Latest in Sian Heder

Siân Heder, who directed and won an Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Best Picture winner CODA, will receive the American Film Institute’s 2022 Franklin J. Schaffner Alumni Medal, AFI said today. She will receive the honor June 9 during the AFI Life Achievement Award Gala Tribute to Julie Andrews, which will air June 16…

Sian Heder brought the Oscar audience to its feet winning her first Academy Award for adapting CODA (Child Of Deaf Adult), from the 2014 French film  La famille Bélier written by Victoria Bedos. This is the first Oscar and nomination for Heder.   During her acceptance speech (accompanied by an ASL interpreter), she…

Winning the Academy Award for Best Picture often demands so much more than simply making a great film. Sometimes, it comes down to peaking in the minds of awards voters in the final weeks of the season, capturing late awards and having the cast and story to charm the voters. The film that finds itself in that enviable…

After sweeping the awards at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, capped by a fest-record $25 million sale to Apple, CODA has proven to be the little engine that could. Financed independently after Lionsgate insisted on stars — writer-director Siân Heder and star Marlee Matlin dug in and refused to make the film unless…

EXCLUSIVE: CODA, the film that traveled the longest road among the Best Picture nominees, will get a new surge. Apple and its Original Films division will re-release the inspirational film for free in theaters from next Friday, February 25 through Sunday, February 27. All free screenings to feature open captions to be…

Respect for the underlying material is the key to film adaptation, agreed panelists tonight at the WGA Foundation's Beyond Words panel discussion featuring this year's WGA Awards nominees for adapted screenplay. For Guillermo del Toro, film adaptation is "almost like you're marrying the widow of one of your best…

After watching her family drama CODA break ground this morning as both the first Apple Original, and the first feature led by a predominantly deaf cast to land a Best Picture Oscar nomination, writer-director Sian Heder caught up with Deadline to discuss the meaning behind this recognition from the Film Academy, and…

The 2022 Sundance Film Festival gets underway later this week, but it will be hard to imagine any movie in the current lineup making quite the impact CODA did in 2021, when it landed an unprecedented and historic four major awards there to dominate the festival, and also made a huge sale to Apple for $25 million. Siân…

Editors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will be factors in this year’s movie awards race. After writer-director Siân Heder scored raves for her debut feature film Tallulah, she came to the attention of the producers who held rights to the acclaimed 2014…

For her film CODA, filmmaker Siân Heder found that delving deep into the cultural differences between the deaf and hearing communities to be wildly informative in creating a fresh cinematic experience. "I was very excited kind of by the specificity and yet the universality of the story," Heder said during the Apple Ori…

The 2014 French drama La Famille Bélier centered on a young woman growing up in a family with deaf parents, but for the most part the filmmakers cast hearing actors to play the deaf roles. Writer-director Siân Heder was determined not to take that same approach when she set about making CODA, her award-winning…

CODA writer-director Siân Heder was joined by stars Marlee Matlin and Emilia Jones at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles to discuss the drama, which set a record when Apple paid $25 million-plus to acquire the film after its opening-night premiere at Sundance, “When I watched the original film,” said Heder of the…