At the beginning of Julia Cafritz’s senior year of high school, she saw Peter Weir’s The Last Wave and decided to drop out of high school, skip college, move to Australia, marry Mr. Weir and devote her life to filmmaking. Her parents said no. Two years later, she dropped out of college and founded the band Pussy Galore with fellow Brown dropout Jon Spencer. She showed them! Many bands (STP, the Action Swingers, Free Kitten) and years later, she moved to western Massachusetts. Following a briefish tenure as the proprietress of an art-house theater, she is now a proud adjunct at Holyoke Community College, where she gets to incorporate great Criterion Collection releases such as La haine and George Washington into her English syllabi. “Picking just ten films was a bitch,” she writes. “So I cheated by using this bio as an excuse to add three more. Yay!”
Biography via Criterion.
