NYWIFT Blog

By Lily Della Pietra

Welcome to NYWIFT, Anna Koukouli Born!

Anna Koukouli Born is a bicoastal writer-director splitting her time between NY and LA.  

She explores women’s stories, dysfunctional families, unbearable workplaces filled with Succession-like egos, social inequality, and climate-caused disasters set in the near future. 

Drawing from her Greek history and heritage, Anna loves allegorical cautionary tales about strong, tragic characters trying to overcome adversity. She’s also obsessed with women’s rights and gender parity. Her humor is darker than yours. She bets on it.

Anna studied Story Analysis and TV Development at UCLA Extension and holds a BA (Hons) Marketing and an MBA from the UK Universities of Lincoln and Liverpool, respectively.

Anna talks about her journey into the film industry, her experiences working on various films, and how she overcomes challenges within these fields!

NYWIFT Member Anna Koukouli Born

Welcome to NYWIFT! Introduce yourself briefly to our readers! 

Hey – I’m Anna Koukouli Born and I’m a writer/director based in NY and LA. I was primarily based in LA for nine years, and made Brooklyn my base this last February. I love writing women-centric stories and beyond, with a lot of subtext and vulnerability, and I’m not shying away from unhappy endings.

I was born and raised in Athens, Greece, which makes me a storyteller native to drama, I’d guess. And yes, we are taught Aristotle’s Poetics in high school, in case you were wondering.

I have shot three shorts, and I have written several scripts, both features and pilots. I hope to expand my collaboration circles in New York and shoot my first feature in the near future, over here.

What brought you to NYWIFT?

My move to NYC. I had been living in Los Angeles since 2016, and I joined WIF in Los Angeles in 2017, if I’m not mistaken. I love some active participation in this great organization, meeting other filmmakers and women in the industry who support each other on any occasion and form, therefore, it was an easy call for me to apply and join the organization first thing as I settled in New York. 

Can you share your journey into the film industry and any pivotal moments that shaped your career?

Sure! My desire to write and direct had been there ever since I discovered the movies’ magic. There’s something enchanting about being transported into another world or meeting characters you would never meet in life. When I finished school, I wanted to study to be a photographer or director, but as parents often do, my parents vetoed, asking me to choose something more “marketable” and then, if I so wished, I could see filmmaking and the arts later in life.

So I studied marketing. My logic was, I’d go into advertising, and that’s as close as it gets to filmmaking and photography. And so I did. I spent 13 years in Global Network Advertising Agencies – yes, the Madison Avenue kind with global clients like Nivea and P&G  – but of course with a degree in Marketing and an MBA, at this point, I never got my hands dirty working at the creative department. 

I was an executive, based in Germany, working in London and Geneva, and the rest of Europe. I was aching to write and direct and get really down to do creative work. That thorn never went away, and the higher I was climbing the ladder I was drifting from the creative product and I was more involved with numbers and forecasts. After a couple of strong doses of burnout, in 2015, my husband and I talked about our wishes and plans, and we decided we would leave Germany. We decided it would be great if we moved to LA for a major change of scenery and for me to pull the plug on the agency life and get a full reset. 

That’s how I found myself attending UCLA Extension, taking classes in Story Development and Story Analysis. This was also the TV golden era, so everyone was shouting, “You need to learn how to put together a show!” Thus, more classes for TV writing at Script Anatomy. I was aching to learn more about directing, so I started taking classes with Sundance and Raindance, and overall, I pushed a lot on my education but also sought any opportunity to write and direct. 

This journey is pretty difficult and sometimes lonely, and meeting like-minded people is crucial. I made this my priority, and I have surrounded myself with smart, inspiring artists and filmmakers who want to make things and tell stories on screen. I had all this development and production experience from advertising, all I needed to do was to immerse myself into the creative community and make things happen.

We got to screen my first short film Appraisal at the Beverly Hills Film Festival, which takes place at the iconic Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard and at that moment I felt content and proud. I said to my husband, “Yes, that’s what I wanna do for the rest of my life.”

Anna Koukouli Born at the Beverly Hills Film Festival

As a bicoastal writer/director, how have your experiences in both New York and LA influenced your work?

My living in LA and NY has definitely grounded me in two major yet different American metropolitan cities with a diametrically different mindset and vibe, and I’m all too grateful to take it all in.

For starters, I’m already a globally-minded person and very adaptable to the cultures I get to experience. I’m born and raised in Athens, Greece, I studied in the UK and lived there for five years, I worked in Germany and all over Europe for another eight years, I was responsible for marketing campaigns for Latin America, Asia and the US, so the insights into different cultures and actual experience having lived in different places is my second nature. 

Now, having said that, I enjoy delving and immersing myself into the specifics of a place. That’s why in my film Angel, I rewrote the family portrayed as a Chicanos family, living in the most iconic Mexican American corner of LA, West Adams. It can’t get more Los Angeles than that! And we shot it locally, meaning both the house of the family and the church were actually in the West Adams neighborhood. 

[The] same is happening for another piece I’m currently writing that I had based in Brooklyn, but now that I get to live here, I’m hoping to soak up the specificity and history of the neighborhoods and life in Brooklyn and give my script a more authentic makeup, which will help it and help me pitch it better for funding and production.

Anna Koukouli Born on the set of Angel

You have worked as a producer, writer, and director for short films like Appraisal and Don’t Forget to Brush Your Hair. What was it like working on these projects?

