Women and Hollywood

Melissa Silverstein is a writer, blogger and marketing consultant with an expertise in the area of social media regarding women and Hollywood. She is the founder and editor of Women and Hollywood, one of the most respected sites for issues related to women and film as well as other areas of pop culture. She is the Artistic Director and co-founder of the Athena Film Festival – A Celebration of Women and Leadership at Barnard College in NYC. The third annual festival will take place from February 7-10, 2013.

Blog Roll

Interview with Dori Berinstein - Director of Carol Channing: Larger Than Life

Features

Women and Hollywood: You've been a producer of Broadway shows for a number of years. How did you segue into becoming a documentary filmmaker?

By Melissa Silverstein
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January 20, 2012 12:10 PM
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When I was asked five years ago if I could make a documentary about the Weissensee cemetery in Berlin I was full of fascination for Europe’s largest Jewish cemetery still in use - but also skeptical. Who would go to the cinema to watch a cemetery film? The special nature of the Weissensee cemetery, the mixture of stone graves and wild and rampant nature, the miracle that this site survived the Nazi era without being destroyed – can be best experienced by going there oneself.

I felt that a film would have to show things that remain hidden to the cemetery visitor on a Sunday morning walk; the stories behind the gravestones. I didn’t want to tell the story of the well-known people who are buried there like Louis Lewandowski, the composer of synagogal music or Adolf Jandorf the founder of Berlin’s famous department store KaDeWe. Their life stories are written in books or can be easily found online. I was searching for unknown stories and people who were almost forgotten.

The index cards in the cemetery registry are still in existence but don’t tell who the 116,000 people were who lie buried there. I thought that scattered around the world are living grandchildren, nephews or cousins of these people. But what do these descendants know about their ancestors? Does something link them to the cemetery in Weissensee? And how was I to find them?

By Britta Wauer
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November 21, 2011 3:01 PM
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Guest Post: Making Marathon Boy

Features

Six years ago, in an impoverished corner of India, an orphanage director and a slum boy capture the imagination of their country. Plucked from obscurity and thrust into the national spotlight, Budhia Singh ran 48 marathons by the age of 4, winning hundreds of thousands of fans and making headlines around the world. But what started as a remarkable rags-to-riches saga morphed into a tale of greed, corruption and broken dreams.

By Gemma Atwal
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November 20, 2011 5:44 PM
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Emma Stone Promos for SNL

I just love Emma Stone. Here's another reason why.

By Melissa Silverstein
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November 9, 2011 3:21 PM
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1 Comment

As a long-time documentary producer, I’ve come across countless films about war and conflict. But few of those narratives captured the larger picture of warfare. War Redefined, the final episode of the five-part series Women, War & Peace (which airs tonight- check your local PBS listings), tells the story of modern war in its totality – and shows how women are at the forefront of conflict in ways that few of us realized.

By Melissa Silverstein
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November 8, 2011 12:53 PM
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Do We Still Need Women's Film Festivals?

If you look around the landscape of film festivals there are many women's films festivals all across the world. But those who work in that area are struggling especially during these difficult economic times. I've been to a women's film festival in Germany that survived budget cuts and put on a great edition last spring that was embraced by the community and the local politicians. I've been to a festival in Romania that wasn't a women's film festival but had a section on female directors and those films were very strong, as strong, or stronger than the films in the main section of the lineup. And I've recently spoken also with the main programmer at the oldest women's film festival: Festival international de films de femmes de Créteil in France and they are struggling for their identity.

By Melissa Silverstein
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November 7, 2011 10:02 AM
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2 Comments