Su Friedrich

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Su Friedrich
Born December 12, 1954 (1954-12-12) (age 53)
New Haven, Connecticut United States

Su Friedrich (born December 12, 1954 in New Haven, Connecticut[1]) is an American avant-garde filmmaker.

[edit] Biography

Friedrich graduated from Oberlin College in 1975 and made her first film, Hot Water, in 1978. Her films regularly combine elements of narrative, documentary, and experimental styles of film-making and often focus on the roles of women, family, and homosexuality in contemporary America[2]. She is currently a Professor in the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University, where she has taught film and video production since 1998.

From the onset of her career in the late 1970’s, Su Friedrich has been a leading figure in avant-garde filmmaking and a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema. Her work has radicalized film form and content by incorporating a feminist perspective and issues of lesbian identity and by creating a remarkable and innovative synthesis of experimental, narrative and documentary genres. Friedrich’s films are multi-lingual, moving fluidly between the personal and the political, from autobiographical films about family to the investigation of society’s notions of sexual identity. Her rich cinematic palette, which includes home movies, archival footage, interviews, and scripted narratives, has resulted in a thrilling body of work that continues to influence and inspire new generations of independent filmmakers.

Su Friedrich is the recipient of the Cal Arts Alpert Award in the Arts and has received fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, as well as numerous grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Independent Television Service, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films and videos are widely screened in the United States, Canada and Europe and have been the subject of retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Stadtkino in Vienna, the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, the National Film Theater in London, and many others. Friedrich’s work is part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the National Library of Australia.


[edit] Filmography

  • 1978 Hot Water
  • 1979 Cool Hands, Warm Heart
  • 1979 Scar Tissue
  • 1980 I Suggest Mine
  • 1981 Gently Down the Stream
  • 1982 But No One
  • 1985 The Ties That Bind
  • 1987 Damned If You Don't
  • 1990 Sink or Swim
  • 1991 First Comes Love
  • 1993 Rules of the Road
  • 1994 Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire
  • 1996 Hide and Seek
  • 1999 Being Cecilia
  • 2002 The Odds of Recovery
  • 2004 The Head of a Pin
  • 2005 Seeing Red
  • 2007 From the Ground Up

[edit] External links

Su Friedrich at the Internet Movie Database