Independent Filmmaker Anders to Screen New Film

Independent filmmaker Allison Anders--director of Gas, Food, Lodging and Mi Vida Loca --will screen and discuss her newest work, Sugar Town, on campus April 9.

Mount Holyoke will host the East Coast premiere of Sugar Town, the newest work by independent film directors Allison Anders and Kurt Voss. Anders will accompany the film and lead a post-screening conversation about her work on April 9.

Anders is one of the few women directing films with strong female characters, films whose central themes have dealt with working-class people, women in relation to men, and women raising kids alone.

While studying at UCLA, Anders made the cult film Border Radio, a dark story about the LA punk rock scene. Her Gas, Food, Lodging won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best new director. Mi Vida Loca premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1995 Anders was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She directed a segment of Four Rooms, and also made Grace of My Heart, a bright, honest look at a woman struggling to find her own voice in the male dominated world of music.

Her latest film, Sugar Town, stars Rosanna Arquette and Ally Sheedy and is set in the seductive and treacherous rock and roll music world of Los Angeles. Anders calls it a snide comedy. "The film was liberating because we made fun of everything that was once precious to me, with the exception of childbirth and children," she says. "We trashed everything--all my bad dates, the self-help books I've read, all the spiritual stuff, the massage therapy--everything." Kurt Voss, Anders's cowriter and codirector of Sugar Town, adds, "Fame is the one addiction you can never overcome."