Katherine Brooks

"Sara is going to visit her high school friend Emily. On her journey there, she recalls her last experience with her teenage crush, remembering a letter that she wrote Emily—a letter confessing her love for her. Following a painful flashback to Emily's mocking of Sara after she reads the note, and recalling the hurt that Emily had caused her, as Sara finally reaches her destination at the finale of this short film, she decides to keep on driving." "Dear Emily" was funded by EVEO.com after Brooks won a pitch contest for her feature film, Loving Annabelle. Despite being given only 6 weeks from conception to completion, and just $1,000 to make it, the film, to date, has made back over 500% of its profit.

Loving Annabelle was a labor of love. I wrote the script while traveling the world working on reality shows to pay my bills. While crews would be off sharing a drink after wrap, I'd be huddled in my hotel corner with Cocteau Twins playing on my computer while I wrote. It took five years to put it together. It all started when I saw Erin Kelly (Annabelle) in the audience of a play I went to see. For years we worked on the character together, developing her especially for Erin to play—much of the dialogue is from us work-shopping it together. Diane Gaidry (Simone) then came on board to play opposite Erin.

We edited Loving Annabelle every day and night over a 12-week period. I then collaborated with the exceptionally talented music artists Aurah, who created a masterpiece of sound. We premiered at Cinequest that November, and were subsequently approached by many distributors – some much larger and more well known that Wolfe – but as filmmakers felt like Wolfe would get behind our film and give it the distribution it deserved. Many people ask me how I feel watching it now and if I'm happy with the final product. I don't know if a director is ever really happy with their work, I just know I'm proud of what we were able to achieve with so little money and so little time.

As part of research for the topic, Brooks locked herself up for 30 days and underwent the same process as the character Madison. This helped Brooks to visually re-create her experiences from the trial, bringing the character and the story more to life. Waking Madison was shot on location in New Orleans in Winter 2007.

Brooks's first feature film, Loving Annabelle, which Brooks wrote and directed and stars Erin Kelly, Diane Gaidry and Kevin McCarthy, debuted at the prestigious Cinequest Film Festival in 2006; the film won the Audience Award and Best Actress Award at Outfest. In addition, Loving Annabelle won Best Feature Film at Melbourne Film Festival (2006), Barcelona Film Festival (2006) and Atlanta Film Festival (2006), and the Jury Award at Paris Cinema Festival (2006); the film picked up six audience awards and four Jury Awards over the course of the six-month festival run.

We were able to raise money for the entire production, through a collection of people which included ourselves, and set off to shoot the day after July 4th in 2005. We shot Annabelle in less than three weeks, with just twenty minutes to shoot some scenes, which for a director is frustrating. In most big budget movies, you average a page a day of script; we were shooting, on average, seven pages.

In 2004, Erin Kelly and Brooks made an experimental short film called Finding Kate. The short film was part of a series called Virgin Memoirs, a compilation which narrated the "first time" experiences of women.

Katherine Brooks (born March 15, 1976) is an American film writer and director. Brooks is a member of the Directors Guild of America, a Jury Member for Samsung Fresh-Films 2007—the largest teen filmmaking program in the USA, and is the recipient of the LACE Award for Arts and Entertainment, which honors women who have made a difference in the entertainment community. In 2011, she was named one of the "Amazing Gay Women and Amazing Gay Men in Showbiz" by POWER UP.

Loving Annabelle was written to explore the complexity and controversy of love and struggle between two women who "have every reason to deny their feelings". Blind to the world around them, the two journey into a love affair destined to change their lives forever. Inspired by the 1931 German classic, Mädchen in Uniform, Brooks clarified:

When a series of events leaves Madison suicidal and desperate, she locks herself away in her apartment for 30 days. Using a video camera to document herself like a visual journal, Madison clearly states on her first entry that if she does not have the answers to her questions and feels more at people with her life on the 30th day, she will kill herself.