Quelle Horreur! Featuring Top Female Horror Directors Ana Lily Amirpour (A GIRL WALKS HOME AT NIGHT), Jennifer Kent (THE BABADOOK), and Anouk Whissell (SUMMER OF '84)

Ana Lily Amirpour made her first film at age 12; a horror movie starring guests of a slumber party. She has a varied background in the arts, including painting and sculpting, and was bass player and front-woman of an art-rock band before moving to Los Angeles to make films. 

Amirpour's feature debut, the black and white Iranian vampire love story A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and was the opening selection for the New Directors/New Films screening series at the MoMA in New York City. The film won the "Revelations Prize" at the 2014 Deauville Film Festival and the Carnet Jove Jury Award, and the Citizen Kane Award for Best Directorial Revelation from the Sitges Film Festival. 

In 2014 Filmmaker Magazine named her to their 2014 list of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film. And at the 2014 Gotham Awards, Amirpour was given the Bingham Ray Award, for an emerging filmmaker whose work exemplifies a distinctive creative vision and stylistic adventurousness that stands apart from the mainstream. 

Amirpour’s second film is the desert-set psychedelic cannibal romance, The Bad Batch, starring Jason Momoa, Suki Waterhouse, Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey. The film premiered at the 2016 Venice Film Festival where it took home the Special Jury Prize.

Anouk Whissell is a Montreal-based Filmmaker, Traditional Animation Graduate, and Co-fonder of RKSS— a Writer-director triforce with fellow filmmakers François Simard and Yoann-Karl Whissell. Their debut feature—the critically acclaimed Turbo Kid, premiered at Sundance in 2015, launching a very successful festival run and winning 24 awards worldwide (including the SXSW’s Audience Midnighters Award, BiFan’s Best Directors, Sitges’ Carnet Jove for Best Feature and Best Original Soundtrack, as well as a Saturn Award for Best International Film). Through Turbo Kid, the trio thriving on passion, has successfully touched the hearts of all generations far beyond the genre and cult fans. Earlier this year, they had the great honor to be returning to Sundance, where it all started, for the World Premiere of their second feature entitled Summer of ’84. The movie was released in August and just screened at Sitges, concluding a great festival tour. 

Anouk is repped by Gersh and is currently in development on a number of projects including a sequel to Turbo Kid, currently at the script stage and The Z Word, a feature adaptation of a comic book by Jerry Frissen and Guy Davis released by the Humanoids, to which RKSS signed the script with the blessing of the original author. Driven by the need to tell stories, she is constantly on the lookout for the next project that will inspire and passionate the trio.

Jennifer Kent was born in Brisbane, Australia. She graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and has worked extensively in theatre, film and TV as an actor. In 2002, Jennifer undertook a directing apprenticeship on Dogville, directed by Lars von Trier. Jennifer’s award-winning short film Monsterscreened at over 50 international festivals including Telluride Film Festival and Aspen Shortsfest where it won the Audience Award and The Ellen Award for distinctive achievement. 

In 2010, Jennifer completed the script program at the Binger Filmlab in Amsterdam, where she developed her feature film The Babadook. The Babadook screened at Sundance Film Festival in January 2014 to critical and audience acclaim, and has won over 50 international and domestic awards, including the Australian Director’s Guild award for Best Director, the Australian Academy Award (AACTA) for Best Direction, Best Screenplay and Best Film, and the New York Critics Circle Awards for Best First Feature. 

Her second feature The Nightingale premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it won the prestigious Special Jury Prize as well as the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Newcomer (Baykali Ganambarr.) The Nightingale will be released in cinemas in 2019. 

Her third feature as writer/director, Alice and Freda Forever is slated for production in the US in 2019. She is also writing and will direct Tiptree, a limited series for TV based on the extraordinary life and work of female science fiction writer Alice B Sheldon.