Juanita Wilson

Irish writer and director Juanita directed her second feature film, ‘Tomato Red’, in 2017 which she adapted for the screen from the Daniel Woodrell novel (writer of Winter’s Bone, a 2011 Academy Award® Best Picture Nominee) of the same name.

Juanita followed up her Oscar nominated first film, ‘The Door’, with an equally hard hitting true story from the Bosnian War, ‘As If I Am Not There’, based on Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic’s book of the same name. The film went on to win the prestigious Silver Pyramid at the Cairo International Film Festival in December 2010.

‘As If I Am Not There’ was nominated for Most Valuable Film of The Year at Berlinale European Cinema For Peace alongside ‘Gods and Men’ and ‘The Social Network’. It won the The Film Award of The Council of Europe at the Istanbul Film Festival 2011 as well as Best World Picture at the Phoenix Film Festival 2011, Best Feature Film at Long Island International Film Expo 2011, Rhode Island Film Festival 2011 and Moondance Film Festival 2011. She won Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Film at the 2011 Irish Film and Television Academy Awards in February 2011.

Juanita was named among Variety’s top ten directors to watch for in 2011, the only woman to feature on the list.

‘The Door’ was shot on location in Pripyat and Kiev in the Ukraine and so far has received worldwide critical acclaim both for its moving story and its cinematic imagery. The Academy Award® nomination in March 2010 followed a number of awards throughout the world including Bilbao International Film Festival Golden Medal for Fiction; Irish Film and Television Academy Award for Best Short; Foyle Film Festival Best Irish Short; Cork Film Festival Clare Lynch Award for Best First Time Director.

At the Sarajevo Film Festival in August 2009, Stellan Skarsgard awarded Juanita the prestigious Katrin Cartlidge Foundation Bursary which recognises ”a new creative voice in cinema, showing the independence, singularity and integrity of spirit that the actress exemplified in her own lifetime”.

Before Juanita started directing she jointly developed and produced two powerful award winning feature films; ‘H3’ written by surviving Irish hunger striker Laurence McKeown about his prison experience, and ‘Inside I’m Dancing’ about the quest for independent living by two Dublin men with disability. ‘H3’ won the Bergamo Film Festival Audience Award in 2002 and ‘Inside I’m Dancing’, starring James McEvoy in his break out role, won the Edinburgh Festival Audience Award in 2004, was in the official Selection for Sundance in 2005, and won the Irish Film and Television Audience Award for Best Film that same year.

Born and reared in Dublin, Juanita studied Fine Art in the National College of Art and Design and, after a year living and studying in Paris, went back to achieve first place on the postgraduate Diploma in Arts Management in UCD.

Not afraid to take on strong subjects, and driven by a desire to discover and explore what it means to be human, her work, to date, combines her love of image-making with her desire to tell powerful stories about the resilience of the human spirit.

Juanita has optioned another Daniel Woodrell novel, ‘The Ones You Do’ and has also optioned ‘Unremarried Widow’ by Artis Henderson which she has adapted for the screen.