2022 Filmmaker In Residence
Isobel Lennart (1915-1971), a Polish Jew from Brooklyn, NY, was a prolific, critically acclaimed screenwriter during Hollywood’s Golden Age, succeeding in an industry whose barriers to women still remain formidable. She once said “you write about yourself a lot,” drawing on her own troubled marriage to offer insights into gender dynamics in her screenwriting that remain contentious today. A creature of the cinema, her biggest hit came on Broadway with Funny Girl, a story in which themes of a woman’s success, body image, and the very definition of female beauty, coalesced powerfully on stage and later on screen. Although Funny Girl returned Fanny Brice to public attention and catapulted Barbra Streisand to international fame, Lennart’s own life and work remain largely unknown. With a 2022 Broadway revival of Lennart’s most iconic work, filmmaker Marguerite Moritz seizes the opportunity to bring her story to light.
Meg Moritz is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker based in Boulder, CO. She worked for NBC Radio and TV before becoming a journalism professor at the University of Colorado where her research focused on LGBTQ+ rights as well as media reporting on collective trauma, including school shootings, natural disasters, and terror attacks. She has written and/or directed more than a dozen documentary films, including Scouts Honor (writer), Covering Columbine, Taking the Lede, and Como Fue: A Cuban Journey that have screened on both PBS and at international film festivals. She has served as a Gannett Fellow in Asian Studies, a RIAS Berlin Fellow, a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and a UNESCO chair.
Project description and bios courtesy of the Resident