Bio
Hanna Gray Organschi is a New England filmmaker pursuing her MFA in Film at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Hanna received the 2021 New York Women in Film & Television Scholarship for her breakout short film BEA, SERIOUSLY (Hamptons International Film Festival), won the NYU Tisch Wasserman King Award for her short film MERCI, POPPY starring Victoria Pedretti (AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, PONYBOI, ORIGIN), and produced Angalis Field’s short film THE DALLES (Sundance Film Festival 2023). She is the recipient of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative Reproductive Rights Accelerator Grant and the Spike Lee Production Fund for her upcoming thesis film F*CK THAT GUY and was selected for the 2024 Purple List, 2024 Sundance Screenwriters Lab and the 2024 NYU Production Lab Development Studio with her feature film RUBBER HUT. Hanna’s work explores strong, stubborn female protagonists who seek autonomy with self-knowledge.
DIRECTOR STATEMENT
My life has been defined by the women who raised me, all of whom broke out of the social and cultural constraints of the era in which they came of age. Often they made big messes and alienated people. Always they stuck to their guns despite the difficulties.
I was seven when I first watched the great screwball comedy BRINGING UP BABY with Gigi, my leading-lady grandmother. “Is there anything in the world that doesn’t belong to you?” Katharine Hepburn voices the central question about men and women in our world. It’s a refrain in my household, charged with many shades of meaning and passed down through the women.
When she starred in the 1938 film, Ms. Hepburn was constrained by her time-working within a narrow range of allowable agency. But through her biting wit and her irrepressible star power, she manages to get right at the matter. In asingle question, she declares women’s lot. It is this perspective that connects me to Ms. Hepburn’s character; to my grandmother; to my mother; to Emanuella, the protagonist of my film.
As a filmmaker, I’m focused on life’s tiny moments in which fleeting injustices set in motion unlikely courses of action. Usually stubborn women are involved. Emanuella is worlds away from the screwball ‘30s, but she too chafes at the status quo and rebels against her lot. Emanuella is unapologetically herself, even when being herself is unpopular. I love her for that. I am obsessed with women who make it their mission to stand out because they don’t like what it means to fit in.
RUBBER HUT is a story about an irrepressible personality in a small town in the smallest state in the country at a moment of culture clash and political upheaval. It is a character-driven exploration of agency and the process of radically individuating. My own life is mirrored by the identity building and independence seeking of my protagonist. The women who shaped me are aggressively themselves and I write what I know.
SYNOPSIS: RUBBER HUT
Rhode Island, 1992. An entrepreneurial ex-Pan Am stewardess opens a drive-thru condom shop in her Italian Catholic town. Overnight, Emanuella DelVecchio becomes the local lightning rod, a radical hero to the neighborhood teens and an unlikely threat to her tight-knit community.
PRODUCTION INFO
2024 Sundance Screenwriters Lab
2024 NYU Production Lab Development Studio
2024 Purple List