Director’s BIO: Gretchen Bayer (THE FOREST PRINCESS)

Short Film playing at the November 2017 FEMALE FEEDBACK Film Festival

Director Biography

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Raised by a couple of art teachers / artists, it’s no wonder Gretchen started developing her creative eye at a very early age.
She tried her hand at painting, pottery and drawing, but at 9 years old, fell in love with her dad’s Pentax K1000. She loved capturing “in between” moments…the subtle action that happened inside the bigger, intended picture.

She left small town Indiana and moved west to Los Angeles to attend university. There, she decided to take a more lucrative path and study business, but she never let go of her love of photography and nearly always had her camera with her.
Dwelling in the City of Angels, she became drawn to cinema and discovered the incredible eye of Alfred Hitchcock, Wim Wenders, Krzysztof Kieślowski and others. She absorbed how the filmmaker used the camera to orchestrate a scene, evoke a feeling and tell a story.

She met her husband in 2008. He had been in film production and editing for most of his life and they began teaching each other their crafts. He taught her how to tell a story with moving pictures and she taught him to rein in the motion of the camera and let the moments play out in the frame.

The Forest Princess is Gretchen’s directorial debut.

Director Statement

Over the years I have embraced the philosophy of wabi-sabi…

a state of acceptance of the imperfections in life and appreciating them as beautiful, accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay.

I find that this philosophy transcends to art and allows freedom to make mistakes, grow from or transform the mistake into something beautiful.

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By femalefilmfestival

The irony of this festival is that its goal is to not be around in 5 years time. To eventually not be relevant because there is zero need to have a festival geared for female talent and female stories because the stories presented in Hollywood and around the world are a balanced showcase of the human experience from both sexes. Our goal is to achieve a lot of success and then fold into oblivion simply because there is no need for this festival. This festival was created by the FEEDBACK Film & Writing Festival as a simple reaction to a strong need to showcase female talent from around the world in a more profound way. When putting together the weekly festival, the administration noticed a lack of a female presence in the stories being shown at the festival. A classic example and analogy to the frustration is how the festival noticed that even the smaller roles in a screenplay were written for a man to play. There was zero reason for this in many stories. How a police officer, or a political campaign manager, for example with 3-4 lines in a screenplay was a "HE" character. Why? And these are the screenplays written by the winners! The talented one who have obtained agents and have began/beginning their careers as a writer.

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