Featured Guest: Ana Lily Amirpour

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NWFFest is proud to present
our first ever VANGUARD AWARD recipient..
.

ANA LILY AMIRPOUR

A screening of her acclaimed film,
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night 
will be followed by a discussion
with this extraordinary director
as well as Q&A session,
moderated by Roudi Boroumand.

Saturday, March 25, 4:00 - 8:00 PM at the Springs Preserve

ana lily amirpour

Photo by Myrna Suarez

 

Ana Lily Amirpour made her first film at age 12; a horror movie starring guests of a slumber party. She has a varied background in the arts, including painting and sculpting, and was bass player and front-woman of an art-rock band before moving to Los Angeles to make films.

Amirpour's feature directorial debut was A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), self described as "the first Iranian vampire spaghetti western". The film built up significant buzz when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and was the opening selection for the New Directors/New Films screening series at the MoMA in New York City. The film went on to win the "Revelations Prize" at the 2014 Deauville Film Festival and the Carnet Jove Jury Award, as well as the Citizen Kane Award for Best Directorial Revelation from the Sitges Film Festival.

Upon the film's premiere, VICE Media Chief Creative Officer Eddy Moretti, whose company released the film, called Amirpour "the next Tarantino". The New York Times's A.O. Scott also remarked that the film had a "Jim Jarmusch-like cool" and a "disarmingly innocent outlaw romanticism." In the wake of the film's release, Filmmaker named her to their 2014 list of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film. At the 2014 Gotham Awards, Amirpour was given the Bingham Ray Award, bestowed upon an emerging filmmaker whose work exemplifies a distinctive creative vision and stylistic adventurousness that stands apart from the mainstream.

Amirpour’s sophomore film is a desert-set psychedelic cannibal romance, THE BAD BATCH, starring Jason Momoa, Suki Waterhouse, Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey. The film premiered at the 2016 Venice Film Festival where it took home the Special Jury Prize. The Hollywood Reporter described the new film as “both violent and dreamy — a bewitching fusion of The Road Warrior with Robert Rodriguez-style scorched-earth badassery and a mystical Western strain that tips its hat to Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo. But those influences notwithstanding, Amirpour creates a world that's very much her own.”