VTIFF Program-Guide 2024 - Flipbook - Page 7
Stay connected with VTIFF @VERMONTFILM | Support and become a member VTIFF.ORG/MEMBERSHIP
SPECIAL EVENTS
THE VTIFF AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN CINEMA
2024 Award Recipient:
Lizzie Borden
LIZZIE BORDEN is a writer, director and editor and script consultant. Her film, Born in Flames, has been called one of
“The Hundred Most Significant Political Films Of All Time” by The New Republic, and is on the British Film
Institute’s list of the 500 Best Films of All Time. In 2016, Born In Flames was restored by the Anthology Film
Archives and screened around the world, where it received its belated acknowledgement as, in the words of New
Yorker critic Richard Brody, “a feminist masterpiece.”
Brody went on to say, “Borden proves herself to be a far more imaginative and farsighted screenwriter than many
celebrated Hollywood figures, because she sees the plot from a wide range of perspectives and circumstances,
including one that she palpably views with hostility. Borden’s very sense of what constitutes a story, and how to
realize it in images and sounds, is as radical as the social politics that she asserts.”
Borden also wrote, directed, and produced a controversial independent fiction film, Working Girls, which depicted
the working lives of prostitutes. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight, then won best
Feature at the Sundance Film Festival. It was restored by Criterion Films in 2021. The Anthology Film Archives has
just restored Borden’s long-unseen first film, Regrouping, an experimental documentary about women’s groups,
which Melissa Anderson called “combative, entropic, mesmerizing” in Four Columns.
Borden also published an anthology in 2022, WHOREPHOBIA: Strippers on Art, Work and Life, published by Seven
Stories Press, described as “a gorgeously done collection of all things stripping and sex work told by those who know
it best.”
Borden is currently working on several film projects.
VTIFF wishes to thank the UVM Film & Television Studies
program for their support in hosting Lizzie Borden.
WITH ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FROM
Burlington, Vermont
hotelvt.com
VTIFF.ORG | VERMONT INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024
7
