MEGAN GRIFFITHS
Megan Griffiths is a writer and director working in film and television. She recently directed two episodes of the Duplass brothers' HBO anthology series ROOM 104 and an episode of the Epix comedy GRAVES, starring Nick Nolte. Prior to this, she wrote and directed the thriller THE NIGHT STALKER. Her film LUCKY THEM starring Toni Collette, Thomas Haden Church and Johnny Depp premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was distributed by IFC Films. Megan’s film EDEN, based on the true story of a young woman captured into the world of human trafficking, was a breakout at South by Southwest 2012, winning the Emergent Narrative Director Award, the Audience Award for Narrative Feature as well as a Special Jury Prize for lead actress Jamie Chung. Megan's feature THE OFF HOURS, distributed by Film Movement, premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Megan was the recipient of the 2012 Stranger Genius Award for Film, was named the 2013 City Arts Film Artist of the Year, and received the 2015 Seattle Mayor’s Award for Film. She is the vice president of the board of the Northwest Film Forum and is an active advocate for sustainable production.

Director’s statement
In much of the media we consume, a man with a gun is removed from moral ambiguity: he is either an inhuman monster, a superhero saving the world, or a patriot serving his country. Death tolls rise without any perceived impact. Lives are taken without consequence. We’ve spent a lot of time as a culture trying to reckon with the effects of the intense exposure to violence faced by soldiers, but what about the effects of similar exposure on those at home? How does this steady diet of violence (from the real-world carnage of war, mass shootings and police brutality, to the fictional, cartoonish bloodshed filling our screens) impact those coming of age in this era? When all they see are adults solving their problems with force, what does that teach kids about how to solve their own problems? Most stories about disaffected, violent youth focus on boys. Stories about war are almost exclusively a male domain. But no one is immune to the imagery with which we are bombarded every day in this society. Young girls are equally at risk of being desensitized and damaged by this constant exposure. With SADIE, I have tried to create a cautionary tale with humor and humanity that I hope will contribute to a larger cultural conversation. I set out to write a war film where the soldier was a 13-year-old girl and the battlefield was the trailer park where she lived. Sadie goes to war against her enemy only to realize too late that her actions have not solved anything. The wake of her deeds will affect her whole life, and by considering that I hope that the audience might consider the wake of the deeds we perpetrate as a culture, and the enduring damage they do to us all.