Joan Micklin Silver – Filmmaker Born May 24, 1935; died December 31, 2020 Joan Micklin Silver, who has died aged 85, was a filmmaker who broke through Hollywood resistance to women directors to eventually hit a commercial peak with her 1988 rom-com, Crossing Delancey. Prior to the film’s mainstream success, Silver was best known for a series of acclaimed independent features. These included her remarkable debut, Hester Street (1975), and Between the Lines (1977). While her male peers were lauded during the same era, Silver struggled to get her work made. One studio executive told her that “Feature films are difficult to make, and they’re expensive to market, and women directors are one more problem we don’t need.” In the end, Silver directed seven features, as well as another nine TV movies on top of her early short films. Many of Silver’s best works are about the clash between cultures, and the tensions that arise from attempts to assimilate while retaining one’s own identit
As Claudia Zeiske passes the baton to Natalia Palombo at Deveron Projects, a look at the past, present and possible futures of the Huntly-based experiment where art meets life in a place where ‘the town is the venue’. From little acorns do mighty oaks grow. So it is with Deveron Projects, the Aberdeenshire based arts initiative, which over the last quarter of a century has operated in the small town of Huntly as a holistic body that puts a sense of place at its core. Co-founded by dynamic German émigré Claudia Zeiske in 1995 as Deveron Arts, over the following twenty-five years, the freethinking organisation has hosted more than 100 artists’ residencies that have focussed on the relationship between the local and the global. Major figures taking part have included Christine Borland, Peter Liversidge, Dalziel + Scullion and Jacqueline Donachie. Each temporary resident has also left some kind of totemic legacy behind to create what has become The Town Collection. Rather than have t