American film director
Lauren Wolkstein is an American film director, writer, producer and editor. She is known for directing, writing, and editing the 2017 film The Strange Ones with Christopher Radcliff and serving on the directorial team for the third season of Ava DuVernay's Queen Sugar, which she followed with a producing director role in the fifth season. She is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University in Philadelphia.[2]
Early life and education
Wolkstein was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland.[3][4] She is the daughter of a schoolteacher and an Air Force Colonel.[4] Wolkstein has written that John Waters, David Lynch and Lukas Moodysson were early inspirations for her film career.[5] She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Film from Duke University, and won a Duke Undergraduate Filmmaker Award.[4] In 2010, she completed a Masters of Fine Arts in Directing from Columbia University.[4][6] She has said at Columbia, she "fell in love with filmmakers like Hal Ashby and Nicholas Ray, who had a sensitivity to outsiders, odd couple pairings, and people on the fringes.”[3]
Career
Wolkstein's Columbia University thesis film, Cigarette Candy, based on the experiences of her father as an Air Force colonel, won the Short Film Jury Award for Best Narrative Short at the 2010 SXSW Film Festival.[7][3] In 2011, she co-directed the short The Strange Ones with Christopher Radcliff, which was described by Filmmaker as "a brilliantly unsettling drama about two travelers, a man and a boy, who create fear at a roadside motel."[3] In 2011, she was named as one of 25 emerging filmmakers in the Emerging Visions program by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Independent Filmmaker Project.[8] Her next film, Social Butterfly, premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.[3] In 2013, Wolkstein was named one of 25 "New Faces of Independent Film" by Filmmaker.[9]
Wolkstein directed and wrote the screenplay for Beemus, It’ll End in Tears, a short included in the 2016 omnibus film collective:unconscious that was written with a premise described by The New York Times as "Five filmmakers transcribed their dreams; each description was then given at random to one of the others to direct as a short."[10][11] Sean L. Malin writes for The Austin Chronicle, "the five dream-renderings are unanimously virtuosic, especially those like Decker’s, Wolkstein’s, and Baldwin’s, that called for Lubezki-level single-shot photography."[12] Chuck Bowen writes for Slant Magazine that the film directed by Wolkstein "revels in the potential cleaning of an authoritarian slate, using nightmarishly symmetric imagery to relate a tale of a masculine hierarchy turned upside down by apocalypse."[13]
In 2017, Wolkstein and Radcliff adapted their 2011 short The Strange Ones into the feature-length film The Strange Ones. Katie Walsh at Los Angeles Times described the film as "an artful, boundary-pushing debut from Radcliff and Wolkstein,"[14] and Sheri Linden at The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein demonstrate an undeniable mastery of mood."[15] Eric Kohn at IndieWire writes, "Eventually, the feature-length debut of co-directors Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein reveals all its cards, and the full picture of this brief tone poem doesn’t match the level of engagement generated early on. But its atmospheric sophistication holds strong throughout, channeling a wonder for the natural world reminiscent of Terrence Malick with an air of existential dread straight out of Andrei Tarkovsky."[16] Matt Zoeller Seitz at RogerEbert.com described the film as a "frustratingly fractured but still-haunting drama from the filmmaking team of Christopher Radcliff and Lauren Wolkstein."[17] Andrew Lapin at NPR writes, "this may not be fair to the directors, but the film's two best conceits have been done better elsewhere,"[18] and Variety described it as a "ponderously opaque and tediously elliptical drama."[19] Leah Pickett writes for Chicago Reader, "cowriter-directors Lauren Wolkstein and Christopher Radcliff, expanding on a 2011 short, seem more concerned with building an eerie mood around the boy than with revealing what actually happened to him."[20] David Edelstein writes for Vulture that the film is "a perfect demonstration of how the craft of storytelling is also the craft of withholding — of revealing as little as possible in carefully parceled-out amounts," and "Radcliff and Wolkstein maintain an atmosphere of paranoia and dread by what they don’t do."[21] Sean L. Malin writes for The Austin Chronicle, "Wolkstein’s and Radcliff’s direction and editing only extend outward in technical excellence from the actors with a tight orbit of handsome visual and aural contributions,"[22] and Andy Crump writes for Paste, "Radcliff and Wolkstein’s approach to editing and filming lends an eerie cadence to their picture, looping from day to night to morning with a tempo that’s as natural as it is thoroughly spooky."[23] John Waters named it one of the best films of 2017.[24]
Wolkstein was a 2017-2018 Women at Sundance fellow,[25] and her films have screened at a variety of festivals, including Cannes Film Festival,[26] Outfest LGBT Film Festival,[27]
Sundance Film Festival,[28] and SXSW.
In 2018, Wolkstein began her work with Ava DuVernay's Queen Sugar, joining the directing team in Season 3,[29][30] and becoming a directing producer for Season 5,[31][32] in which she directed 5 episodes.[33] In 2021, Wolkstein directed an episode of the American drama television series Y: The Last Man. Wolkstein has also directed episodes of Cloak & Dagger[34] and Dare Me.
Personal life
Wolkstein is married, and she and her wife have one daughter.[33]
