‘Girl Friend’ by Alumnae Available on Directors Notes

Girl Friend, a short film written and directed by alumna Chloe Sarbib '20, produced by student Gina Hackett and co-produced by alumna Lauren López de Victoria '19, is now available on the Directors Notes website alongside an interview with Sarbib about the making of the film. The coming of age drama is also currently featured as a Daily Pick on Film Shortage.

Girl Friend tells the story of Sophie, who, when her best friend starts dating someone new, will do whatever it takes to make things go back to the way they were.

The film already had a successful festival showing, priorly winning Best Student Short at Provincetown Film Festival and Best New York Short at NewFest. 

Chloe Sarbib is a French-American writer, director, and editor based in Brooklyn. Her films have played and won awards at festivals in the US and internationally, including Palm Springs International ShortFest, Seattle International Film Festival, Mill Valley Film Festival, Provincetown Film Festival, NewFest, Brooklyn Film Festival and the Bushwick Film Festival. Her work appeared in Filmmaker Magazine’s “50 Most Anticipated American Films of 2018.” She has been supported by the Janowsky Screenwriting Fellowship, the Indian Paintbrush Production Grant, and the Catwalk Institute.

Gina Hackett is an MFA student in Screenwriting/Directing at Columbia University. In 2019, Hackett received the prestigious Screenplay Grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as well as the Katharina Otto-Bernstein Production Grant for her upcoming thesis Delicate Prey. She also received Columbia's Alex Sichel Fellowship for a second-year female director demonstrating promise and was a finalist for the SFFILM Rainin Grant as a co-writer on Waleed Alqahtani’s feature film Amal. As Co-Chair of Columbia Women in Film (CWIF), Hackett champions intersectional storytelling that explores the myriad ways in which women inspire each other. 

Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, López de Victoria has produced several short films that have played in festivals both in the US and abroad. She is the recipient of an Entertainment Scholarship award from the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts and was the recipient of the 2018 Arthur Krim Memorial award. In 2019, she was a finalist for a SFFILM Rainin grant as a producer for Amal, the recipient of a Katharina Otto-Bernstein production grant and the PGA Debra Hill grant recipient. In 2020, López de Victoria was selected by Film Independent as a Project Involve Producing Fellow. She currently works at United Talent Agency in the Independent Film department.