Winter's Bone is a 2010 American independent drama film, an adaptation of Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel of the same name. The film was written and directed by Debra Granik and stars Jennifer Lawrence. It explores the interrelated themes of close and distant family ties, the power and speed of gossip, patriarchy, self-sufficiency, and rural poverty in the Ozarks as they are changed by the pervasive underworld of illegal methamphetamine labs. The film won a number of awards, including the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic Film at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. It received four 2011 Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor.

Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), 17, looks after her mentally ill mother; her brother, Sonny (12), and her sister, Ashlee (6). Every day, Ree makes sure her siblings eat, all the while teaching them basic survival skills like hunting and cooking. The family is very poor - as an incident where the family dog is fed with stale food demonstrates (one of several incidents where someone is thrown a "bone"). Ree's father, Jessup, hasn't been home for a long time and his whereabouts are unknown. He is out on bail following an arrest for cooking meth.

Jennifer Shrader Lawrence (born August 15, 1990) is an American film and television actress. She had lead roles in TBS's The Bill Engvall Show and in the independent films The Burning Plain and Winter's Bone, for which she received nominations for the Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, Satellite Award, and the Screen Actors Guild Award. At age 20, she was the second youngest actress ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She is also known for playing Mystique in X-Men: First Class. In 2012, Lawrence achieved wider recognition starring as the heroine Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, an adaptation of Suzanne Collins' best-selling novel of the same name. Her performance in the film garnered her notable critical praise and marked her as the highest grossing action heroine of all time. Lawrence's performances thus far have prompted Rolling Stone to define her as "the most talented young actress in America."

Lawrence was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and has two older brothers. Her parents are Karen (née Koch), who runs a children's camp, and Gary Lawrence, who once owned a concrete construction firm, Lawrence & Associates. She acted in local theater and, by the age of 14, had decided to pursue an acting career, persuading her parents to take her to New York City to find a talent agent. Prior to finding success in Hollywood, Lawrence attended Kammerer Middle School. She graduated from high school two years early with a 3.9 average in order to begin a career in acting. While growing up and in between acting, Lawrence served as an assistant nurse at the children's summer day camp that her mother ran.

Debra Granik (born February 6, 1963) is an American independent film director. She has won a series of awards at the Sundance Film Festival, including Best Short in 1998 for Snake Feed (her first film, made while a student at New York University), the Dramatic Directing Award in 2004 for her first feature-length film, Down to the Bone (a tale of addiction she co-scripted with Richard Lieske), and the Grand Jury Prize for Drama in 2010 and Prix du jury at Deauville American Film Festival 2010 for her second feature, Winter's Bone.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Granik grew up in the affluent suburbs of Washington D.C. She received her B.A. from Brandeis University in 1985, where she majored in politics and became very interested in documentary film, democratic media, and feminism. After graduation, Granik started making educational films for trade unions. She later earned an MFA from the graduate film program at New York University (Tisch School of the Arts). While at NYU, she mentored under Boris Frumin and directed her first short, "Snake Feed" . Granik is the granddaughter of broadcast pioneer Theodore Granik (1907–1970), founder-moderator of radio-TV's long-run panel discussion program, The American Forum of the Air.