Sarah Friedland

Sarah Friedland (born 1992) is an American director and choreographer. Her 2024 debut feature film, Familiar Touch, premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where she won the Orizzonti section's Best Director award and the film won the Luigi de Laurentis Lion of the Future Award for best debut feature.

Early life Friedland was born in California, to an Ashkenazi Jewish family, with her parents coming from "mixed class identities and divergent interpretations of Jewish identity." She describes her background as a "twin sister that comes from former-hippie-turned-bourgeois, left-wing, Californian, Jewish educators."

Career Friedland is a graduate of Brown University's department of Modern Culture and Media and started her career assisting filmmakers, with a minor in dance. She graduated in 2014. She describes herself as "working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies". She explains that to elucidate and revise the embodied patterns of social life and the body politic, she writes and stages bodies and cameras in concert with one another "through hybrid, experimental, and movement-based filmmaking, multichannel video installation, and site-specific live dance performance."

In 2014 she choreographed a live dance performance, "After the Multiplex", after which she continued to incorporate live and experimental dance into her films. Between the years 2017–2022, she created a trilogy, Movement Exercises, consisting of three short films that explore movement in different contexts, especially how they can become dance, and how they are coded with social and political meaning. Through techniques of embodied interviewing, pre- and reenactment adaptation, and improvisational play, she facilitates a research process that incorporates found movements, gestures, and postures from embodied memories, film, and archival footage. Friedland creates dances with a diverse range of performers and movers, including professional dancers, as well as cohorts of older adults and teenagers. The first short film in this trilogy, Home Exercises, adapts the form of the home workout video. It investigates and frames the gestural habits and choreographies of eight older adults in their homes. The second short film, Drills, a reimagining of the Cold War-era US government-produced social guidance film, explores the choreographies of future preparedness, ranging from office meditation to lockdown and Boy Scout drills. The final installment, Trust Exercises, explores the conflict between the poetics of the group movement and its instrumentalization for capitalist management by altering the choreography of team-building exercises and the visual grammar of corporate videos. where Friedland won the Luigi de Laurentiis prize for best first film, alongside the Best Director award. Lead Kathleen Chalfant won the Best Actress award. In her acceptance speech for the debut award, Friedland made a statement, saying: “As a Jewish American artist working in a time-based medium, I must note, I'm accepting this award on the 336th day of Israel's genocide in Gaza and 76th year of occupation. I believe it is our responsibility as filmmakers to use the institutional platforms through which we work to redress Israel's impunity on the global stage. I stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine and their struggle for liberation.”

Awards

2024 Winner Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Best Debut Film (Familiar Touch) 2024 Nominee Venice Horizons Award for Best Film (Familiar Touch) 2024 Winner Venice Horizons Award for Best Director (Familiar Touch) 2025 Winner Film Independent Spirit Someone to Watch Award (Familiar Touch)