Sara Driver

Born in 1955, in Westfield, New Jersey, Sara Driver is an independent director who was part of the creative wave in downtown Manhattan from the late 70’s to the 90’s. With a bachelor degree in Theater and Classic Languages and a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts at the New York University, where she taught directing, Driver rose in the cinema world when she produced two of Jim Jarmusch’s films, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984), in which she also starred as well. In 1981, she directed her first film, You Are Not I, based on a short story by Paul Bowles, which earned plenty of praise and was considered one of the best films of the 80s by the Cahiers du Cinéma. A fire in a warehouse destroyed the negatives and the film was thought to be lost for several years, but later a copy was found in Bowles’ archives. She directed two other feature films, Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993), with presence and awards in several film festivals. While short, her work is praised by important film critics. In 2015, she was a guest at LEFFEST and her entire work was screened in the appropriately called section “Discovering Sara Driver”. Driver also presented, as a work in progress shown first-hand at the festival, an excerpt of the film Teenage Basquiat, a documentary about the formative years of the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, which she is now finishing.