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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

AWARD WINNING FILM TWITCH SCREENS AT OVER 100 FILM FESTIVALS

Leah Meyerhoff’s latest film Twitch has screened at over one hundred film festivals to date.

Twitch portrays a young girl who must confront her worst fear: that her mother's disability might be contagious.

Twitch kicked off the film festival circuit by winning a Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance and becoming a finalist at the Student Academy Awards.

Twitch has screened at over 100 festivals worldwide and won a dozen international awards.

Twitch is also featured on the Independent Film Channel's popular series Film School.

Leah Meyerhoff is a Brown University graduate and an MFA candidate at New York University. She is currently working on her first feature film.

Twitch
Super 16mm, 10 minutes
directed by Leah Meyerhoff
www.twitchthemovie.com

Leah is an artsy American making a movie based on her own angry, cold relationship with her disabled mother.
Virginia Heffernan
New York Times

Twitch tells the poignant story of a young girl torn between two worlds: her domestic life where she must care for her wheelchair-bound mother and her escape into the emerging world of sexuality with her eager, hormone-addled boyfriend. Concerned that her mother's disability is contagious due to her own twitching leg, the young girl seeks out advice from her gynecologist who feebly allays her fears. The director's own mother, a victim of MS, plays the mother with a stark reality that is haunting to watch, and Emma Galvin, who plays the daughter, captures the girl's struggles with an understated command that belies the hidden turmoil of adolescent angst that tortures her character.
Patricia Freeman
Independent Film

Meyerhoff, a Bay Area native and third-year graduate film student in Tisch, has plenty of success stories to put on her resume: On top of being featured in the popular series "Film School" on IFC, her latest film, the poignant and poetic short "Twitch," rocked the Slamdance Film Festival, earning the jury's second prize for Best Narrative Short.
Marc Homer
Washington Square News

“Twitch” is a story about fear, love and an uncertain future. Galvin deftly portrays a girl who longs for a childhood she knows she can never have because she was forced to grow up too quickly. She can convey both innocence and maturity with just a look, and her future in films is solid. Writer/director Leah Meyerhoff has also secured her place in film with this short movie...She’s done a story that is as honest as it is touching, and there is nothing sickly sweet about it. Her ability to sum up a young girl’s life in ten minutes is remarkable, and it makes the film.
Doug Brunell
Film Threat

So many short films seem to pound ideas into our head over and over again, as if to make the message as clear as possible through noisy repetition. Twitch, though, seems to let the message lie just underneath the surface, waiting to be discovered. I enjoyed many things about the film, but I think I mostly enjoyed the performance of the young actress, who acts in subtle ways that indicate great tension between her character and the character of the mother. Here is also a movie that uses editing in profound, yet simple, ways to move the story forward without wasting time... Great job and please continue making films that rely on the intelligence of the audience to move the story forward.
Michael Clawson
Scottsdale International Film Festival

There's Leah Meyerhoff, 24, an eccentric from Oakland, Calif., whose film will help her face down demons collected from a childhood spent taking care of her wheelchair-bound mother with MS.
Ray Richmond
Hollywood Reporter

Young filmmaker Leah Meyerhoff writes and directs this short film that so far has won almost universal accolades on the festival set...The film unfolds without exposition, instead following (a) young teenager through a series of snapshot scenes, detailing her increasing neurosis that perhaps her mother's disability is contagious. As the girl begins to believe that she, like her mother, will lose the use of her legs, the gulf that divides mother and daughter widens...It's a strange, insular take on growing up and rings with the veracity of real-life experience...Twitch is a hard but impressive little film. The travails of growing up, the immense pain of post-adolescence, the terror of the big nasty world resting just outside our windows: Twitch augers in the universal places of hurt in the human brain. We can take solace that Meyerhoff is now working on her first feature-length film. Twitch shows great promise; we now must wait for Meyerhoff's talents to fully bloom.
Ben Beard
Film Monthly

For Meyerhoff, reaching millions has very little to do with personal recognition but rather entirely to do with her desire to affect social change. It’s idealistic. Lovely.
Noralia Ryan Fores
Short End Magazine

Tisch alumni Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese and "Monster's Ball" director Marc Forster make cameo appearances, but the real stars are unknowns like 24-year-old Bay Area native Leah Meyerhoff, who tries to make her autobiographical feature in Oakland after casting her own mother to play...her mother.
Hugh Hart
San Francisco Chronicle

