Sara Driver: Filmmaker

The Museum salutes Sara Driver on the occasion of her new film, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat. A creative force in New York’s independent film industry for decades, Driver is a New Jersey native who received her MFA in film from New York University. She produced Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation and Stranger Than Paradise, and her directorial credits include the short film You Are Not I and the features Sleepwalk and When Pigs Fly.

Invited to the 2018 Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, Driver selected some of her favorite films for presentation, including Energy and How to Get It from the Robert Frank Collection of the MFAH.

“One of the most talented members of the wave of independent narrative filmmakers that emerged in New York in the 1980s and ’90s.” —Anthology Film Archives, New York

“Sara Driver’s films exist in the boundaries of myth, between realism and fantasy, between a solid narrative and the freedom of a poem. Precisely like the city of New York, which constitutes the canvas for her films and is a ‘fabricated’ world, built on the lives of vivid people, strange stories, and urban myths, her films are defined by a crooked line of emotions and sensations.” —Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece