Beeban Kidron

Trained in the British TV industry, Beeban Kidron has come to specialize in modest, eccentric character- driven comedy-dramas, often dealing with relationships between women. A runaway at 17, she worked as a stripper before becoming a prize-winning photographer while still in her teens. Kidron began her filmmaking career helming a fiction short ("Alex" 1985) before co-directing (with Amanda Richardson) "Carry Greenham Home" (1984), a political documentary about a group of women encamped at the Greenham Nuclear Power Plant to promote nuclear disarmament. Kidron was so committed to this school project--she was attending England's National Film and Television School at the time--that she lived at the site herself for more than seven months. After another nonfiction project for TV, Kidron segued to long form fiction with "Vroom" (Channel 4, 1988), an affable English road movie set in the northern city of Lancashire which proved a hit at the 1988 London Film Festival.