Sundance Sorority

By RICHARD CORLISS

SOFIA COPPOLA The Virgin Suicides

Some Sundance directors have heftier credentials, like two-time Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple. Others may have hotter properties, like Mary Harron with American Psycho. But only one made her film debut in the most famous scene of Hollywood's most famous gangster movie. Sofia Coppola was the baby baptized during the killer climax to The Godfather, directed by her father Francis. Now 28, and having rummaged through the other arts, she has made her first feature. Like Michael Corleone, Sofia is joining the family business.

"I'm like an Army brat," she says. "I've lived all over." As a child she played on the Philippine beaches where Dad was filming Apocalypse Now. At 16 she co-wrote Francis' episode of New York Stories. Then she appeared in Godfather III and got savaged by the critics. "After that, I definitely did not want to be an actress." She tried painting, photography, video.

Now married to director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), Sofia read Jeffrey Eugenides' cult novel about five suicidal teen sisters and started a script before she even had the rights. The $3.5 million film, with Kathleen Turner and James Woods as the girls' parents, was produced by Dad's American Zoetrope. If it leads to a brilliant career, tomorrow's moviegoers may hear the name Francis Coppola and say, "That guy--wasn't he...Sofia Coppola's father?"

GINA PRINCE-BYTHEWOOD Love and Basketball

Because the family TV broke when she was seven and wasn't replaced for eight years, this California girl fell in love with books. Reading 20 a week, she had more fun than she could imagine--until she got into UCLA's film program. "I was working on a crew carrying lighting equipment," she says, "when it clicked how happy I was being on a set." Prince-Bythewood, who is half black, got help from Bill Cosby, the NAACP and Sundance's Robert Redford. Love and Basketball, a $15 million hoop-dreams drama with Omar Epps and Alfre Woodard, was produced by Spike Lee's company (her husband, Reggie Rock Bythewood, wrote Get on the Bus for Lee). Now, at 30, she plans a slave epic, but--here's a Hollywood novelty--from a black perspective. "If I'm not telling these stories," she asks, "who will?"

ANN HU Shadow Magic

What does it take to get those mortal enemies, China and Taiwan, to work together? Just a Chinese kid who moved to New York City. Hu's Shadow Magic, about a British entrepreneur (Jared Harris) bringing the cinema to China in 1902, is the first film co-produced by the Beijing Film Studio and Taiwan's Central Motion Picture Corp. Hu, 44, is a child of the Cultural Revolution; her parents were sent to labor camps while she served as a Red Guard. She taught herself English and in 1979 was among the first Chinese sent to U.S. schools. "I was always too stubborn," Hu says. So she wouldn't be cowed by a little thing like directing an epic in her homeland. "Americans and Chinese are very much alike," she says. "The film gives me a chance to get that message across."

MARY HARRON American Psycho

For a while, she was known as the woman who said no to Leo. Leonardo Di Caprio had wanted to play the title role in American Psycho, her film of Bret Easton Ellis' incendiary novel about a yuppie murderer, and Harron declined. But after Di Caprio dropped out, she made the $6 million movie with Christian Bale. Anyone who saw her I Shot Andy Warhol, with Lili Taylor as would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, could spot the Canadian-born Oxford graduate's mulishness and taste for beguiling sociopaths. Also her love of period Manhattan. "The Ellis novel has enormously violent sections," she says. "But there's also some great satirical stuff about the late '80s. It's better than Bonfire of the Vanities." The film, which has just been given an NC-17 rating (for sex, not violence), may set off a bonfire of its own. Meanwhile, she's already nurturing her next big project: at 47, she is six months pregnant with her second child by her husband, director John Walsh.

LISA KRUEGER Committed

At a precocious 19 she was in Paris studying film, yet this San Francisco native took more than a decade to get working on her debut feature, Manny and Lo. "There's no way I could blast out of film school at 19 and tell someone, 'Hand me a million bucks and I'm going to make a work of genius,'" she says. "First I had to prove myself to myself. Maybe it's my Catholic upbringing." Krueger, now 39, toiled for indie gurus Jim Jarmusch and Abel Ferrara, then found salvation at the Sundance lab. "They start treating you like a filmmaker, and you just say, 'Whoa, I can make my movie.'" On Manny, she says she took the $500,000 budget "way too much to heart. I cut scenes while we were shooting because I was nervous about the money." The 1996 critical hit got her lots of meetings and spec scripts, but this director really wanted to write. So she did: Committed is a $3 million road romance with Heather Graham and Casey Affleck. Krueger's advice to novices: "Let another person worry about the money. You worry about the movie."

JAMIE BABBIT But I'm a Cheerleader

She apprenticed with John Sayles and Martin Scorsese, but Barnard grad Babbit's boldest inspiration was Amy Heckerling, auteur of Clueless. Says Babbit: "I want a career like hers: do TV commercials, videos, everything!" An open lesbian, she read an article about "homosexual conversion camps" and fashioned a $1.2 million comedy around them. Cheerleader may not be Clueless, but neither is the 29-year-old Babbit. "It's no surprise women can direct films," she says. "It's surprising they're being given the opportunity to do so--and taking it."