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13 Facts About Su Friedrich

1.

Su Friedrich was born on December 12,1954 and is an American avant-garde film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer.

2.

Su Friedrich has been a leading figure in avant-garde filmmaking and a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema.

3.

Su Friedrich was born in 1954 in New Haven, Connecticut.

4.

Su Friedrich's mother was German and came to the US with Friedrich's father, Paul Friedrich who was working in Germany as a GI at the time.

5.

Su Friedrich lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and is a Professor in the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University, where she has taught film and video production since 1998.

6.

Su Friedrich made her first film, Hot Water, in 1978, and has produced and directed eighteen films and videos.

7.

Su Friedrich's work has radicalized film form and content by incorporating a feminist perspective and issues of lesbian identity and by creating a remarkable and innovative synthesis of experimental, narrative and documentary genres.

8.

Su Friedrich is the recipient of the Cal Arts Alpert Award in the Arts and has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as numerous grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Independent Television Service, and the Jerome Foundation.

9.

Su Friedrich's work is part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the National Library of Australia.

10.

The moving image collection of Su Friedrich is held at the Academy Film Archive.

11.

The Ties That Bind is a documentary of Su Friedrich's mother, who was born in Ulm in Germany and grew up with the Third Reich.

12.

Su Friedrich's work has always used personal narrative to support strong political beliefs.

13.

Rather than make a traditional social documentary, Su Friedrich made a film that echoed her own experience, which was that of being stunned by the unimaginable scale and complexity of the coffee industry and the often grueling physical labor required to get those seedling to eventually yield a cup of coffee.