Debra Granik

Debra Granik
Granik at the 2010 Deauville American Film Festival
Born	February 6, 1963 (1963-02-06) (age 48) Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	Director, screenwriter
Years active	1997–present

Debra Granik (born February 6, 1963) is an American independent film director. She has won a series of awards at the Sundance Film Festival, including Best Short in 1998 for Snake Feed (her first film, made while a student at New York University), the Dramatic Directing Award in 2004 for her first feature-length film, Down to the Bone (a tale of addiction she co-scripted with Richard Lieske), and the Grand Jury Prize for Drama in 2010 and Prix du jury at Deauville American Film Festival 2010 for her second feature, Winter's Bone.

Early life

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Granik grew up in the suburbs of Washington D.C. She received her B.A. from Brandeis University in 1985, where she majored in politics. She later earned an MFA from the graduate film program at New York University (Tisch School of the Arts). Granik is the granddaughter of broadcast pioneer Theodore Granik (1907–1970), founder-moderator of radio-TV's long-run panel discussion program, The American Forum of the Air.

Themes

Interviewed by Jeremiah Kipp, Granik gave an overview of the challenges involved in doing a film about addiction:

The traditional storyline in an American film is usually in the form of a V shape. I am oversimplifying, but we see someone tumbling down, they hit bottom, and then they rise up again and find redemption. Anyone who personally, tangentially or culturally knows anything about addiction is aware that it resembles an EKG. Up and down, up and down. Very few people ever get clean on the first or second attempt. For many people, it’s something they have to try over and over again. You get knocked down and ask all the ethical questions like how many chances do you give a person? When is the last chance? How many chances do they get? Can you imagine how difficult it is to fit that in a feature-length film? But those are the questions that are worth asking... The reason why boils down to the word “dark”. It is the scariest four-letter word in American storytelling and in this culture. Our film had a strong reception in Europe and achieved distribution, but that was not the case here. We received so many responses like, “We love the film, but we cannot do anything with it or we’ll lose our shirts. We’re sorry.” The intervention comes from people like Laemmle/Zeller Films. Every couple of years, some mavericks take on this challenge of distributing so-called un-distributable films. They take those films on a small run and allow them to see the light of day. Those efforts are what give a film like Down to the Bone a chance to have a life of some kind.^[1]

See also

• List of Sundance Film Festival award winners

References

1. ^ Kipp, Jeremiah (November 21, 2005). "Cutting close to the bone". Filmmaker. http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/archives/online_features/cutting_close.php. Retrieved 2009-03-30. 

External links

• Filmmaker: Interview with Debra Granik
• Down to the Bone official site
• Debra Granik at the Internet Movie Database
• Interview with Debra Granik regarding Winter's Bone in The A.V. Club
• "A Director Ever in Search of Survivors," Ella Taylor, The New York Times, 30 April 2010
• Moon, Michael and Colin Talley. "Life in a Shatter Zone: Debra Granik's Film Winter's Bone." Southern Spaces, December 6, 2010

Persondata
Name	Granik, Debra
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1963-02-06
Place of birth	Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Date of death
Place of death