Amber McGinnis

INTERNATIONAL FALLS is Amber's feature film debut and winner of the New American Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Seattle International Film Festival, and Grand Jury Prizes at Ashland Independent Film Festival, and Naples Film Festival.

Set in International Falls, MN, INTERNATIONAL FALLS follows an aspiring comic (Rachael Harris) through the collapse of her marriage and a two-night stand with a dead beat comic (Rob Huebel) at the end of his road. The film is a meditation on the deeply comedic and profoundly sad as they sit side by side in life. As the character Tim says, "If you wanna tell jokes for a living, tell the truth."

INTERNATIONAL FALLS was released through Gravitas Ventures in March 2020 and is now available to stream on Showtime, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.

ANIMAL WISDOM, directed by Amber McGinnis, is the genre-defying film adaptation of the hit off-Broadway musical written by Heather Christian.

Called “The Film-Theater Hybrid Helping to Make Sense of This Past Year and Beyond,” (Variety) this one-of-a-kind musical seance follows singer-songwriter-soothsayer Heather Christian as she lays to rest the souls that haunt her. Shapeshifting between rock star, folklorist and high priestess, Heather conjures a constellation of souls in an effort to confront her family’s mythologies.

Produced at the height of the pandemic at a time when theatres across the world lay dark and dormant, ANIMAL WISDOM invites us to commune and participate from the safety of our homes, and confront both the real and metaphorical ghosts that haunt our lives.

Interactive media

As forms of media continue to expand and become more interactive for its viewers, so must we as filmmakers. Here are just a few examples of a pedagogical take on interactive filmmaking, each directed and co-written by Amber McGinnis for WILL Interactive.