News Briefs

• Interview with Helen Hunt from the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin. Her directorial debut, Then She Found Me opens on April 25. Helen Hunt Talks Film Making in Austin

• The Golden Compass is the first film to cross the $300 million mark in international box office without having made $100 million in the US. Maybe the world doesn't have as much trouble with girls as the lead of movies as we think they do. Hopefully this will get sequel talks revived.

• Sarah Polley 's Away from Her picked up seven awards at the Canadian Genie's. The film won best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, best first feature and acting awards for Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent.

• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical film about her life in Iran has been banned in Lebanon.
  

• ShoWest is the industry event that stokes the fire to get people in the biz (namely the theatre owners and reporters) ready for the summer season. They hand out awards each year that are focused on films that are coming out over the next couple of months. The list this year includes: Helen Hunt as the Breakthrough Director of the Year for Then She Found Me; Anne Hathaway as Female Star of the Year who will be seen as Agent 99 in Get Smart. Also, Sarah Jessica Parker who will try and whip up a female frenzy with Sex and the City, received the Vanguard award and Abigail Breslin who next stars with Jodie Foster in Nim's Island has been named Female Star of Tomorrow (based on her current crop of work, she seems like the female star of today.) This summer she also stars in the big screen version of the American Girl doll phenomenon, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl.

• Interviews from Women Directors with film at South by South West Mary Bronstein, director of Yeast; Caroline Suh, director of FrontRunners (IndieWire)
  

• Baby Mama, the new comedy starring Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, will open this year's Tribeca Film Festival on April 23rd.

• Judith Thompson has won the 2008 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for her play Palace of the End, a series of monologues about the Iraq War. This is the most prestigious prize for female playwrights.
  

• Joe Queenan in the Guardian uses the release of 10,000 BC to ponder the changing role of women in the prehistoric films.

In today's postmodern prehistoric film, the women - rather than thundering across the Hyborian savannahs clad only in string bikinis stitched together from the carcasses of very tiny Jurassic marsupials, but doing so in a strong and empowered way - are simply shunted off to the sidelines.

Full piece: The Women the Script Forgot (The Guardian)