Joyce Chopra has produced and directed a wide range of award-winning films, from documentaries to features, which have appeared in theaters, on television and at festivals around the world. Born in Coney Island in 1936, Joyce spent much of her youth alternating between Saturday movie matinees and the town’s carnival rides, all the while dreaming of becoming an archeologist. During her junior year in Paris that all changed when she became smitten with filmmaking, but it seemed useless to hope that she could become a film director, since she couldn’t name one woman in that role. After graduating from Brandeis University with a degree in Comparative Literature, she was unable to find a job other than as a secretary, so she and a friend decided to start their own business. The Club 47 was born, a folk music coffeehouse two blocks from Harvard Square, where everyone from Joan Baez to Bob Dylan performed at the start of their careers. She also ran a Monday night classic film series which ignited a fire to try her luck in the movie world in spite of the odds against her as a woman. Close to giving up after months of trying, she finally landed a job with the legendary inventors of cinema verité, D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles. After that apprenticeship, she co-directed the satirical A Happy Mother’s Day with Leacock about the exploitation of the first woman to give birth to live quintuplets in the United States, revealing how the family was exploited by the town’s merchants and the swarming press. 

In 1971, during the eighth month of Chopra’s pregnancy, a friend challenged her to make a film about juggling the conflicting demands of her new baby, her career, and her marriage to the writer Tom Cole. She thought the idea “too narcissistic” since she had never seen a documentary about a private person’s life before, but she finally accepted the challenge. The result was the groundbreaking Joyce at 34, a film that is still relevant today and most likely the first autobiographical documentary ever made; thanks to that innovation, it is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. With that film serving as a model, she then produced a series of documentaries about women at different life stages, including Girls at 12, all of which appeared on PBS. Her first fiction film, Smooth Talk, starring Laura Dern and Treat Williams, received glowing reviews and won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Dramatic Feature at the Sundance Film Festival. Hollywood came calling in droves, which led to an ill-fated adventure with producer Sydney Pollack who fired her from her next outing directing Bright Lights Big City. Her next feature, The Lemon Sisters, about the ups and downs of a singing group in Atlantic City, starred Diane Keaton and Carol Kane. Following all this was a decade of directing a series of films for television with the chance to work with outstanding actors like Gene Wilder, Elizabeth Montgomery and Wallace Shawn. Starting in her mid-seventies and continuing to this day, she has been mentoring kids who have stories to tell with a camera which continue to resonate globally. Among them are Fire In Our Hearts, a documentary about students at a school for Tribal girls in India, and My Beautiful Nicaragua, a film that tells the story of a teenager whose family’s coffee fields are being devastated by a fungus caused by climate change. When travel was stopped by the Covid-19 pandemic she began to write her memoir, Lady Director, while editing Faith’s World, a film about a determined teenager living with cerebral palsy.

Many of Joyce Chopra’s films can be seen on the Criterion Channel. For a complete list of her documentaries and features, go to IMDB.com.