West Coast Artist: Lynn Shelton

Presents Humpday and previews $5 Cover: Seattle with a live music set by Kevin Murphy of the Moon doggies and Jason Dodson of the Maldives.

Lynn SheltonSeattle-based writer/director Lynn Shelton is a rising star in independent cinema. Always buttressing her characters and observations with realism and perceptive observation, Shelton is one of the visionary filmmakers of the new decade.

After several years of acting for the stage in Seattle and New York, Lynn Shelton attended the MFA program for Photography at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. She then spent a decade as an experimental and documentary filmmaker and as an editor before writing and directing her first feature-length film. That film was We Go Way Back, an exploration of a young woman’s life through an apparitional experience with her younger self. The film premiered at Slamdance 2006 where it picked up the Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature and the Kodak Vision Award for Best Cinematography.

My Effortless Brilliance premiered in competition at SXSW 2008 and won Shelton the 2009 Independent Spirit “Someone to Watch” Award. Humpday is Shelton’s third feature and it earned her the Special Jury Prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Picked up by Magnolia Pictures, the film added a female voice to the low-budget indie film movement known as “mumblecore,” and it starred one of the leading “mumblecore” directors, Mark Duplass (whose film Cyrus is also playing in Cinema Pacific). Humpday also brought Shelton back to the 2010 Independent Spirit Awards, where this time she picked up the John Cassavetes Award for the best film made for under $500,000.

Shelton’s latest venture is $5 Cover Seattle, a 12-part series of webisodes premiering on MTV online in June. Shelton focuses on thirteen of Seattle’s hottest bands , dramatizing their lives and the contemporary Seattle music scene using a semi-improvisatory, semi-documentary format. At Cinema Pacific, Shelton will preview several webisodes and talk about the creative process behind the project.