Leah Land

Leah is an artsy American.
Virginia Heffernan
New York Times

When the story is as good as filmmaker Leah Meyerhoff’s, you can’t help but be drawn in.
Jennifer Modenessi
Contra Costa Times

Meyerhoff, a Bay Area native and third-year graduate film student in Tisch, has plenty of success stories to put on her resume: On top of being featured in the popular series “Film School” on IFC, her latest film, the poignant and poetic short “Twitch,” rocked the Slamdance Film Festival.
Marc Homer
Washington Square News

“Twitch” is a story about fear, love and an uncertain future … Writer/director Leah Meyerhoff has secured her place in film with this short movie…She’s done a story that is as honest as it is touching, and there is nothing sickly sweet about it. Her ability to sum up a young girl’s life in ten minutes is remarkable, and it makes the film.
Doug Brunell
Film Threat

Twitch tells the poignant story of a young girl torn between two worlds: her domestic life where she must care for her wheelchair-bound mother and her escape into the emerging world of sexuality with her eager, hormone-addled boyfriend. Concerned that her mother’s disability is contagious due to her own twitching leg, the young girl seeks out advice from her gynecologist who feebly allays her fears. The director’s own mother, a victim of MS, plays the mother with a stark reality that is haunting to watch, and Emma Galvin, who plays the daughter, captures the girl’s struggles with an understated command that belies the hidden turmoil of adolescent angst that tortures her character.
Patricia Freeman
Independent Film

There’s Leah Meyerhoff, 24, an eccentric from Oakland, Calif., whose film will help her face down demons collected from a childhood spent taking care of her wheelchair-bound mother with MS.
Ray Richmond
Hollywood Reporter

Young filmmaker Leah Meyerhoff writes and directs this short film that so far has won almost universal accolades on the festival set…The film unfolds without exposition, instead following (a) young teenager through a series of snapshot scenes, detailing her increasing neurosis that perhaps her mother’s disability is contagious. As the girl begins to believe that she, like her mother, will lose the use of her legs, the gulf that divides mother and daughter widens…It’s a strange, insular take on growing up and rings with the veracity of real-life experience…Twitch is a hard but impressive little film. The travails of growing up, the immense pain of post-adolescence, the terror of the big nasty world resting just outside our windows: Twitch augers in the universal places of hurt in the human brain. We can take solace that Meyerhoff is now working on her first feature-length film. Twitch shows great promise; we now must wait for Meyerhoff’s talents to fully bloom.
Ben Beard
Film Monthly

Remember Van Halen’s 1984 video for their adolescent anthem “Hot for Teacher?” Well, Team Queen is its queer, feminist doppelganger. Okay, that’s giving David Lee Roth too much credit because the post-punk, emo, Brooklyn-based Triple Creme are way cooler than Diamond Dave could ever hope to be, even if he did have a cameo on an episode of The Sopranos.
Heather Brown
The Feminist Review

For Meyerhoff, reaching millions has very little to do with personal recognition but rather entirely to do with her desire to affect social change. Before a screening of her Student Academy-Award finalist short Twitch, Meyerhoff says repeatedly in talking about her work the importance of bettering society, of contributing in some small way. It’s idealistic. Lovely.
Noralil Ryan Fores
Short End Magazine

Tisch alumni Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese and “Monster’s Ball” director Marc Forster make cameo appearances, but the real stars are unknowns like 24-year-old Bay Area native Leah Meyerhoff, who tries to make her autobiographical feature in Oakland after casting her own mother to play…her mother.
Hugh Hart
San Francisco Chronicle

Leah, 24, is a punk-aesthete visual-artist Brown grad who includes blond wigs and black eyeliner among her conceptual guises. Her project: a therapeutic film that relives through drama her stressful relationship as a teenager with her wheelchair-bound mother, a victim of multiple sclerosis.
Gerald Peary
Portland Phoenix

Leah Meyerhoff explores some interesting and complex territory in Twitch. A young woman burdened by her mother’s crippling ailment begins to develop the hypochodriacal belief that she is contracting her mother’s disease. Obsessive bathing does little to abate her fears as she is forced to deal with her issues.
Matt Forsman
SF Station

Meyerhoff has the talent to rival the likes of Catherine Breillat in her ripe observations regarding the battle of the sexes.
Tram Ngo
Lucid Screening

Meyerhoff’s film, “Twitch,” is a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl who’s resentful about taking care of her mother, who has multiple sclerosis.Their complex, fractured relationship is based on Meyerhoff’s own experience with her ailing mother, who she casts in her film.
Rhonda Stewart
Boston Globe

