The Runaways

Floria Sigismondi was born in Pescara, Italy (1965). Her parents, Lina and Domenico Sigismondi, were opera singers. Her family, including her sister Antonella, moved to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada when she was two. In her childhood she became obsessed by drawing and painting. Later, from 1987 she studied painting and illustration at the Ontario College of Art, today’s Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD). When she took a photography course, she became obsessed once more, and graduated with a photography major. Sigismondi started a career as a fashion photographer. She came to directing music videos when she was approached by the production company The Revolver Film Co., and directed music videos for a number of Canadian bands. Her very innovative, but also very disturbing video works, located in sceneries she once described as “entropic underworlds inhabited by tortured souls and omnipotent beings”, attracted a number of very prominent musicians. Sigismondi is currently represented for Music Videos by the production company Symphony 19 in Los Angeles, CA (US representation) and by Revolver (international representation).

With her photography and sculpture installations she had solo exhibitions in Hamilton and Toronto, New York, Brescia, Italy, Göteborg, Sweden and London. Her photographs also were included in numerous group exhibitions, together with artists such as Cindy Sherman, Joel-Peter Witkin, and Francesco Clemente. The German art press Die Gestalten Verlag has published two monographs of her photography, Redemption (1999) and Immune (2005).

Floria makes an appearance in the 2008 feature documentary by Nik Sheehan about Brion Gysin and the Dreamachine entitled ‘FLicKeR’. Sigismondi’s first feature-length film is The Runaways, a period piece about the 1970s all-girl rock and roll band The Runaways. The film is largely about the relationship between Joan Jett (played by Kristen Stewart in the film) and Cherie Currie (played by Dakota Fanning). Sigismondi wrote the screenplay based on Currie’s book Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway. The film premiered in 2010 at the Sundance Film Festival and was released in Canada and the United States in March 2010. In an interview with Exclaim!, Sigismondi said “I went in and said I didn’t want to make this a straight-up biography. I want to make this a coming of age, because that’s what’s so interesting about them. And if you want to compare them to anybody else, that’s what makes them so special, is how young they were, and that they were all female. So those kinds of things really resonated with me.” —Wikipedia