Alexandria Bombach
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“What is Our Responsibility to Survivors?”: Alexandria Bombach on her Sundance-Winner On Her Shoulders
Recently announced Nobel Peace Prize recipient Nadia Murad, a survivor of the Yazidi genocide and a current human rights activist, is the star of On Her Shoulders, Alexandria Bombach’s Sundance-winning (both for Best Documentary and the U.S. Documentary Directing Award) portrait of Murad as she navigates a world that would be overwhelming and intimidating for any 23-year-old, let alone one who has experienced unspeakable crimes at the hands of ISIS. But speak Murad must — to the prying media, to the cold bureaucratic UN, to indistinguishable assorted government officials. And to the refugees at camps who look to her as […]
by Lauren Wissot on Oct 17, 2018 -
Was 2018 the Year of the Woman at the Sundance Film Festival?
After the Sundance Film Festival’s awards ceremony, when female directors swept all the top categories, the response was ecstatic. “Women dominated Sundance,” cried the headlines. Social media blew up with congratulatory hashtags #womeninfilm and #femalefilmmakerfriday. “It felt like a revolutionary moment,” says Celine Rattray, who produced Sara Colangelo’s directing-award winner The Kindergarten Teacher. At the festival’s opening press conference, Robert Redford’s most memorable line was: “The role of men right now is to listen.” But did the film industry hear that? More than two weeks after Sundance concluded, five of the festival’s female-led jury winners had still not closed distribution […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Mar 8, 2018 -
“The Rest of the Shoot Was Just as Unpredictable”: Director Alexandria Bombach | On Her Shoulders
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your work? When I packed my bags to meet Nadia Murad for the first time, I thought we were heading to Kurdistan. I was going to film the displaced Yazidis in camps north of Sinjar and possibly the mass graves where ISIS had murdered thousands of Yazidi people in 2014. It was July, so I packed for 120-degree […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2018 -
“The Big Cameras Get Stopped in Security”: Alexandria Bombach on Shooting and Directing On Her Shoulders
Documentary filmmaker Alexandria Bombach released her debut feature, Frame by Frame, in 2015 to major acclaim on the festival circuit. The film screened at more than 30 festivals, including SWSX, Hot Docs, AFI Docs and the Camden International Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Documentary Feature. Bombach debuts her second feature, On Her Shoulders, in the U.S. Documentary Competition lineup at Sundance 2018. Below she discusses acting as her own cinematographer, the influence of Errol Morris’ Interrotron and filming in the “impossible heat” of a refugee camp in Athens. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2018 -
“… If You’re Not Trusting Yourself, You Can’t be Creative”: Mo Scarpelli and Alexandria Bombach on She Does Podcast
Mo Scarpelli and Alexandria Bombach are documentary filmmakers and co-directors of award-winning film Frame by Frame. The documentary follows four Afghan photojournalists as they face the realities of building a free press in a country left to stand on its own after decades of war and rule under the oppressive Taliban regime. The film had its world premiere at SXSW 2015, has screened at over 50 other festivals, garnered several awards, was voted one of the Top 10 Audience Favorites at Hot Docs Film Festival, and is nominated for a Cinema Eye Honors Award for Spotlight Doc. Right now, Mo […]
by Elaine Sheldon and Sarah Ginsburg on Nov 19, 2015 -
Counter-Brogramming: The 39th Atlanta Film Festival
Atlanta Film Festival falls right on the heels of SXSW, and its penchant for women directors and strong female leads is refreshing after Austin, where lesser Indiewood bro-coms go to die and where this year even some of my favorite films veered into man-child territory. Kristy Breneman and Christina Humphrey, the two young programmers behind Atlanta’s welcome change of pace, have inherited the 39-year-old festival and are crafting an earnestly community-minded identity in the midst of a rapidly changing city. Its growth is in part due to the fact that tax incentives have enticed more productions from Hollywood to Atlanta […]
by Whitney Mallett on Apr 13, 2015
