Allison Anders

The film also won the Deauville Film Festival Critics Award and film was also nominated for the Golden Bear at the 42nd Berlin International Film Festival. Gas Food Lodging gives audiences a look at three vibrant, restless women in a dusty Western town, chronicling a coming of age story about a truck stop waitress and her two daughters.

Her next film for Cineville was Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life), about girl gangs in the Echo Park poor Hispanic neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, where Anders lived. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993, and saw wide release in 1994. This is the female perspective of what it means to live in the inner city, where almost every girl has at least one child by the age of twenty-one, and where most homeboys of the same age are either dead or in prison. Mi Vida Loca peers into the lives of several of the young Echo Park women. Read Less

Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach had their first collaboration on her film and were nominated for a Grammy Award. Anders also makes another film Sugar Town, before beginning to involve herself with television. Sugar Town follows the interconnected lives of a handful of power brokers, wanna-bes and has-beens. Gwen Jade Gordon, a self-centered would-be rock star who will do anything to further her career, is working as an assistant to production designer Liz Ally Sheedy, but when Gwen discovers Liz has a date with famous producer Burt Larry Klein, any loyalty she has to her boss immediately goes out the window.

Her 2001 film Things Behind the Sun, dealing with the long-term aftermath of a rape, won an Emmy Award nomination for actor Don Cheadle for Best Supporting Actor, 3 Independent Spirit Award Nominations: Don Cheadle for Best Supporting Actor, Kim Dickens for Best Actress, and Best Film. She and co-writer Kurt Voss received a nomination for the Edgar Award. The film was awarded the SHINE Award as well as the Peabody Award. When a young journalist Gabriel Mann goes to interview a female rock singer Kim Dickens, memories of his past are awaken and they are both forced to confront the troubling secrets of their past. Read Less