Since film began in shaky black and white, actors and directors have likened filmmaking to life’s most challenging events - going to war, climbing a mountain or even giving birth. And yet each year aspiring filmmakers, brimming with passion, patience and perseverance, confront the intricate web of writing, funding and production as they attempt to bring their heartfelt visions to life.
There’s nothing more exciting and terrifying than doing this for the first time, and it’s these debut filmmakers that Rialto channel celebrates in their new Sunday evening series Rialto New Wave.
Screening on Sunday 27th April is Tiny Furniture, the first professional full-length feature film from Golden Globe winner Lena Dunham, who is best known for writing, directing, producing and acting in Girls, the series she created for HBO that went to air in 2012.
Since film began in shaky black and white, actors and directors have likened filmmaking to life’s most challenging events - going to war, climbing a mountain or even giving birth. And yet each year aspiring filmmakers, brimming with passion, patience and perseverance, confront the intricate web of writing, funding and production as they attempt to bring their heartfelt visions to life.
There’s nothing more exciting and terrifying than doing this for the first time, and it’s these debut filmmakers that Rialto channel celebrates in their new Sunday evening series Rialto New Wave.
Screening on Sunday 27th April is Tiny Furniture, the first professional full-length feature film from Golden Globe winner Lena Dunham, who is best known for writing, directing, producing and acting in Girls, the series she created for HBO that went to air in 2012.
Only 27 years old Dunham makes being an entertainment mogul and ‘it girl’, look like a breeze, but as she told Vanity Fair in 2012, "Hard work pays off. I am so annoyed at my father for being right about that."
Dunham is New York born and bred and the daughter of painter Caroll Dunham and photographer Laurie Simmons. After high school she attended Oberlin College were she studied creative writing and began writing short films and plays. After graduation she created the web series Delusion Downtown Divas, and at the age of 23 produced her debut feature film Tiny Furniture. The film was written in a four-day session in October, shot over several weeks in November in her family’s apartment and around New York, and send to the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austen in January.
It was a fast process, as Dunham told the The Film Panel Notetaker website. “Suddenly I just felt I had a feature-length story to tell, pronto. I had been contemplating for months as I lived my first post-collegiate year and suddenly it felt do or die” said Dunham.
Tiny Furniture was Dunham’s big break. She’d already attracted attention with her 60-minute film Creative Nonfiction that screened at SXSW in 2009, but it was Tiny Furniture that articulated her vision and voice and confirmed her talent. The film, which like all her work to date has an autobiographical element to it, tells the story of a young woman (Dunham’s Aura) trying to work out what to do after graduating from college during a global recession with a qualification that represents a good education, but limited job possibilities.
As Dunham told the New York Times, “The movie came out pretty true to form,” she said. “It’s about a period when someone doesn’t know how to value yourself. She is no longer a student, but not defined by a career yet, she is not defined by relationships, or by being someone’s child.”
The film stars her real life mother Laurie Simmons and sister Grace, who play a versions of themselves, and just as she does each season with Girls, Dunham delights us by presenting refreshingly real and complex female characters who are funny, frustrating and relatable.
Tiny Furniture debuted at SXSW, and wound up winning the award for Best Narrative Feature and went on to win an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. Thanks to the buzz surrounding Dunham and the comparisons to Woody Allen or Larry David, Dunham found herself in conversation with the master of irreverent comedy Judd Apatow who agreed to executive produce Dunham’s television series Girls, and well, the rest of this story.
Dunham’s meteoric rise might look like a case of ‘overnight success’ but it’s clear this filmmaker’s ‘do or die’ philosophy to getting on and producing work has got her to where she is today. Let’s hope it keeps propelling her to make edgy, original and smart comedy.
Tiny Furniture screens on Rialto New Wave, Sunday 27th April at 8.30pm