Alexandre Rockwell

Alexandre Rockwell is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and professor whose career has been defined by a fiercely independent spirit and a poetic eye for outsiders. Born on August 18, 1956 in Boston, Massachusetts, he grew up in Cambridge as the grandson of Russian animator Alexandre Alexeieff and artist Alexandra Grinevsky, absorbing a legacy of visual experimentation that would later inform his own cinematic language. Skipping school for pinball and arthouse cinemas, Rockwell eschewed traditional education, instead hitching a ride to Paris where he slipped into the French Cinémathèque and assisted his grandfather’s studio before relocating to New York in his early twenties, driving a taxi and delivering seltzer water while financing his first 16 mm Bolex camera. His early short films in the lower‑east‑side scene of the 1980s helped launch the careers of future stars such as Steve Buscemi, Sam Rockwell, Peter Dinklage and Stanley Tucci, and earned him a reputation for blending slapstick humor with the contemplative moods of Tarkovsky—“as much the Three Stooges as it is Tarkovsky,” he once declared.\n\nRockwell’s breakthrough came with the 1992 Sundance‑winning In the Soup, a landmark of the independent boom that shared its year with debuts by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. He contributed a segment to the cult classic anthology Four Rooms, then directed Somebody to Love (1994) starring Rosie Perez, Buscemi and Harvey Keitel. Though his later ventures Louis & Frank and Pete Smalls Is Dead met mixed reviews, he rebounded by returning to New York, teaching at NYU and marrying actress Karyn Parsons in 2003. His recent micro‑budget project Sweet Thing (2020), starring his own children Lana and Nico, won the Crystal Bear at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival and affirmed his enduring ability to craft intimate, resonant stories. Today, Rockwell heads NYU’s graduate directing program, lives in Brooklyn, and continues to collaborate with family, students, and friends, sustaining a career that spans four decades of daring, low‑budget filmmaking.