SA Director takes prestigious DGA Jury Award for Student Film

South African filmmaker Jean Barker accepted the prestigious DGA (Directors Guild of America) Jury Prize in the Women Director category at the DGA Student Film Awards on November 6. Her graduate thesis film, made with a virtual United Nations of students from India, Turkey, China, Norway and the US, is a sci-fi love story starring John Heard (Home Alone) and Adair Jameson as two 80-year-olds who escape from a euthanasia preparedness centre in the year 2084.

I grew up in South Africa in the 1980s raised by anti-apartheid parents. Maybe thats why most of my films are about my distrust for governments, organisations and institutions. They all tend to have some kind of imprisonment or social injustice theme, says Barker.

Barker left South Africa shortly after the Football World Cup in 2010 to study filmmaking at Chapman University (a top 5 film school in California) and graduated a double Masters of Fine Arts in Screenwriting and Directing in 2014.

Unbearably homesick at first, shes been back a few times, and on one trip home even directed an eight-minute short , Paradise Road, about kids, dogs and friendship, with South African DOP Jacques Koudstaal. The film played the Durban International Film Festival in 2013. Many of the then completely green crew have started working in film. Producer Ashlin Simpson recently directed her own short, which played Horrorfest in Cape Town a few weeks ago!

She supports herself doing freelance script coverage, background acting and on-set production work. Just paying my dues. Background work particular lets me be right up close watching top directors work, while being paid to learn. She has no desire to be an actor. Its too hard, emotionally. I have huge respect for what actors put themselves through.

Los Angeles is messy and sprawling and wonderful, and it kinda reminds me of Joburg, says Barker, who lives in the downmarket Koreatown neighborhood near downtown LA. Its become a second home, and Im very torn between my urge to go home and make a feature in South Africa, and my addiction to the promise of life here. Part of me wants to see where this whole America' thing takes me. My ideal situation would be having a visa that allowed me to visit South Africa for months at a time, and work there too.

LINK:	http://www.filmcontact.com/news/south-africa/sa-director-takes-prestig...
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