A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Marie-Françoise Theodore is an interdisciplinary artist of Haitian descent working in film, television and theatre as writer, actor and filmmaker. A native of Chicago IL, she resides in Los Angeles, CA with her son Aaron. Marie-Françoise is the recipient of a 2006 Women In Film/General Motors Acceleration Grant for Emerging Filmmakers and is a 2006 Film Independent Fellow – Project:Involve Honoree (formerly IFP/LA), and was mentored by esteemed film and television director Neema Barnett. In 2007, Marie-Francoise received a Frances E. Williams Artist Grant for Writing to attend Natalie Goldberg's 'Old Friend, Far Away' Memoir Writing Retreat in Sante Fe, NM. Her debut feature length screenplay The Street, adapted from the award-winning novel by Ann Petry, has been a finalist for several prestigious screenplay programs including the Bush Foundation Fellowship, Tribeca All Access Connects and twice for the Roy W. Dean Foundation. Marie-Françoise has been short-listed for the Sundance Screenwriter Labs for three consecutive years. Marie-Françoise is the writer/director/actor of two experimental narrative short films: the multi-award winning rebel in the soul and bloodmemory. rebel in the soul, has screened in over ten film festivals nationally and abroad, winning Best Experimental Short at the 2003 Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival in NY. Marie-Françoise starred in the independent feature film Strange As Angels (also Associate Producer) distributed by Image Entertainment; Love Jones (New Line Cinema); and Small Metal Jacket (BBC Films). Marie-Françoise holds an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from Columbia College, Chicago IL. Marie-Françoise is currently working on her memoir Not A Proper Haitian Girl, which chronicles her Chicago childhood in the 1970s-- from placement in an orphanage at birth through to her natural mother's subsequent marriage to Marie-Françoise's foster-mother's nephew. The memoir explores the complex relationships of an extended foster and natural family and the consequences of memory and identity for a young girl.
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.