Writer/Director Daria Price
Daria Price works in both narrative and documentary films. Her first film as writer/director is Survival of the Fittest, which won "Best American Short" at the Swansea Bay Film Festival, the "Fusion Audience Award" at Dances With Films, the "Platinum Award for Comedy Short" at Worldfest–Houston International Film Festival, and it was an Official Selection at a dozen festivals. Her produced screenplay, The Nesting, was nominated for Best Film and Best Screenplay at Madrid's IMAGFIC Festival. Her optioned screenplays include Blindsight and Living Proof. Writers Guild Of America East selected her screenplay Blood From A Stone for a staged reading with Patricia Clarkson.
She produced, directed, and edited DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION, about the greatest hoax ever of Modern American Art. Distributed by Grasshopper Films, it was featured in The Guardian when it premiered at London’s 2019 Raindance Film Festival and was nominated for Best Doc. Her first documentary, OUT ON A LIMB, won “Best Documentary” at the Boston International Film Festival and was distributed by PBS and APT Worldwide.
Her current screenwriting project is RAW MATERIAL, a limited narrative series about a rocky romance between two passionate young writers rescued by a New Deal work-relief program as a divided America climbs out of the Depression and heads for world war.
She produced, directed, and edited DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION, about the greatest hoax ever of Modern American Art. Distributed by Grasshopper Films, it was featured in The Guardian when it premiered at London’s 2019 Raindance Film Festival and was nominated for Best Doc. Her first documentary, OUT ON A LIMB, won “Best Documentary” at the Boston International Film Festival and was distributed by PBS and APT Worldwide.
Her current screenwriting project is RAW MATERIAL, a limited narrative series about a rocky romance between two passionate young writers rescued by a New Deal work-relief program as a divided America climbs out of the Depression and heads for world war.
Director's Statement
I’m a born and bred New Yorker yet the first film I made was set and shot in Los Angeles. “Survival Of The Fittest” was initially inspired by a question I kept asking myself when I first visited LA. I’d find myself staring at people because something about them was “wrong.” Their faces and bodies just didn’t make sense. Too much cosmetic surgery had awarded them the peculiar status of being neither young nor old, nor even middle-aged—they were in fact of “no age.” But those were only the extreme jobs—the scalpel-junkies. I soon realized that there were many more who had had at least some subtle work done.
Cosmetic surgery is of course popular elsewhere-- in fact in China young girls get “westernized” to improve their status and employability. But there is no place on earth like Los Angeles for total obsession with “self” and “quick fixes”—from exercise and surgery to buff up the outside to recovery and self-help groups to spruce up the inside. And so my first film became a sardonic ode to LA.
If we live in a time when hearts are bypassed and internal organs replaced, is it any less justifiable to fix up the outside, especially when one is bombarded by messages that say it’s good to live longer but not to look like we have-- and not just for vanity’s sake but to remain employable. Hollywood has been accused of discriminating against writers over 40, and they’re not even on screen! As an attorney in the film proclaims, “we live in an age when the greatest sin of all for a woman is to age, so why wouldn’t any woman choose the option not to?” Thus, as much as my film pokes fun at its narcissistic characters, it finally does not pass judgment on them and what they view as an evolutionarily imperative “survival of the fittest” in a society obsessed with youth and beauty.
Cosmetic surgery is of course popular elsewhere-- in fact in China young girls get “westernized” to improve their status and employability. But there is no place on earth like Los Angeles for total obsession with “self” and “quick fixes”—from exercise and surgery to buff up the outside to recovery and self-help groups to spruce up the inside. And so my first film became a sardonic ode to LA.
If we live in a time when hearts are bypassed and internal organs replaced, is it any less justifiable to fix up the outside, especially when one is bombarded by messages that say it’s good to live longer but not to look like we have-- and not just for vanity’s sake but to remain employable. Hollywood has been accused of discriminating against writers over 40, and they’re not even on screen! As an attorney in the film proclaims, “we live in an age when the greatest sin of all for a woman is to age, so why wouldn’t any woman choose the option not to?” Thus, as much as my film pokes fun at its narcissistic characters, it finally does not pass judgment on them and what they view as an evolutionarily imperative “survival of the fittest” in a society obsessed with youth and beauty.