Anna Gutto

Anna Gutto's feature debut Paradise Highway, starring Academy Award-winning actors Juliette Binoche and Morgan Freeman, premiered at Locarno Film Festival 2022 and was hailed by Variety as “a singularly promising debut for a first-time feature filmmaker.” The film is distributed by Lionsgate in the US and Netflix in select international territories, where it went straight to no. 1 in Australia, New Zealand and all of Scandinavia.

Anna comes from a career in the theater, first in Europe, then in New York, garnering critical acclaim from, among others, The New York Times, which described the work as “…universally excellent.” During her years in the Big Apple, Anna also produced several concerts at Carnegie Hall and was a consultant for Boardwalk Empire. 

Ms. Gutto co-directed the first season of the Netflix success Home for Christmas, and her short films have won multiple festival awards, among them Best Director and Best Ensemble Cast. Her short comedy Mommy Heist was broadcast by France Televisions' channel FR3 and A Lucky Man is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award recipient and is in the screening catalogue of the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. 

Anna is attracted to stories about underexposed characters and situations, such as the female trucker of Paradise Highway, the unexpected fate of the college boy in A Lucky Man, or the unusual adventure of three moms and a baby in Mommy Heist. Working in a variety of genres, for Anna, storytelling is about connection—characters connecting with each other, and stories connecting with an audience. Anna is a dual US and Norway/EU citizen.