Interview with Leah Meyerhoff, director of Twitch
Heather Burke
Raven Entertainment

When the story is as good as filmmaker Leah Meyerhoff's, you can't help but be drawn in.
Meyerhoff's film "Twitch" is a 10-minute short that thrusts viewers right in the middle of a teenage girl's complex and turbulent life.
Jennifer Modenessi
Contra Costa Times

(Twitch) portrays a teenage girl who has a conflicted and emotionally charged relationship with the disabled mother she cares for and develops an irrational fear that the disability is contagious.
Michele Meek
New England Film

At its core, Twitch makes far more subtle points about shedding norms and other’s expectations, by portraying a pivotal moment in one young woman’s transition into adulthood and coming into self in an unsentimental, non-deterministic fashion.
Ruth Cameron
Feminist Review

Leah, 24, is a punk-aesthete visual-artist Brown grad who includes blond wigs and black eyeliner among her conceptual guises. Her project: a therapeutic film that relives through drama her stressful relationship as a teenager with her wheelchair-bound mother, a victim of multiple sclerosis.
Gerald Peary
Portland Phoenix

Leah Meyerhoff explores some interesting and complex territory in Twitch. A young woman burdened by her mother's crippling ailment begins to develop the hypochodriacal belief that she is contracting her mother's disease. Obsessive bathing does little to abate her fears as she is forced to deal with her issues.
Matt Forsman
SF Station

Meyerhoff has the talent to rival the likes of Catherine Breillat in her ripe observations regarding the battle of the sexes.
Tram Ngo
Lucid Screening

Meyerhoff's film, "Twitch," is a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl who's resentful about taking care of her mother, who has multiple sclerosis. Their complex, fractured relationship is based on Meyerhoff's own experience with her ailing mother, who she casts in her film.
Rhonda Stewart
Boston Globe

“Twitch” tells the true story of Meyerhoff, who spent her teenage years taking care of a disabled mother with multiple sclerosis. The film reveals the challenges Meyerhoff faced while caring for her ill mother as her own life blossomed.
Maria Guevara
The Golden Gate [X]press

Twitch is a powerful and unsentimental autobiographical film about the conflicted and complicated relationship between a teenage girl and her disabled mother (played by Meyerhoff's own mother Toni). Meyerhoff easily conveys the neuroses and brutality attendant to an enforced reversal of roles: when the line between caregiver and charge is hopelessly blurred.
Antimatter Film Festival

Leah Meyerhoff's short "Twitch," which screened at the Chicago International Film Festival, stars Emma Galvin as a teen afraid she's acquiring the disability that afflicts her mother, played by Leah's own mother Toni Meyerhoff. Leah Meyerhoff, a former Art Institute student, garnered a Student Academy Award nomination and a Slamdance Grand Jury Prize for "Twitch." The short has played more than 30 fests, with upcoming screenings in Sweden, Wales, and New York.
Ed M. Koziarski
ReelChicago

Here is a brief interview with Leah Meyerhoff, one of the filmmakers associated with the "Into the Limelight" program.
Markus Sandy
Apperceptions

I really enjoyed this short and hard-hitting movie. Dark, mean spirited, and all. Twitch grabs the emotions and fears we all share and makes more of a statement than the director may have ever intended.
Garth Crosby
Art Source LA

(Twitch) shows a self-centered, scared girl looking in vain for the wrong things from the people in her life: she seeks physical affection from her mother, who can only offer emotional connection; she wants her boyfriend to listen to her and validate her feelings and fears, but all he wants is sex...Shame, though, that you'll only get to see it once through -- it rewards multiple viewings.
Cheshire Dave
SFist

Meyerhoff's film involves her having to reconcile with her mother, disabled with multiple sclerosis, with whom she's had a rocky relationship since childhood.
Cary Darling
Star Telegram

The movie is about Leah's childhood and the multiple sclerosis that afflicted her mother. The story follows a young girl as she grows up caring for her disabled mother and comes to terms with the disease.
Head-Royce Newsletter

Leah Meyerhoff, an eccentric 24-year-old from Oakland, California, writes a script, which will force her to battle her inner demons and face her anger about growing up with a disabled mother.
Film Threat

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