SUNDANCE WINS

Please join us in celebrating some of our talented members — Film Fatales won big at Sundance! And this is just the beginning of Awards Season! We are excited for what’s to come and hope that you stay tuned for all of these incredible stories that need to be told.

Sian Heder’s coming of age drama “CODA,” earned four U.S. Dramatic Competition awards, including the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award. ‘CODA’ also sold to Apple for record-breaking $25 Million after a Sundance bidding war. The drama follows the daughter of a deaf family who joins her school’s choir.

Sian Heder is a writer, director and showrunner, whose most recent work includes executive producing and showrunning Little America for Apple TV+ and directing CODA, for Vendome Pictures and Pathe. She wrote and produced for three seasons on the acclaimed Netflix series, Orange is the New Black, receiving multiple WGA nominations for her work. Her other television credits include Men of a Certain Age, which earned her a Peabody Award. She has directed episodes of Netflix’s Glow, Orange is the New Black, Hulu’s The Path, and Little America. Her first short film, Mother, was awarded the Cinefondation Jury Award at Cannes Film Festival. Her debut feature film, Tallulah, starring Ellen Page and Alison Janney, premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and was released as a Netflix original.

In documentary categories, “Writing With Fire,” directed by Film Fatales member Rintu Thomas won the Audience Award and Special Jury Award: Impact for Change. The film follows the brave journalists of India’s only women-run newspaper, blending the personal and professional with a deft touch.

Rintu Thomas is a director-producer from India and co-founder of Black Ticket Films, an award winning film production agency based in New Delhi. She is a Sundance Fellow and her work is supported by the Sundance Institute, Chicken & Egg Pictures, IDFA, SFF Film Fund, Doc Society, Tribeca Institute, Finnish Film Foundation and Bertha Foundation, among others. Rintu was recognised for her film work with a President’s Medal in 2012, the highest honour given to filmmakers in India. Her latest feature documentary, Writing With Fire (co-directed, co-produced) is the only Asian film to be selected for its world premiere in World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Over the last 10 years, her shorts have ranged from themes of environment and public health to women’s rights and resilience of local communities towards climate change. Her notable multiple award-winning shorts are Dilli (2010), Timbaktu (2012). Rintu’s films have travelled to film festivals across the world, are being used as advocacy tools for social impact, included in the curriculum of universities and exhibited globally, including at the United Nations Climate Change Conference and The Lincoln Center for Performing Arts – becoming catalysts for new conversations. Rintu is a Skoll Stories of Change Fellow and also a South Asia Fellow with the Japan Foundation. In 2017, she was chosen as an Adobe Young Lantern, an award that honours creative leaders of tomorrow.