Academics The Filmmaking Team
Jay Craven
Award-winning independent filmmaker and Marlboro College film professor Jay Craven will lead the team and direct Northern Borders. Craven has written, produced and directed five narrative feature films, six documentaries, and an Emmy-winning regional TV comedy series. Festivals include Sundance, Seattle, Nantucket, South By Southwest, AFI: Fest, Vancouver, Vienna, and Avignon. Special screenings include Lincoln Center, The Smithsonian, Harvard Film Archives, Beijing Normal University, Cinémathèque Française, The Constitutional Court of Johannesburg, La Cinemateca Nacional de Venezuela, and many others. Awards include the Producers Guild of America's 1995 NOVA Award for Most Promising New Motion Picture Producer of the Year. Also, a MacDowell Fellowship, the Golden Gate Award (San Francisco International Film Festival), the Vermont Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, and two National Endowment for the Arts Media Arts Production Grants (for Where the Rivers Flow North and Disappearances. Featured press coverage includes The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, The Today Show, Esquire, the CBC, and National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Fresh Air, Here and Now, and A Prairie Home Companion.
Craven's films have played 348 U.S. theatrical venues and 43 countries - and sold more than 300,000 DVD's along with TV rights to Showtime, Starz, Sundance Channel, Disney Channel, 12 PBS affiliates, and more than 200 syndicated stations. Where the Rivers Flow North was selected as one of five U.S. finalists for Critics Week, 1993 Cannes International Film Festival and Disappearances was one of seven U.S. films selected by the American Film Institute for its first-ever AFI: Project 20/20, an international filmmaker exchange initiative sponsored by the AFI, National Endowment for the Arts, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and President's Committee for the Arts and Humanities.
Chip Hourihan
Chip Hourihan has produced ten independent features during the past nine years. His 2009 film, Frozen River, received the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for two 2009 Academy Awards (Best Actress and Best Original Screenplay). Frozen River received more than twenty Best Feature and Best Actor awards, including two Gotham Independent Film Awards (including a Best Feature award for Hourihan) and it was nominated for seven Independent Spirit Awards (including a Best Feature Film nomination for Hourihan), taking home two. Among his other films, Hourihan worked as producer and 2nd unit director for Mind the Gap, winner of the Special Jury Award for Narrative Feature at South by Southwest. The film was also released theatrically, broadcast, and distributed by Showtime in 2004. He wrote, produced, and directed the multiple award-winning dramatic feature Glissando, which Variety called "a small gem deserving wider exposure... a striking debut for talented helmer-scripter Chip Hourihan."
Hourihan's documentary work includes The Red Book Film (currently in post-production), Rocks With Wings, the documentary TV series Aperture, and Made in the USA. Also short-form work for Maysles Films. He is a graduate of Yale University with degrees in English and Architecture.
