Director, producer, screenwriter and a respected teacher in her field, Susan Seidelman was born on 11 December 1952 in Abington, Pennsylvania, grew up in Philadelphia and studied fashion and the arts at the local Drexel University. Her move to New York would later form the geographical foundation for both her films and her identity. Cinephilia truly sparked through encounters at university with classics of the French New Wave and the Nordic dramas of Ingmar Bergman. European influences, including Lina Wertmüller and Agnès Varda, would continue to resonate strongly. Seidelman’s short film debut, And You Act Like One Too, a satirical story of a housewife’s ex-marital affair, already attracted well-deserved attention.
Her debut feature Smithereens (1982) startles with its unapologetic roughness, the stark streetscapes of East Village, the hazy afterglow of the punk era and its exceptional protagonist Wren (Susan Berman). As a point of comparison for the character’s distinctly shabby mode of existence, one might mention Mona from Varda’s Vagabond (1985). Seidelman’s artistic, commercial and international breakthrough Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) prised open the doors of Hollywood, though the position of women directors remained highly challenging in the mid-1980s dream factory with its worship of oiled male muscles and toxic masculinity.
The New Wave screwball comedy Desperately Seeking Susan grew into a pop-cultural phenomenon, a cult classic and a respected landmark of feminist cinema. Not forgetting her underground roots, Seidelman continued to create surprising genre hybrids, like the romantic AI comedy Making Mr. Right (1987), in which an android falls in love with a PR woman, the father-daughter mafia film Cookie (1989); the emancipated revenge story She-Devil (1989), the Euro-mystery Gaudi Afternoon (2001), reshuffling gender roles, The Boynton Beach Club (2005), a portrait of senior citizens seeking companionship, the wheelchair patients’ dance-competition romance Musical Chairs (2011); and the sports comedy The Hot Flashes (2013), about a middle-aged women’s basketball team.
Her artistic hallmarks include strong female ensembles, aesthetic playfulness, an outsider perspective, broad age ranges, and an almost anthropological worldview in which the everyday cosmos appears as a changing organism and a mischievous playground. Seidelman’s women do not live on the verge of nervous breakdowns, but at least permanently on their toes.
In her 2024 memoir Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers and Material Girls, the director humorously recounts one of the “low points” of her career: a Disney television film in which the former Oscar nominee had to direct a chimpanzee. Yet the industry’s perpetual ebb and flow was reflected in the success that lay behind another door: directing the 1997 pilot for the soon-to-be-iconic Sex and the City.
Despite her studio productions, Seidelman still proudly considers herself an independent New Yorker filmmaker. She is a genuine trailblazer, instinctively drawn to places where something new is beginning: the first films of Madonna and Roseanne, Rosanna Arquette’s breakthrough role, Meryl Streep’s first comedy and countless other actors, innovations and phenomena now firmly established by name…
We warmly welcome this American auteur with a singular voice to the land of the midnight sun!
Lauri Timonen