I love stories that are centered on women who have to fight, show vulnerability, give attitude, speak out, you get the notion… Writing and producing those stories came mainly out of my need to express my views on certain issues women face every day, combined with themes I care deeply about, like gender inequalities at the workplace, dysfunctional families and addiction, and relationships among family members. Appraisal, Angel, and Don’t Forget to Brush Your Hair, which is still in post-production, are three completely different projects with one common denominator: my personal human experience. 

Appraisal is about an advertising agency associate creative director’s appraisal meeting, where she wants to prove her worth and get a promotion to no avail. I wanted to raise the mirror on how women are treated in the workplace. I have been passed over for promotions and experienced double standards, I have also been asked to exclude mothers who were working flexible hours from promotions, I have been asked to give specific feedback about women to be fired on the basis of lack of commitment… The list goes on and on. Appraisal is a surreal take on those insights. 

Don’t Forget to Brush Your Hair is a painful take on the mother-daughter relationship, and through a phone call, we get to experience the unabridged wishes and curses of being a daughter to a mother who doesn’t even understand she’s burdening her child, also with a splash of surrealism. 

Now, Angel is different. This is a short film about the shock of sudden death and the denial of two adult siblings, who mess with their father’s funeral preparations to postpone their grief and conspire to sneak his unfinished beer bottle into his coffin, while also preparing a military honors funeral.

Although the film is written with the dramatic attention it needs to make sense on screen,  it’s pretty based on our [own] experiences during that long weekend, which couldn’t be more heartbreaking, more hilarious, more intense, and more emotional than what’s in the film. This one has been the most demanding piece for me. First of all, I had to separate myself from the materials and see the story as a writer/director, fix the pace, and tell a story for the screen. Then it was the issue of money: we needed significant funds. We were in need of specific locations: a cemetery, a church, a house. We were in need of a specific wardrobe: Navy uniforms, black funeral attire, and accessories. We were also in need of a lot of extras, significant props like the casket, flowers, ladders, name it. 

It took everything I had to switch hats all the time from directing in pre-production to producer and vice versa, and to initiate a crowdfunding campaign for the production, to ask the help of friends to contribute any way they can, to find the right collaborators that will see this passion project in the same way as I did. I was more than lucky and happy to get the best cast, the best crew, and the best post-production team anyone can dream of. A lot of people donated their services to us because they loved the script. Actor friends came and played the characters with truth and emotion. My producers worked in coordination with me to seamlessly cover all bases and make the process as painless as possible.

Overall, producing one’s films is very hard, very expensive, and very personal, but in the end, if the result comes together, it is very rewarding.

Anna Koukouli Born working on Angel

What other challenges have you faced as a writer, and how have you overcome them? Are these similar or different from your experience as a director/producer?

I find that writing vs. producing/directing are two polar opposites. Writing is a very solitary activity. It is this unique journey that starts with you in front of the dreaded white page. And when you put the words on the paper, the self-doubt is paralyzing. “Am I clear enough? Am I emotional enough? Am I thematic enough?” There are too many pieces that synthesize a good script and the writer gets most of the pressure to assemble every detail, every emotion, every action that translates clearly and impactfully on screen.

That’s why screenwriting is maybe the most important pillar of a movie for me. To quote Hitchcock, “To make a great film you need three things: the script, the script, and the script.” If the script is great, tight, and hits all the beats, then the film will come together.

On this note, I prefer to be known and appreciated for my writing rather than my producing skills. Producing for me is project management, a team effort involving a coordinated group of creative minds, definitely not for the faint-hearted and definitely for a creative soul that seeks to bring things to life, but for me, it’s already within me. Maybe I have this flow of a very trained producing skill through my advertising career, since in the end, no matter how much strategy and presentation I had to do, the commercials were the end product that I had to produce. 

Now, directing is another muscle. I have learned so much through my directing classes and from analyzing scenes and frames, and every time I am on set, I soak up all the experience. A script tells you what’s needed. A director’s eye finds the most beautiful or impactful way to show that. When it comes to collaborations on directing, I also find myself invested in all the people and their respective crafts around me, and being on the same wavelength is truly important to me.

The biggest difference I found between writing and directing is that my self-esteem is battered every time I write, but my confidence comes back triumphantly when I am in pre-production. The action of planning the scenes, giving a physical dimension and specificity to the words, and working with the actors is so empowering and enlightening. I spend my mind and my soul on paper, but I get to reap the rewards on set.

Anna Koukouli Born working on Appraisal

Are there any projects you are currently working on or would like to explore in the future? 

I’m in the process of writing a couple of scripts at different stages. Angel has been done as a short, but it was always going to be a feature script, and this is what I’m writing right now. Then there is a story I have written while I was living in LA, inspired by my experience as a teenager – what a life phase that is – set in the 90s in Brooklyn. Funny that now I live in Brooklyn and I have the opportunity to rewrite it in a more authentic and visceral way, as I will walk the streets I was writing about and the environment the story is supposed to take place in. 

And then, I have a couple of pilot scripts from my TV writing training era that I believe can be rewritten into features. One of them is called Off Fence and it’s about people trying to escape the control of a totalitarian corporation – think something like Amazon on steroids – that keeps people living in a metaphorical and literal fence for a hefty subscription fee. When things go wrong, they realize they can’t live either in it or outside the fence. Kind of a dystopian impossible dilemma. Maybe too close to reality? 

Connect with Anna Koukouli Born on Instagram and Bluesky at @annakoukouliborn, follow her short Angel on Instagram at @angel.theshortfilm, and via her website www.annakoukouli.com.

(All images courtesy of Anna Koukouli Born)