Jewish Winners at Sundance
We called it! Both feature-length films premiering at Sundance we wrote about last week have won awards at the prestigious film festival.
First-time director Jill Soloway won the Directing Award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition for her film, “Afternoon Delight,” about what happens when a frustrated Jewish housewife living in the hip Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles hires a stripper to be her child’s nanny.
Soloway, who is an Emmy-nominated television writer, told the Forward how important it was for her to try her hand at directing. “I could have remained a well respected writer who didn’t get anything of my own made,” she said. “But I stopped waiting for directing opportunities to come my way, and I built that reality myself.”
The “Afternoon Delight” production team is doubly proud, with Kathryn Hahn, who plays the film’s protagonist, Rachel, putting in one of the 10 best performances at Sundance, according to New York Magazine.
“Inequality For All,” a documentary featuring former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich and his economic theories, won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Achievement in Filmmaking. In the movie by Jacob Kornbluth, we see the UC Berkeley professor skillfully and passionately arguing that widening income inequality is a great — if not, the greatest — threat to our economy and democracy. Some expect “Inequality For All” to be a real game-changer, to do for the economy what “An Inconvenient Truth” did for climate change.
Sebastian Dungan, who co-produced both films with his partner Jen Chaiken, has told the Forward that “Inequality For All” has been sold to the Radius/Weinstein Company for an undisclosed sum. “And we’re in talks with a number of distributors in regards to ‘Afternoon Delight,’” he said.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
