Nantucket Film Festival Announces 2023 Honorees

The Nantucket Film Festival announced this week that its 2023 Screenwriter Tribute honorees include Nicole Holofcener, Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Jenny Han.

The screenwriters and filmmakers will be honored June 24 at the Sconset Casino during the 28th annual Film Festival.

The Screenwriters Tribute Award is the highest honor presented by the festival, and was stablished in 1998 to honor an individual whose history in screenwriting has made a distinct impact on American cinema. This year's winner, Holofcener, is an award-winning filmmaker, whose work spans three decades. Acclaimed by critics and audiences for her relatable writing and personal directing style, she has created seminal films about relationships, class, loyalty, and love with realistic and multidimensional characters; films like "Friends With Money," "Please Give," and "Enough Said," starring Julia Louis Dreyfus and James Gandolfini.

Some of today's most gifted cinematic storytellers work outside of scripted characters and plots, and the festival honors these non-fiction filmmakers with its Special Achievement in Documentary Storytelling. The 2023 winners - Burns and Novick - are among the greats in their field.

Burns has been making documentary films for over 40 years. Since the Academy Award-nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including "The Civil War," "Baseball," "Jazz," "The War," "The National Park: America's Best Idea," "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History," "Jackie Robinson," "The Vietnam War," and "Country Music."

Novick has been making landmark documentary films about American life and culture for more than 30 years. She has created nearly 100 hours of acclaimed programming for PBS in collaboration with Burns, including "The U.S. And The Holocaust," "Hemingway," "The Vietnam War," "Baseball," "Jazz," "Frank Lloyd Wright," "The War," and "Prohibition" - these landmark series have garnered 19 Emmy nominations. One of the most respected documentary filmmakers and storytellers in America, Novick herself has received Emmy, Peabody, and Alfred I. DuPont Columbia Awards.

Every once in a while, a writer bursts onto the independent film scene, making noise with a combination of an already recognizable style and a compelling yet fresh take on a genre or tried-and-true narrative, and since 2010, the NFF has been shining the spotlight on these exciting new talents with its "New Voices In Television Writing Award."

This year's winner is Jenny Han, the #1 New York Times best-selling author of the "To All The Boys I've Loved Before," and "The Summer I Turned Pretty" series. Her books have been published in more than 30 languages. For television, she has created two new series based on these books — Prime Video’s "The Summer I Turned Pretty" which she executive produced and co-showran, and the upcoming "XO Kitty," a spinoff of the "To All The Boys" universe, which she also executive produced and co-showran.

The 2023 Nantucket Film Festival runs from June 21 to June 26, and passes are on sale now.