Director of
SUN DON'T SHINE
&
WHEN WE LIVED IN MIAMI
Special Program FIVE WOMEN: Amy Seimetz
Amy Seimetz figures as a prominent hub within the fabric of American low-budget cinema. According to the “Los Angeles Times”, Amy Seimetz would probably be right at the centre of any cut made across the current US independent film scene. As an actress – with eleven credits in 2011 alone – she has starred in generational portraits of the mumblecore scene such as OPEN FIVE (Kentucker Audley, 2010), dramas of adolescence such as THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER (David Robert Mitchell, 2010) and independent horror films such as BITTER FEAST (Joe Maggio, 2011). Following a number of supporting parts, she starred in Adam Wingard’s killer drama A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE (2010) and Megan Griffith’s character study THE OFF HOURS (2011).
Growing up in St. Petersburg, Florida, Seimetz studied film for a short while at New York University, in addition to history, art history and literature in Tallahassee and Los Angeles. She has produced short films since 2005; in that year she also played one of her first major parts in BLACK DRAGON CANYON by Jay Keitel, who was subsequently her director of photography in SUN DON’T SHINE, her full-length feature debut, and in the short film when we lived in miami (both 2012). Seimetz has also been producer for Barry Jenkins (MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY, 2008) and Joe Swanberg (SILVER BULLETS, 2011), among others. She has repeatedly acted in Swanberg’s films.
In the work she has recently directed, Seimetz has bundled some aspects from these different circles: the intimacy of improvised relationship merry-go-rounds, the flagrant emotional virulence of horror cinema, or the addition of a modernist touch of style to camera work and sound design. Most of all, however, she makes full use of proven working relationships with acting colleagues and crew members, to the best of decisively small-scale cinema that never feels humble. (Joachim Schätz)