Allison Anders

The film also won the Deauville Film Festival Critics Award and was also nominated for the Golden Bear at the 42nd Berlin International Film Festival.

Gas Food Lodging is a coming-of-age story about a truck stop waitress and her two daughters, three vibrant, restless women in an isolated Western town.

The screenplay was loosely adapted by Anders from the novel Don't Look and It Won't Hurt by Richard Peck.

Her next film, Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life), was about girl gangs in the poor Hispanic Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Anders lived.

Allison Anders (born November 16, 1954) is an American independent film director whose films include Gas Food Lodging, Mi Vida Loca and Grace of My Heart.

Anders has collaborated with fellow UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television graduate Kurt Voss and has also worked as a television director.

Anders' films have been shown at the Cannes International Film Festival and at the Sundance Film Festival.

She has been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant as well as a Peabody Award.

Anders was born in Ashland, Kentucky, to mother Alberta "Rachel" Anders (née Steed) and father Robert "Bob" Anders.

She has two sisters, one of whom, Luanna Anders, starred in her first film, Border Radio. Her paternal side has ancestry that traces back to the Southern Hatfield family and, more distantly, to George Washington's spy, Caleb Brewster, while her maternal side includes another Washington spy, Abraham Woodhull.

When Anders was 4 years old, her father abandoned the family.

Anders' mother and father were divorced when she was 5.

At age 12, she was gang raped by three boys at a party in Cape Canaveral, Florida, an event that influenced several of her films.

After her mother moved her and her sisters to Los Angeles, Anders suffered a mental breakdown at the age of 15 and was hospitalized.

When she came out of the psychiatric ward, she was placed into foster care but ran away.

She hitchhiked across the country, at one point ending up in jail.

After turning 17, Anders dropped out of her Los Angeles high school and moved back to Kentucky.

She later moved to London with the man who fathered her first child.

In her early 20s, Anders moved back to Los Angeles with her daughter and attended junior college, Los Angeles Valley College, while working odd jobs.

Due to constant relocation as a child, Anders had not had a steady education.

She said that growing up, most of her time was spent watching TV and going to movie theaters.

Inspired by the films of Wim Wenders and other filmmakers, Anders applied to UCLA Film School.

During her time at UCLA, Anders produced her first sound film.

Wenders attended the screening.

She has called Wenders' 1974 film Alice in the Cities "one of my very favorite films, and a guiding light, since I first saw it at the Nuart in Santa Monica in the 1970s."

The story is set amid the Los Angeles punk-rock scene of the 1980s.

With a $2,000 contribution from actor Vic Tayback and loans from Voss's parents to fund the film, the filmmakers made up for the small budget by using local locations and casting performers they knew.

For the starring role, they cast Anders' sister, Luanna Anders, and musician Chris D.., as the leading man, as well as Anders' daughter, Devon Anders, who played Luanna's daughter in the film.

Violating UCLA policy, the filmmakers cut the film at night in the school's editing bays, while Anders' two young daughters slept on the floor.

In 1986, Anders got her B.A. in Motion Picture-Television from the University of California Los Angeles.

In 1986, Anders won a Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award for a script called Lost Highway that she wrote about her father.

She said that after writing the script she shared it with her father, and was able to have a relationship with him again.

Anders' first film, the punk music-heavy Border Radio, was co-written and co-directed with Kurt Voss and Dean Lent and was made while they were at UCLA.

It was nominated for Best Feature of 1988 by the Independent Feature Project for Best First Feature.

The film told the story of three musicians who stole money owed to them from a job and then fled to Mexico.

Anders' second feature, the 1992 film Gas Food Lodging, earned her a New York Film Critics Circle Award and National Society of Film Critics honors for Best New Director; and nominations from the Independent Spirit Awards for Best Screenplay and Best Director.

Actress Fairuza Balk won a Spirit Award for her role in the film.

It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993, and saw wide release in 1994.

The story features a female perspective on growing up in the inner city.

In 2007, Border Radio was given a special release on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection and was lauded as groundbreaking independent cinema.