Episode 5: Overcoming Roadblocks and Making Movies That Matter - Claire Fowler

New York Welsh

Writer-director Claire Fowler is a filmmaker from North Wales, based in New York City. Her most recent short, ‘Salam’, a film about a Syrian female Lyft driver on a night shift in New York City, had its World Premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. After studying at Oxford University and the Royal College of Art, Claire made a name for herself after making a number of human rights-themed documentary films, including ‘Open Heart’ an emotional journey that highlights the plight of the struggling Palestinian health care system. In 2008, she won a Fulbright scholarship to study film in the US, where she graduated with an MFA honors in screenwriting from Columbia University. Since then, she’s won the grand prize in Shore Scripts Screenwriting Competition and Starz Denver Screenwriting Competition for her feature screenplay, ‘Little House’, while her AFI DWW short film, ‘Noodles’, which premiered at Nantucket Film Festival, was acquired by Nowness in 2016. In this episode, Richard and Gideon discuss Claire’s journey from North Wales to Brooklyn, the challenges of funding a short-film, and what it takes to film in the West Bank.