Greg Takoudes.
Greg Takoudes is the director, producer, and co-writer of Up With Me (2008), a feature film that premiered at South-by-Southwest and won the Special Jury Award. Up With Me played at over a dozen film festivals in America and Europe, winning four awards; the film secured distribution representation with David Garber/Lantern Lane Entertainment, sold domestic rights to the Independent Film Channel (IFC), and sold foreign rights to Visit Films.
Up With Me received numerous positive reviews and notices from magazines such as O, The Oprah Magazine (“innovative… a gripping immersion course on urban youth”) and Variety (“unusually compelling with an air of streetwise neorealism”). The movie was also featured by Tavis Smiley on his national radio show, and included on the curriculum of a film course taught at Ithaca College. Starring a group of nonprofessional teenagers from Harlem, Takoudes developed the movie out of a series of workshops with the teens, basing much of the story on their real lives, and then improvising much of the script.
Takoudes recently completed his second feature, The Jonestown Defense, which was filmed in Sarasota, Florida. He also co-wrote House of Satisfaction, directed by Jesse Hartman, which makes its European debut at the Reykjavik International Film Festival in 2009. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Takoudes worked for Ron Howard and Brian Grazer as a member of the creative team at Imagine Entertainment in Los Angeles. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, a senior cookbook editor at Clarkson Potter/Random House, and their two children.
