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Nicole Conn, Marina Bader & Soul Kiss Films

02 Feb Posted by in Robin Lowey | 3 comments
Nicole Conn, Marina Bader & Soul Kiss Films

Nicole Conn is a warm and generous person who also happens to be a talented filmmaker and author. Her film, A Perfect Ending, the newest offering from Soul Kiss Films will be premiering this Summer. She and partner Marina Rice Bader just launched their new site Soul Kiss Films.com.  See Coco’s Coffee Talk  for more about Nicole and the Epochalips Interview – a behind the scenes look on the set of The Perfect Ending.

Nicole Conn is Co-Founder of Soul Kiss Films along with life partner Marina Bader. She has been a die-hard romantic and black and white film fan from the age of ten. Raised and educated in Portland, Oregon, she easily made the transition to Hollywood sunshine and California dreaming.  Her penchant for adult and dramatic story telling is evident in her latest feature films, Elena Undone and A Perfect Ending. Both films are classic romances with a twist, the former based on a chapter from her own life, and the latter based on a story idea by Marina.

The premature birth of Conn’s son, Nicholas, dramatically changed both her personal and film life. little man, is a documentary she wrote, directed and produced about her own son born 100 days early and only weighing one pound. The feature documentary went on to win 12 Best Documentary Awards, along with the prestigious Cedar Sinai’s Courageous Beginnings Award and Family Pride’s Family Tree Award. The film made three TOP TEN FILMS OF 2005 list and Showtime picked up the feature and ran an Emmy campaign on this hard-hitting story about Conn’s son’s premature birth and subsequent 5-month hospital stay in a Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit.

Conn’s passion for film carried her through her first feature where she single handedly raised the money, wrote, directed and produced (along with Pam Kuri) Claire of the Moon, the maverick film about a woman’s journey to her sexual identity. The film garnered rave reviews and paved the way for lesbian themed cinema in 1991. Conn also created a FIRST for lesbian cinema: ancillary in the form of a novelization (in its 15th reprint and 10 Year Anniversary Republish) a making-of documentary MOMENTS (best-selling lesbian documentary ever made), soundtracks, posters, t-shirts, etc. She followed these projects with the award winning short film, Cynara…Poetry in Motion.

A two book deal with Simon Schuster produced the novels, Passion’s Shadow (1995) & Angel Wings (1997), a new age love story. The script adaptation for Angel Wings won the 2001 Telluride Film Festival’s Best Screenplay Award. In another pioneering effort, The Wedding Dress was chosen by AOL Time Warner for its new internet endeavor ipublish, which debuted in June 2001. She Walks in Beauty was published in September, 2001 and is currently in development as a feature film, along with several other original screenplays Conn has penned.

Nicole achieved industry recognition with her film Claire of the Moon and was a finalist in the prestigious Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. She believes in giving back to the community and sponsored the Claire of the Moon Scholarship in 1998, awarding second time novelists through the ASTRAEA Foundation.

Elena Undone was Marina Bader’s first producing project, and she loved every minute of it – she also learned what the term “wearing a lot of hats” really meant. Her second film A Perfect Ending is in final stages of production and she has three more films in development. Marina is dedicated to making films that are rich, textured, and always features strong female leads.

Being a true lover of moving pictures for as long as she can remember, Marina is excited to venture out on a new path, and will be writing and directing a short film in the spring of 2012.

“I want my movies to be for women”, says Bader. “I believe in making well written, thoughtful movies with strong females leads who tell a story meant for female audiences, although we have many thoughtful male fans of  Elena Undone. ” Her friends liken Marina to Sisyphus — the fellow in the Greek myth doomed to eternally pushing a boulder up hill. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done – passion drives me and I have no fear of being rejected – it just goes with the territory. A Perfect Ending was funded by our Soul Kiss Tribe, a group of women (and a few fabulous men) who all decided to work together to get this film made. It’s been one of the most amazing parts of the project – all these interesting and lovely souls intersecting with our world of making movies, and it’s been brilliant. I’m so attached to them, and many have become close friends.

Marina has been a Los Angeles based photographer working with celebrities, actors and children for the past two decades. Among some of her favorite clients are Hector Elizondo, Carol Channing, Val Kilmer, Wentworth Miller, Judith Light and Sir Ben Kingsley. Her transition to films, the ultimate in visual storytelling, was only a matter of time.

Take a moment to check out Soul Kiss Films.com, a great effort from these two fabulous women.

 

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