Anna Biller

I am an independent filmmaker living in Los Angeles. I became a cinephile at an early age, watching classic Hollywood films and foreign cinema with my parents. My work is informed by these shimmering black-and-white and Technicolor images, and by the many paintings I was surrounded by (my father is an artist) and looked at in books. Starting as an actress and then as a painter, with forays into theater, I finally found my true calling as a film director, where I have been able to craft personal worlds in which to express ideas that are at the same time personal visual, psychological, social, and auditory. The sensual qualities of film (the film image, the sounds of voices and music, the costumes, the lighting) for me are so arresting that I hold them of equal or greater value to the story. And yet, as a female director, I am also very interested in writing good stories about lived female experience, often framed within the claustrophobic limits of social conventions.