CONNIE WHITE, President and Film Buyer

After falling in love with film while living in Paris on a student visa, Connie returned to Massachusetts and applied for a job at Harvard Square’s historic Brattle Theatre. Within a few years, she’d graduated from selling tickets and popcorn to theater management, and by 1987, Connie, with business partner Marianne Lampke, owned and operated the Brattle. For the new partners, running a single-screen repertory art house presented a hefty workload of booking, publicizing, and screening at least two distinct films a day, 365 days a year. Still, in 1992, the duo carved out time to launch the Boston International Festival of Women's Cinema (BIFWC), a groundbreaking, high profile, decade-long annual celebration, including visiting filmmakers Sofia Coppola, Alison Anders, Lisa Cholodenko, and Mary Harron, early in their careers.

While still running the Brattle Theatre, Connie was drafted across the Charles River in 1996 as film buyer for Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre, a beloved-but-then-struggling cinema. Today, Connie continues to program and book the Coolidge, now one of the highest grossing independent art houses in the country.

In 1999, with the Brattle, Coolidge, and BIFWC at full sail, next to leave the dock is the maiden voyage of the Provincetown International Film Festival, with Connie White on board as Artistic Director, buoyed by glittering, calming John Waters, the festival’s spiritual sextant. Staying the course through 2016, Connie pulled into port for good after 18 exciting years with PIFF.

Selling the Brattle Theatre in 2001 opened opportunities for new pursuits, and Balcony Releasing, created initially to distribute Gail Dolgin and Vincent Franco’s heart wrenching Daughter From Danang, kicked off twenty theatrical releases over the next ten years after that film was nominated for a 2002 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.  Concurrently, Connie began to expand her film-buying business, now called Balcony Booking, for an ever-growing stable of outstanding unique art house.

Deciding in 2012 to forgo distribution to focus exclusively on film buying, Connie continues to bring new theaters and festivals into the Balcony Booking fold. A founding member and sustaining contributor to the Art House Convergence, she stays abreast of all things germane to independent cinema exhibition, and above all, remains an advocate for bringing people together through film.