Jenny Han, Lynn Novick and Ken Burns to be honored at Nantucket Film Festival

Posted by Brandy McDonnell on Mar 27, 2023 | 0 comments

Jenny Han, Lynn Novick and Ken Burns are among the honorees who will receive Screenwriters Tributes at summer’s Nantucket Film Festival.

The Nantucket Film Festival’s most esteemed awards recognize writers and filmmakers from film and television for their significant contributions to the art of storytelling. These honors are presented annually during the film festival at a gala celebration.

Han will be lauded with the New Voices in Television Writing Award, bestowed on a writer who bursts onto the television scene, making noise with a combination of an already recognizable style and a compelling yet fresh take on a genre or tried-and-true narrative. Since 2010, the festival has been shining the spotlight on these exciting new talents with this honor, which goes to screenwriters who think outside the box and still manage to engage audiences, critics, and the industry alike.

Han is the No. 1 New York Times best-selling author of the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “The Summer I Turned Pretty” series. Her books have been published in more than 30 languages. For television, she has created two new series based on these books — Amazon Prime Video’s “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” on which she served as executive producer and co-showrunner, and the upcoming “XO, Kitty,” a spinoff of the “To All the Boys” universe, on which she also worked as executive producer and co-showrunner.

In addition, Han executive produced all three films of Netflix’s global hit “To All the Boys” trilogy, starring Lana Condor and Noah Centineo.

Esteemed nonfiction filmmakers, Novick and Burns will be honored with the festival’s Special Achievement in Documentary Storytelling.

Novick has been making landmark documentary films about American life and culture for more than 30 years. She has created nearly 100 hours of acclaimed programming for PBS in collaboration with Burns, including “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” “Hemingway,” “The Vietnam War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “Frank Lloyd Wright,” “The War” and “Prohibition.” These landmark series have garnered 19 Emmy nominations. One of the most respected documentary filmmakers and storytellers in America, Novick herself has received Emmy, Peabody and Alfred I. DuPont Columbia Awards.

“College Behind Bars,” Novick’s debut as a solo director, premiered at the New York Film Festival and aired on PBS in 2019. Novick’s next project as solo director and writer is a multi-part PBS series on the history of crime and punishment in America, slated for release in 2026. Following “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” she is collaborating with Burns, Sarah Botstein and writer Geoffrey C. Ward on a six-hour series on the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Burns has been making documentary films for more than 40 years. Since the Academy Award-nominated “Brooklyn Bridge” in 1981, he has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “The War,” “The National Park: America’s Best Idea,” “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” “Jackie Robinson,” “The Vietnam War” and “Country Music.”

Future film projects include “The American Buffalo,” “Leonardo da Vinci,” “The American Revolution,” “Emancipation to Exodus,” “LBJ & The Great Society,” among others.

Burns’ films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including 16 Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards and two Oscar nominations. In September 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, he was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

As previously reported, award-winning writer-director Nicole Holofcener will receive the Screenwriters Tribute Award at this year’s Nantucket Film Festival.

The Nantucket Film Festival is set for June 21-26 on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts. The mission of the festival is to celebrate the vast diversity of human experience through the art of screenwriting and storytelling.

For more information, go to https://nantucketfilmfestival.org.

-BAM

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