James Rowe

James Rowe first walked onto a film set at 18, as a British Red Coat in the epic adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans (1992), shooting outside his hometown of Asheville, NC. That fall he entered UNC-Chapel Hill where he would write and direct the jazz-inspired short film Sax Man. The short was purchased by PBS for their Southern Visions series and James was invited to join the American Film Institute as a Directing fellow. While at AFI, he set up his first feature screenplay. The resulting film, Blue Ridge Fall (1999) - starring Peter Facinelli, Chris Isaak and Academy Award nominee Amy Irving - was directed by James and released by HBO. It played the Los Angeles Film Festival, Austin Film Festival and Cine de Mar del Plata, Argentina, among others, and was given prominent placement on the Blockbuster Entertainment Awards show (which, yes, was a thing). "A taut drama," proclaimed Film Threat, "extolling the bonds of friendship as well as the fragility and vulnerability of futures we wrongly assume are set in stone." He later wrote the screenplay (writing as Samuel Tilsen) for the internationally acclaimed film Ijé: The Journey (2010), starring African movie icon Genevieve Nnaji. Ijé won the Melvin van Peebles Award for best feature at the San Francisco Black Film Festival. After teaching directing and screenwriting at the Colorado Film School, CU Denver and the New York Film Academy, and leading workshops for filmmakers around the world, James is stepping back behind the camera in 2021 to direct the thriller Breakwater (2022) from his own script.