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Talkhouse

Sonny Mallhi’s latest film, the horror movie Hurt, is out now through Gravitas Ventures. Born and raised in Chicago, he has spent many of the past 15 years developing screenplays with top-tier screenwriters and up-and- coming directors, giving rise to numerous projects around town including The Departed and The Grudge. Sonny has produced several films, including The Lake House, starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves; The Strangers starring Liv Tyler; House at the End of the Street starring Jennifer Lawrence; Old Boy directed by Spike Lee; and The Monster starring Zoe Kazan. In 2011, Sonny undertook a new role as writer and producer of the feature film, The Roommate, which was the number one film at the box office. Sonny made his directorial debut with the film Anguish in 2015. He also directed Family Blood for Blumhouse Productions and Netflix in 2018 and produced the recent acclaimed film The Dark and the Wicked.

Sonny Mallhi

Film

“What Am I Doing Here?”

Shaina Feinberg (she/her) is an award-winning American filmmaker and writer. She spent her twenties making a stoner, punk sketch show called The Spew. She has been on This American Life, was a resident at Space on Ryder Farms (2018) and Twenty Summers (2021), a Reel Families for Change grantee (2022) and a recipient of the Reboot Studios grant (2023). Her film My Mom&#8217;s Eggplant Sauce (2022) played festivals around the world, including Hot Docs, Rotterdam International Film Festival and Palm Springs, won her a Best Director award and is featured on Short of the Week. Her short doc A Brief History of Hating My Face (2023), was commissioned by the New York Times. Her film Cleo From 8:20 to 2:35 premiered at the Aspen Film Festival (2024). Shaina is the author of three books, has written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post and Tablet and writes regularly for the New York Times. Her films and books have been written about in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bust, Broadly, Logo, THEM, Indiewire and more. She is currently working on a film about Joan Darling, the first woman to be nominated for an Emmy in directing. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their two children.

Shaina Feinberg

Revisited: 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Me

Marnie Ellen Hertzler is a filmmaker living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. <a href="https://memory.is/crestone" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Crestone</a>, her debut feature which she wrote, produced and directed is now on PVOD through Utopia. Crestone follows a group of SoundCloud rappers who live in solitude, growing weed and making music for the internet. When an old friend arrives to make a movie, reality and fiction begin to blur. Her films have screened at Locarno Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, MoMA, and more. In 2018, Marnie was named one of Filmmaker Magazine&#8216;s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”

Marnie Ellen Hertzler

Revisited: What I Learned From Being Geralt of Rivia

Matt Yoka directed and produced the documentary <a href="https://www.whirlybirdmovie.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Whirlybird</a>, about a husband-and-wife helicopter news duo who covered L.A.&#8217;s most historic events, which premiered at Sundance 2020 and is out now in theaters through Greenwich Entertainment. He began his career working on a wide range of TV with Vice Media (Vice Does America, Epicly Later&#8217;d, Huang&#8217;s World and the HBO special World in Disarray). During this time he also developed a distinct visual style directing music videos for record labels like Drag City and Sub Pop, collaborating most often with the artist Ty Segall. Whirlybird, his debut feature, draws inspiration from his childhood in Los Angeles and his research at USC&#8217;s Annenberg School of Journalism, where he received a Master’s Degree. He currently lives in L.A. and drives a 2006 Toyota Sienna.

Matt Yoka

Revisited: The Day Kobe Bryant Died

Stacy Rukeyser is an award-winning creator, showrunner and executive producer whose new show is the Netflix hit Sex/Life, about a suburban mother who takes a fantasy-charged trip down memory lane. Previously, Stacy was the showrunner and executive producer of the critically acclaimed, award-winning drama UnREAL, about the inner workings of a reality TV show. Her other writing credits include the Golden Globe Award-winning and Emmy® Award-nominated series Without a Trace, as well as Crash, One Tree Hill, October Road, Standoff, Greek and The Lying Game. A cum laude graduate of Princeton University, she resides in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.

Stacy Rukeyser

Revisited: The Revolutionary Act of (Female) Desire

Australian writer, director and actor Joy Hopwood’s latest film, the romantic comedy Rhapsody of Love, is out now through Quiver Distribution. She wrote the screenplay for The Casting Game and made her feature debut as writer-director with The Script of Life. She is currently in post-production on her third directorial feature, the rom-com musical Get a Life, Alright.

Joy Hopwood

Changing the Narrative of How Asians are Represented on Screen

Virgil Williams is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter whose new feature, A Journal for Jordan, directed by Denzel Washington and starring Michael B. Jordan, comes out December 24 through Sony Pictures. His last big-screen adaptation, Netflix’s Mudbound, netted him Oscar, Critics Choice, Writers Guild, NAACP Image and USC Scripter Award nominations alongside co-writer and director Dee Rees for their work adapting Hillary Jordan’s novel. He also executive-produced the film, which starred Carey Mulligan, Mary J. Blige, Rob Morgan, Jason Clarke, Jason Mitchell, and Garrett Hedlund. A trailblazing Afro-Latinx voice in Hollywood for nearly two decades, Virgil is a veteran television writer and producer, whose extensive credits include the groundbreaking, Emmy-winning dramas ER and 24, as well as Fox’s The Chicago Code.

