Talent Guide
Jessica Dunn Rovinelli
- Discipline:Director, Writer
- Program Year:CNN Docuseries Intensive 2020
Bio
Jessica Dunn Rovinelli (1988) is a film director, editor, colourist and critic based in New York. Her second feature film So Pretty (2019), a literary translation/transposition focusing on gender and the utopian imagination, was screened at numerous international film festivals including Berlinale, IndieLisboa and Anthology Film Archives (New York) and awarded Best International Feature from FIC Valdivia. Her first feature, the performative documentary Empathy (2016), premiered at FID Marseille and follows a heroin-addicted escort across the USA. Rovinelli is also a recipient of the Development Funding Award from Centre national des arts plastiques (Paris) and New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2019, she was selected as one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.
Current Project
AmericaLogline
America is a six-to-eight part documentary fiction hybrid television series by filmmaker Jessica
Dunn Rovinelli (So Pretty, 2019, Empathy, 2016), that follows the odd couple-cum-love story
between a transgender American man, Paul (Phoebe DeGroot, So Pretty) and an alcoholic
Yugoslavian cowboy Dane (film director Dane Komljen). After meeting in the southwest of
America, they embark on a motorcycle trip across the country. They encounter ketamine-fueled
raves filled with gender deviants, a collective of transwomen teaching themselves to shoot guns
in a rural commune, and monster-truck rallies of freaks and queers, among other moments of
atypical yet somehow typical American experience filtered through Rovinelli’s distinctive
documentary-fiction lens.