los Angeles tell their stories, and show their films to the public and industry professionals. Our goal toward change is to engage both men and women in raising awareness through working together and participating in filmmaking, panel discussions and workshops to balance the power scales and end gender and racial inequity. Talent, dedication, focus, hard work and opportunity are the keys to creative success. Our festival provides the platforms to launch creative visions.
U.S. and international film selections by our global sisters in film include films from India, Iceland, Japan, Argentina, Taiwan and Brazil.
Awards to be bestowed:
Humanitarian Award to producer Cindy Cowan
Dorothy Arzner Award for her extensive contribution to LGBTQ visibility in film to director Andrea Meyerson
Sally Kirkland
Lifetime Achievement Award in Acting to Sally Kirkland
Our Screening Venues include The Chaplin Theatre at Raleigh Studios,
at Raliegh Studios
UCLA James Bridges Theatre, and Dick Clark Productions
The Hollywood Women’s Film Institute and our featured program The Hollywood Women’s Film Festival is the vision of founder, writer-director J.R. Niles. Niles has brought in friends from academia, TV and the film industry to help launch the non-profit institute, its festival and educational programs, bringing a new platform of creative intersectionality for women in film, TV, music and media.
Award-winning screenwriter and director, J.R. Niles is an American filmmaker and singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles who came out of the LA Rock Music scene of the late 1990s. Niles began writing and directing films in 2010. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and a Master’s Degree in International Comparative Politics, both from The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). She directed her first two films during her time at UCLA, On This Land Kilimanjaro filmed in Tanzania, Africa at Mt. Kilimanjaro and her film on Women of the French Resistance in WWII, The Art of Resistance, filmed in Paris, France. In 2012 Niles was co-producer the dramatic, film short Lillian, starring Tony Award Nominated Actress Kathleen Chalfant and directed a documentary short on sex trafficking. In 2013 Niles wrote and directed her first narrative film in New York City, No Apologies: Writers of Rebellion about writer Lillian Hellman.
Niles has gone on to write, direct and produce both narrative films and documentaries. Her dark, edgy, feature films are often focused on female driven stories, and often combine the action and dramatic thriller genres. Currently she has formed several producing teams for her slate of feature films and to help finance films for other directors.
