Academy award and Emmy nominated, Golden Globe award winning actress and producer Maggie Gyllenhaal has been named Independent Film Advisor o the brand’s Indie Film Project: a multi-faceted platform designed to support the art of storytelling by shining a light n today’s most-talented screenwriters, film makers and distributors working in Independent Film.
Throughout her career, Gyllenhaal has worked on many Independent Films, from her breakout role in the 2002 romantic comedy drama, Secretary to Crazy Heart, for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination in 2010.
In her role, Gyllenhaal has evolved the Indie Film Project’s Screenwriters in Residence program in which screenwriters, who share Autograph Collection Hotels’ ethos of individuality and an independent spirit, are selected to take residence at the brand’s hotels around the world. Gyllenhaal was personally inspired by Virginia Woolf’s famed feminist 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which argues the importance of literal and figurative space that women writers need within a literary tradition dominated by men, stating: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Its message of refuge evokes the same sentiment that the brand’s Screenwriters in Residence program aims to give emerging screenwriters.
“I think the words of Virginia Woolf – written almost 90 years ago – still ring true,” said Maggie Gyllenhaal. “We are at a moment, culturally, when people are hungry for stories that are emotionally true, rooted in diversity; and reflective of different voices. I am proud to support emerging female screenwriters in independent film, which has always been a place you can tell stories in an honest and authentic way.”
Currently staring in The Deuce (HBO), Maggie has produced and starred in The Kindergarten Teacher (Netflix), which received the Directing Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and will make its Canadian debut at this year’s Toronto Film Festival.
Gyllenhaal selected three powerful female screenwriters from Hollywood’s buzzed-about Black List – which curates the industry’s most liked yet unproduced screenplays – to spend a week at an Autograph Collection hotel of their choice, offering an inspiring space, time and unrivalled hospitality to polish an existing script or develop new material.
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Toronto International Film Festival, Autograph Collection Hotels