James Rowe

Filmmaker James Rowe most recently wrote and directed the neo-noir thriller Breakwater (2023) which took home the Audience Favorite award at the Boston Film Festival, as well as a Best Actor award for lead actor Dermot Mulroney. Prior to working on Breakwater, Rowe directed the film Blue Ridge Fall (1999) which premiered on HBO in 1999. Blue Ridge Fall was produced by Furst Films and starred Peter Facinelli (Twilight, Nurse Jackie), Chris Isaak and Academy Award nominee Amy Irving (Traffic, Zero Hour). The film played the Los Angeles Film Festival, Austin Film Festival and Cine de Mar del Plata, and received prominent placement on the Blockbuster Movie Awards. In 2009, Rowe wrote the screenplay (writing as Samuel Tilsen) for the internationally acclaimed film Ijé: The Journey (2010), starring African movie icon Genevieve Nnaji (Lionheart). Ijé won the Melvin van Peebles Award for best feature at the San Francisco Black Film Festival. Rowe first stepped onto a film set at 18, as a British Red Coat in the Michael Mann epic The Last of the Mohicans (1992), shooting outside his hometown of Asheville, NC. That fall he entered UNC-Chapel Hill, where he would write and direct the jazz-inspired short film Sax Man. The short was bought by PBS for their Southern Visions series and Rowe was invited to attend the American Film Institute as a Directing Fellow. While at AFI, he set up his first feature screenplay at Oliver Stone's Illusion Entertainment that later became the film Blue Ridge Fall. Throughout his career, Rowe has taught directing and screenwriting at the Colorado Film School, CU-Denver and the New York Film Academy, and has led filmmaking workshops for professionals in Moscow and Florence. Rowe is a member of the Directors Guild of America and Writers Guild of America. He resides in Los Angeles.