Nicole Kassell

When Nicole Kassell was dreaming of her film career, she never aimed for the top. "I didn't have the courage to say I wanted to be a director, so I went through every variation," she says from her apartment in Manhattan, where she lives with her husband and baby-to-be. "I thought, I'll be an editor-director or a cinematographer-director." Now, after her first film at age 32, she's just a director-director, and she's happily settling into that role.

Kassell first spotted the play that would become her movie when she was a poor grad student at New York University, going to any free show in town. The serious subject matter of pedophilia caught her off-guard. "I was shocked to find myself seeing the complexity of the main character, because I had learned to look at that kind of behavior as pure evil," she says.

She thought about it long after, and when she couldn't stop, she asked to buy the rights to the play, even though she had only made one short (albeit an award-winning one) and hadn't finished her master's. Playwright Stephen Fechter said yes, and before too long Kassell was at Sundance in the prestigious dramatic competition, where distributors started a small bidding war over her film.