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What brought us together that included our many trips to Sundance Film Festival, hosting panels and programming, and speaking engagements, was a connection to a very special mentor, guru, and guiding star – Alice Guy Blache.
Celebrating, Alice, Kimberly Skyrme casting director, producer, writer, and director, in short, A STORYTELLER shares insights into her most recent work and the upcoming Chesapeake Film Festival. She’s into so many things that her 27-year dedication to the art of nontraditional casting has earned her a stellar reputation in the industry. Honestly; I don’t know where she finds the time. But she does. And she does it very well.
We followed the white rabbit and fell into the rabbit hole, going after the stories of the first woman film director, Alice Guy Blache, and what makes Alice, well, Alice. Today, we are celebrating her one-hundred-fiftieth birthday, July 1st. Happy Birthday Alice Guy Blache!
A Lost Visionary Found
Alice Guy Blache (July 1, 1873 – March 24, 1968) was the first woman film director and the first to make fiction films before women had the right to vote, according to Alison McMahon, author of Alice Guy Blache Lost Visionary of the Cinema. Alice Guy developed narrative film stories at a time when it really didn’t exist. She owned and operated the Solax Studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. As a director for twenty-eight years, she accomplished things that no one was doing at the time, special effects, super imposition, synchronized sound films between 1902 and 1906 and up until 1912, she was the only woman film director who was producing a consistent body of work in the world. In 1912, women didn’t have the right to vote.
an original screenplay inspired by real events
by Christina Kotlar
THEME
“Art challenges the technology. The technology inspires the art.” – John Lasseter
Taking risks as a woman in a man’s world, Alice in Movieland is on par with indomitable spirit biopics of dynamic, accomplished women living their art– La Vie en Rose + Frida challenging male-dominated realms as in The Queen’s Gambit.
DESCRIPTION
As the bourgeois-repressed social order opened up at the turn of the century, artists and free thinkers joined industrialists to achieve their goals. Consequently, super-tech chick Alice Guy Blache arrives on the scene, influencing the likes of Picasso and Braque, impressing inventors and entrepreneurs– Eiffel and Einstein –while embarking on an unconventional woman’s journey launching a filmmaking industry with an upside-down, topsy-turvy, breaking-the-rules approach to life’s absurdities and scenarios.
