Sundance Film Fest2003 (World Premiere)–Thirteen, the third honored film (Best Director) in the dramatic competition featured the striking debut of Catherine Hardwicke.
A graduate of UCLA Film School, Harwicke co-wrote the screenplay with Nikki Reed, a 14-year-old teenager, who’s the film’s co-star.
Thirteen tells the coming of age story of a girl (well played by Evan Rachel Wood), who’s a product of a broken family, growing up in Venice, California, trying to belong to her school’s inner group–at any cost.
Refusing to judge her protagonists, Hardwicke examines from the inside a subculture rarely seen with such honesty on American screens, one in which impressionable girls drift under group pressure into drugs, profanity, piercing, self-mutilation, anorexia, and shoplifting.
Exhibiting a strong sense of visual storytelling, manifest in her dynamic camera, Hardwicke is atalent to watch.