Twitch is a powerful and unsentimental autobiographical film about the conflicted and complicated relationship between a teenage girl and her disabled mother (played by Meyerhoff’s own mother Toni). Meyerhoff easily conveys the neuroses and brutality attendant to an enforced reversal of roles: when the line between caregiver and charge is hopelessly blurred.
Antimatter Film Festival

Leah Meyerhoff’s short “Twitch,” which screened at the Chicago International Film Festival, stars Emma Galvin as a teen afraid she’s acquiring the disability that afflicts her mother, played by Leah’s own mother Toni Meyerhoff. Leah Meyerhoff, a former Art Institute student, garnered a Student Academy Award nomination and a Slamdance Grand Jury Prize for “Twitch.” The short has played more than 30 fests, with upcoming screenings in Sweden, Wales, and New York.
Ed M. Koziarski
ReelChicago

I really enjoyed this short and hard-hitting movie. Dark, mean spirited, and all. Twitch grabs the emotions and fears we all share and makes more of a statement than the director may have ever intended.
Garth Crosby
Art Source LA

(Twitch) shows a self-centered, scared girl looking in vain for the wrong things from the people in her life: she seeks physical affection from her mother, who can only offer emotional connection; she wants her boyfriend to listen to her and validate her feelings and fears, but all he wants is sex…Shame, though, that you’ll only get to see it once through — it rewards multiple viewings.
Cheshire Dave
SFist

Award-winning director and New York University graduate student Leah Meyerhoff has built up a large list of accomplishments as a filmmaker, including a number of awards, and appearances at such festivals as the Cannes International Film Festival in France, Slamdance, and the Chicago International Film Festival. NEFilm recently spoke to Meyerhoff about her experiences in film school, filmmaking, and the making of her new music video Team Queen.
Elaine Mak
New England Film

This colorful romp in high school antics and edginess is a wild ride of a music video. Here, in Team Queen, director Leah Meyerhoff, a young filmmaker at New York University, who has been nominated in the past for a student Academy Award, shows off her chops with unabashed, flashy charm. The film is an ode to the band, Triple Creme, and it should serve as strong inspiration to any film student that you can go there and you can do that.
Christa Martin
GT Weekly

Filmmaker and nightlife entrepreneur Leah Meyerhoff is the director of the titillating Team Queen music video … and the audience will no doubt be encouraged to participate in tawdry and unexpected ways.
Abby Ehmann
Eros Zine

The band paired up with director Leah Meyerhoff to set the video in a gender-bending, fire-breathing, tassel-twirling, post-punk rock ‘n’ roll prom starring the best of New York Burlesque.
Editor’s Pick
Go NYC

They’re here, they’re queer, and they’re ready to rock. The grrrls in the post-punk Brooklyn band Triple-Crème are not afraid of a little heavy bass or some catchy guitar riffs. They’re also not afraid to kick your ass.
Paper Magazine

The Team Queen release party was hectic and crowded in the exact way a good party should be. The turnout was pretty staggering, and all kudos due to director Leah Meyerhoff, who managed to put the whole show together herself. People were packed in body-to-body to watch us shake our collective asses, and the music video is incredibly well-done.Yay for D.I.Y. women.
Cherry Bomb
Queen of Cream

In her first day at a new school, a clean-cut princess tempts her teacher with an apple, and then wanders nervously through high school halls. Cut to her crashed prom, where the queer-punk-rock band Triple Creme bangs out a song, a leather-bound burlesquer breathes fire, and drag-queen cheerleaders dance delightedly in blue satin sports bras. This may sound like a trippy MTV fantasy, but it’s actually the opening of Leah Meyerhoff‘s new music video “Team Queen”
Jenny Halper
Courier Life

Post-punk lez rockers Triple Creme enlisted the brightest and most buoyant of New York’s burlesque scene to star in the new music video for their single “Team Queen.” Relentless schtick-slinger Murray Hill hosts the single’s launch party, featuring a live performance by Triple Creme and supporting boylesque and burlesque acts such as Tigger and Julie Atlas Muz, while roller derby stars, drag queen cheerleaders, magicians, and a girl in a large balloon keep the night, ah, afloat.
Flavorpill

Blending activism and cultural dissent, the work in Death to the Fascist Insect lays bare the link between the personal and political spheres . . . An installation of three unsynchronized television screens playing a video of Leah Meyherhoff applying makeup and wrapping her head in plastic creates a vague parallel between body politics and world politics.
Christina Vassallo
NY Arts Magazine