Sara Driver

About

Sara Miller Driver (born December 15, 1955) is an American independent filmmaker and actress from Westfield, New Jersey. A participant in the independent film scene that flourished in Lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s, she gained initial recognition as producer of two early films by Jim Jarmusch, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Driver has directed two feature films, Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993), as well as a notable short film, You Are Not I (1981), and a documentary, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017), on the young artist’s pre-fame life in the burgeoning downtown New York arts scene before the city’s massive changes through the 1980s. She served on the juries of various film festivals throughout the 2000s.

Driver made her directorial debut in 1981 with You Are Not I, a short subject film based on a Paul Bowles story and co-written by Jim Jarmusch. The premise of the film is a young mentally disturbed woman named Ethel escapes from the asylum where she is treated until she is mistaken for one of the survivors of a deadly car accident she stumbled upon. Then she is taken…