"Directing is not a job you can fully prep for. Sure, you can shadow someone but that’s like watching a pilot fly a plane. There’s only so much you can learn before you’re the one at the controls.  And I believe that each director’s debut feature is an opening paragraph of a conversation they hope to have with an audience over time. To revisit these debuts in this frame gives an audience a fresh view on the director’s further work and insight into film making as an art.

  

As a film lover, an actor and a nascent director, I would love to hear directors consider questions like these: What skills did they come in with on their debut? Did those skills hold up? What were they surprised by either positively or negatively? What did they learn making their debut feature? How has that experience informed their further work? What themes echo through their debut into other further work?  I would also love to hear the questions that an audience revisiting a debut feature might posit.

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These evenings are intended to be an intimate conversation with an experienced film maker revisiting the work that got them started and give an audience a new perspective on the films and film makers they love." -JOHN CARROLL LYNCH