Andrea Weiss is an internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker and nonfiction author.  She is the co-writer/director of the feature documentary Escape To Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, which premiered in the Berlin and Rotterdam Film Festivals. Her other film credits include Recall Florida, I Live At Ground Zero, Seed Of Sarah, Paris Was A Woman, A Bit Of Scarlet, UN Fever, Before Stonewall (for which she won an Emmy Award), Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women and International Sweethearts Of Rhythm which premiered in the New York Film Festival.  

Weiss is the author of Paris Was A Woman (Harper Collins, 1995; Counterpoint Press, 2013), which was winner of a Lambda Literary Award, Vampires And Violets: Lesbians in Film (Penguin, 1993), and In The Shadow Of The Magic Mountain: The Erika And Klaus Mann Story (University of Chicago Press, 2008), winner of a Publishing Triangle Award.  Her books have been translated into French, Spanish, German, Korean, Swedish, Japanese, and Slovenian. 

“I am looking forward to returning to beautiful Saint Petersburg, a city I haven't seen in almost 25 years but that has stayed in my mind like a haunting melody. I am especially eager to return as a guest of the Side by Side Film Festival, which is a brave advocate for LGBT visibility. I am of the generation that remembers all too well the institutionalized anti-Semitism of the Soviet era, and in some ways it seems the persecution of the LGBT community in Russia today is its hideous offspring. I am thrilled and honoured to have my film on the theme of historical justice included in Side by Side, a crucial flame against the forces of darkness."