RiverRun Announces Emerging Master Honorees

By Staff

Filmmaker Debra Granik and actress Melanie Lynskey will be honored with Emerging Master awards at the 16th RiverRun International Film Festival. RiverRun will host two separate tribute ceremonies, each including an on-stage moderated conversation with the honorees and a film clip overview of their accomplished careers, with a short Q&A session following. Tickets for each event are $12 and will go on sale Monday, March 24.

“Our Emerging Master Award recognizes talented performers and directors who have demonstrated an early mastery of their craft,” said Andrew Rodgers, RiverRun’s Executive Director. “We are exceptionally proud to host Debra and Melanie at this year’s Festival and think that our audiences are in for a real treat!”

Debra Granik is an Oscar-nominated independent director and writer. She is best known for her work on Winter’s Bone (2010) starring Jennifer Lawrence, which earned her the Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay and numerous other nominations and awards around the world. She has also written and directed the critically-lauded Down to the Bone and the 1997 short film Snake Feed, which was well-received on the festival circuit. Granik is currently working on the documentary Jesus and Angel: Welcome to America. The tribute ceremony for Granik will be held on the evening of Thursday, April 10, 2014.  The time and locations will be announced.

New Zealand native Melanie Lynskey first gained widespread international attention when she starred in Peter Jackson’s Academy Award-nominated Heavenly Creatures. She is well known to television audiences for her role as Charlie Sheen’s crazed stalker on Two and a Half Men and has held leading and scene-stealing turns in many films, including Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant (2009), Sam Mendes’s Away We Go (2009), Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air (2009), Thomas McCarthy’s critically lauded (and RiverRun 2012 Opening Night film) Win Win (2011), as well as The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012). She was most recently seen in We’ll Never Have Paris, which premiered at South By Southwest in March and Joe Swanberg’s Happy Christmas, which premiered in January at Sundance. The tribute ceremony for Lynskey will be held at 4:30pm on Saturday, April 12, at UNCSA Gold Theatre, and will be moderated by Winston-Salem native Angus MacLachlan, who directed Lynskey in the his debut directorial feature Goodbye to All That, which will premiere next month at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Past recipients of RiverRun’s Emerging Master Award include director Jeff Nichols (Mud, Take Shelter, Shotgun Stories), Michael Shannon (Superman, Mud, Take Shelter), director David Gordon Green (Joe, Pineapple Express, Snow Angels), and director Ramin Bahrani (At Any Price, Goodbye Solo, Chop Shop).

You can go HERE for more details on screenings, events, and tickets for the 2014 RiverRun International Film Festival.