YEREVAN/LOS ANGELES — Screenwriter and director Nicole Ballivian is originally from Washington, DC. A graduate of the American University with a major in Film & Media Arts, she has a production background that includes work with Warner Bros. TV, Universal Pictures, and independent films.
Nicole has a remarkable talent for storytelling, blending humor with depth. Her script “Yemma” won the 2022 Pilot Award at the BlueCat Screenplay Competition, and her dramatic feature “Sleeping on Stones” was selected for the prestigious Sundance Screenwriters Lab.
She also wrote and directed the comedic short “Joe & the Shawl,” which won the Grand Prize at the 2021 New York Women in Film & Television Festival and the Audience Award at the 2020 VOX Feminae Film Festival. Her debut feature, “Driving to Zigzigland,” filmed in Los Angeles and Palestine, earned numerous international festival accolades.
Dear Nicole, I remember your film “Driving to Zigzigland,” filmed back in 2007. I was impressed by the humor and the hero, the Palestinian taxi driver, whose fate moves everyone. Your work spans comedy, drama, and international settings. How do your personal experiences and cultural background influence the stories you choose to tell?
It wasn’t just my personal experience I drew from in writing “Zigzigland.” There are so many absurdities in the immigrant experience to the United States. I grew up in Washington, DC, surrounded by everyone whose parents were immigrants. Every household had a different story of adaptation, one of both humor and pain, of sacrifice and love for family. There is so much automatically in common. For example, there is a film script I’m developing called Baggage that surrounds the stories of the luggage we take back to our home country from America. All immigrants here who travel back home need to take an extra luggage just for gifts, medicines, cigarettes, for family and friends and someone’s uncle two villages away. It’s the same thing for everyone, just hilarity in different languages.
Although you were born in the United States, Middle Eastern subjects are central in your work. Your characters are often Jews and Palestinians, whose conflict seems eternal. What has been the reaction from these communities to your films, and how do you think your work can foster healthy dialogue between them?
