Sarah Friedland
Motion and Pictures
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About Sarah Friedland

Sarah Friedland (b. Los Angeles, 1992)  is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies.  Friedland’s debut feature film, Familiar Touch, earned critical acclaim at the Venice International Film Festival last year, where she received both the Lion of the Future - Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Debut Film and the Horizons Award for Best Director. In addition to Friedland’s honors, the film’s lead actress Kathleen Chalfant received the award for Best Actress, making Familiar Touch the most awarded film selected for the Horizons category in the festival’s history. On the heels of her success at Venice, she won an Independent Spirit Award in the “Someone to Watch” category. Familiar Touch will be released in US theaters this summer by Music Box Films, in addition to distribution in over a dozen territories worldwide. 

Her previous work has been showcased at leading venues and festivals, including the New York, Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, MoMA, BAM, and the Performa Biennial. She has received support from institutions including Film at Lincoln Center, the Jerome Foundation, Panavision, Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Bronx Museum, and Berlinale Talents.

In 2023, Friedland was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film. She has also been recognized with a Pina Bausch Fellowship for Choreography and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Film/Video. She is a graduate of Brown University’s department of Modern Culture and Media and started her career assisting filmmakers including Steve McQueen, Mike S. Ryan, and Kelly Reichardt.



image of filmmaker Sarah Friedland

photo by Anna Ritsch

Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Through hybrid, narrative, and experimental filmmaking, multi-channel video installation, and site-specific live dance performance, she stages and scripts bodies and cameras in concert with one another to elucidate and distill the undetected, embodied patterns of social life and the body politic. Facilitating a research process integrating found movements from social choreographies, gestures and postures from archival footage, embodied memories, and contemporary dance languages, she choreographs through practices of interviewing, pre- and re-enactment, adaptation, and improvisational play, shaping dances with diverse communities of performers and movers—from professional dancers to cohorts of older adults and teenagers.

Her work has screened and been presented in numerous festivals and film spaces including the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Ann Arbor Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Mubi, and BAM, in art spaces such as MoMA, Performa19 Biennial, La MaMa Galleria, and Sharjah Art Foundation, and in dance spaces including the American Dance Festival and Dixon Place, among many others. Her work has been supported by Film at Lincoln Center, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, Dance Films Association, Panavision, Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Bronx Museum, and Berlinale Talents. From 2021 - 2022, she was both a Pina Bausch Fellow for Choreography and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Film/Video. Sarah is a graduate of Brown University’s department of Modern Culture and Media and started her career assisting filmmakers including Steve McQueen, Mike S. Ryan, and Kelly Reichardt. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, Roger Ebert, Screen Slate, and Jewish Currents, and she was named to Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film 2023. Her recently completed short film trilogy, Movement Exercises, is distributed by Video Data Bank. Sarah has worked on collaborative research and writing projects with media theorists Wendy Chun on slut-shaming and new media leaks, with Erin Brannigan on the dancing body on film, and has an ongoing collaboration with writer, scholar, and programmer Tess Takahashi on masses and embodiment. As a teaching artist working across age populations, she has taught workshops on choreographic practices in filmmaking at universities such as Brown, Yale, Cornell, and Reed, among many others, and has worked in creative aging for seven years, facilitating intergenerational filmmaking projects and teaching in older adult communities.

Her debut feature film, FAMILIAR TOUCH, had its World Premiere at the 81st Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti Competition where it won the Lion of the Future - Best Debut Film Award, Best Director, and Best Actress in the Orizzonti Competition. Most recently, Friedland won 2025 “Someone to Watch” Film Independent Spirit Award for her work on Familiar Touch. Music Box Films will be releasing Familiar Touch in theaters in summer 2025.