leah meyerhoff
press

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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

 

So many short films seem to pound ideas into our head over and over again, as if to make the message as clear as possible through noisy repetition. Twitch, though, seems to let the message lie just underneath the surface, waiting to be discovered. I enjoyed many things about the film, but I think I mostly enjoyed the performance of the young actress, who acts in subtle ways that indicate great tension between her character and the character of the mother. Here is also a movie that uses editing in profound, yet simple, ways to move the story forward without wasting time... Great job and please continue making films that rely on the intelligence of the audience to move the story forward.
Michael Clawson

Scottsdale International Film Festival

 

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

 

For Meyerhoff, reaching millions has very little to do with personal recognition but rather entirely to do with her desire to affect social change. 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

 

Interview with Leah Meyerhoff, director of Twitch
Heather Burke

Raven Entertainment

 

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

 

Remember Van Halen’s 1984 video for their adolescent anthem “Hot for Teacher?” Well, Team Queen is its queer, feminist doppelganger.
Heather Brown
Feminist Review

 

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

 

An interview with director Leah Meyerhoff at the Milan Film Festival
Anita F.
Ginger Generation

 

An interview with filmmaker Leah Meyerhoff about the personal nature of her short film Twitch, her experiences working as a female director, and the inside scoop on her upcoming feature Unicorns
Rebekah Frimpong
RWUL Magazine

 

At its core, Twitch makes far more subtle points about shedding norms and other’s expectations, by portraying a pivotal moment in one young woman’s transition into adulthood and coming into self in an unsentimental, non-deterministic fashion.
Ruth Cameron
Feminist Review

 

Interview with Reel NY.
Duana Butler
Reel New York

 

“Twitch” tells the true story of Meyerhoff, who spent her teenage years taking care of a disabled mother with multiple sclerosis. The film reveals the challenges Meyerhoff faced while caring for her ill mother as her own life blossomed.
Maria Guevara

The Golden Gate [X]press

 

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

 

Here is a brief interview with Leah Meyerhoff, one of the filmmakers associated with the "Into the Limelight" program.
Markus Sandy

Apperceptions

 

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

 

Video interview with Leah Meyerhoff at NewFest
Grace Moon

Velvet Park Magazine

 

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 or 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.
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

 

This extemely well-done music video for the band Triple Creme has been playing the underground film circuit all year long ... First of all, it’s a really great, catchy song and the video is a throwback to good, old-fashioned music videos when music videos used to tell a story and were, most of all, fun. The “story” is slight: a “good girl” is horrified by her outrageous classmates until she finally joins them in all their orgiastic excess. Best part: the transvestite cheerleaders.
Mike Everleth

Bad Lit

 

This music video is colorful, and the surrealism is a nice perplexing touch.
Patricia Ethelwyn Lang
Feminist Review

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

photo spread p64 of The Summer Issue
The L Magazine

 

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 Crème 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

 

photo spread from the Santa Cruz Film Festival
The Californian

 

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

 

Leah Meyerhoff's "Wonderfluff Sanwiches", uses plastic wrap and duct tape in her film about sandwich-making, leather ladies, and 1950's housewives.
Wes Bermang
Ion Magazine

Leah Meyerhoff, the founder of DollHouse Gallery, created an art space in her apartment because (she) was interested in creating an alternative to the standard white cube, wine-and-cheese sort of gallery.
Ynonne Dutchover

F News

 

Other artists take war and terrorism as themes...The politics are less specific in a video of Leah Meyerhoff packaging herself in plastic wrap.
Holland Cotter

New York Times

watch the Twitch trailer

download hi-res Twitch stills

visit Leah's myspace profile

watch the Team Queen trailer

download hi-res Team Queen stills

check out the Team Queen party photos