Virgil Williams

A Light in the Darkness

New York-based Jessica Kingdon is a Chinese-American director-producer whose debut feature, <a href="https://ascensiondocumentary.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ascension</a>, a striking observational portrait of the “New China” which is nominated for six Critics Choice Documentary Awards and the Gotham Award for Best Documentary, is now streaming on Paramount+. She was named one of “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker magazine and selected for the 2020 DOC NYC “40 Under 40” list. Her shorts include the award-winning Commodity City (2017), It&#8217;s Coming! (2020), and Routine Island (2019), and her producer credits include Tania Cypriano’s Born to Be (2019), Ian Bell’s 808: How We Respond (2019), Nathan Truesdell’s The Water Slide (2018), and Johnny Ma’s Old Stone (2016). She is a member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective. (Photo by Tomo Saito.)

Jessica Kingdon

Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie, Or How I Found My Family in China

Actress, writer and director Sarah Wayne Callies became known to audiences for her portrayal of Sara Tancredi in Prison Break and followed that up with the even bigger hit, The Walking Dead. She then starred opposite Josh Holloway in the series Colony and most recently was seen in the NBC series Council of Dads. Sarah has taken the leap into directing with an episode of the limited series Unspeakable as well as an episode of the final season of Colony. As a writer, Sarah has several screenplays in development with various motion picture entities. As a film actress, Sarah has appeared in Giancarlo Esposito’s This is Your Death opposite Josh Duhamel and Famke Janssen, Pay the Ghost with Nicolas Cage, and Black November opposite Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. Continuing her passion for storytelling, Sarah is a producer and the voice of the new science-fiction post-apocalyptic podcast <a href="https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-aftershock-83996090/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Aftershock</a>. (Photo by Nicolas Gerardin.)

Sarah Wayne Callies

I Love Difficult Women

Bryan Wizemann is an independent writer, producer, director and editor of film based in Brooklyn, NY. <a href="http://www.factorytwentyfive.com/you-mean-everything-to-me/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">You Mean Everything to Me</a>, his fourth feature film, stars Morgan Saylor, Ben Rosenfield and Lindsay Burge and is out December 17 through Factory 25. He previously wrote and directed About Sunny, starring Lauren Ambrose, Dylan Baker, and Penelope Ann Miller, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead, and was distributed by Oscilloscope. His feature Losing Ground was adapted from his critically acclaimed New York stage play and features the original cast. It premiered at Cinequest with distribution by FilmBuff. His first film, the experimental 16mm feature Sense, starring Maria Dizzia, was programmed at the Johnson Museum of Art and the Angelika Film Centre. (Image by Jeff Vespa, used with permission.)

Bryan Wizemann

The Long Shadow of Las Vegas

Maya Cozier’s debut feature, <a href="http://www.samuelgoldwynfilms.com/she-paradise/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">She Paradise</a>, is out now through Samuel Goldwyn Films. Cozier was raised by artist parents — Irenée Shaw and Christopher Cozier — in the Caribbean twin islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She gained years of experience working as a dancer/choreographer for music videos and television shows (on her own and as part of a champion hip-hop crew that represented the island at the World Hip-Hop Dance Championships). At age 18, Maya had her first international gig when Nicki Minaj flew to Trinidad with Hype Williams to direct the “Pound the Alarm” music video. It was on set as a background model that she became fascinated with the process of filmmaking. After being awarded a national academic scholarship, she enrolled at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, to pursue a degree in film. Her first short film was about a childhood friend, Shan, a limbo dancer, touring the United States with a Circus. Her thesis film, Short Drop, a story in which a recently widowed retiree’s car is mistaken for an illegal taxi bringing together unlikely individuals in Port of Spain, won the NYWIFT student award and has shown at over 20 film festivals worldwide winning best Caribbean short film at Curacao film festival and best short film at Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival.

Maya Cozier

How Entering a Beauty Pageant Helped Me Make My Debut Feature

Joel Cohen, John Frink and Rob LaZebnik are the writers and producers of the animated comedy <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/81159137" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Extinct</a>, featuring the voices of Adam DeVine, Rachel Bloom, Zazie Beetz, Ken Jeong, Reggie Watts and Catherine O&#8217;Hara, which is currently streaming on Netflix. Together they have their own production company, Tolerable Entertainment. The trio has worked together as writer-producers on The Simpson for the past 20 years, winning a number of Emmys in the process. They live in Los Angeles.

film essay