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Apricot Films is an independent production company based in Los Angeles.

Still from Queen of Diamonds (1991) Copyright and courtesy of Menkesfilm.

Championing the Untold. Restoring the Forgotten.

Apricot Films is an independent production company based in Los Angeles.

We champion the untold story to enlighten and entertain our audiences. Our filmmakers, artists, designers and team are passionate to tell marginalized narratives to inspire action and social change. We nurture new talent as well as support the forgotten auteurs. We delight in bringing lost classics to bear witness to present issues and events. Rediscovering the lost, forgotten or unacknowledged from the past and putting them back into the public eye is one of our many motives.

Backing stories created by women is another raison d'être. Because stories made by women and about women are still a rare commodity in cinema and television, we create and support stories with females at the helm and rally for characters on journeys of courageous, unlikely & heroic acts in all centuries and places, real or imagined.

Where Powerful Stories Find Their Audience.

One of our latest films, the feature documentary Tyrus has been a Festival audience favorite around the United States from Hawaii to Georgia garnering many festival awards. Tyrus' world premiere unspooled at the 2015 Telluride Film Festival. In 2017, PBS/American Masters broadcast Tyrus as part of their Documentary Series highlighting artists Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Linklater, Edgar Allen Poe and Bob Hope.

We are happy to announce that American Masters has been nominated by the 70th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Documentary or Non-Fiction Series. We are thrilled to be part of such an illustrious team of filmmakers.

Leadership with Impact

Gwen Wynne, founder and CEO of Apricot Films, is an award-winning Director, Documentarian, Producer, and Screenwriter. She champions untold stories, new talent and emphasizes unheard, mostly censored and buried narratives to inspire action and change.

Ms. Wynne started her career as a theatre director and cofounded a theatre company in Washington, D.C. The No Neck Theatre Company. She directed new plays including one of the first rap musicals at a regional theatre which was nominated for three Helen Hayes Awards including Best New Musical.

As a documentarian, Wynne and Apricot Films produced Tyrus, its national broadcast on PBS’s American Masters and nominated for an Emmy Award for “Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series” in 2017. In 2021, Wynne won two Telly Silver Awards, “Outstanding Directing” and “Social Impact” for her segment in the mini-series Hope Builders: Making a difference in the Inland Empire. Her assignment Dancing on Ice for KVCR/PBS in San Bernardino highlighted the front-line work of “Rapid Response Network’s” life-saving advocacy for immigrants detained in what are essentially prisons in southern California.

Wynne’s latest screenplays and companion project are Birth of the Assassin and The Lady & The Spy, two original spy dramas for episodic television with a companion documentary series Most Secret: Stories of Assassination & Resistance that includes the greatest documentarian of the twentieth century, Marcel Ophuls along with Princess Anne, and a variety of heroines and heroes who were secret agents during World War II. This project has been shooting all over the world over the last twenty odd years since 2003.

In 2018, Wynne founded The Eos World Fund (Eos), a new initiative to champion emerging and established visionary filmmakers around the world.

Ms. Wynne graduated from Brown University and later received an M.F.A. in Production at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Ms. Wynne is a directing member of the Directors’ Guild of America and serves on its Women’s Steering Committee since 2010. During Award season, Ms. Wynne has also been involved with BestDirectHER, a grassroots organization amplifying the latest female filmmakers in the effort to garner attention for nomination at the Directors’ Guild of America Awards.