women directors
Bluestocking Film Series is an an exclusive showcase for provocative, well-produced films that feature complex female protagonists driving the narrative and leading the action. Moreover, all films submitted to the series must feature a female protagonist, and must pass the Bechdel-Wallace Test. It’s the first ever U.
Meera Menon’s film Equity manages to tick a lot of boxes off in terms of the kind of characters it depicts and focuses on, from having a female lead (an incomparably skillful Anna Gunn, best-known for Breaking Bad), to a female ensemble, to numerous women behind the camera (led by director Menon, helming her second feature). One of many truly impressive feats the film manages to pull off is that it not once feels like it’s ticking any boxes – that the film is inclusionary of layered, dimensional female characters is of course, noteworthy, but it is one of its many strengths. Chief among these strengths is the compelling narrative, which starts from the screenplay (credited to Amy Fox, story by Sarah Megan Thomas, also onboard as a producer and co-star, with producer and co-star Alysia Reiner), and is bolstered by Menon’s capable direction, Gunn and the ensembles’ applause-worthy performances.
This little gem of a film won the Nora Ephron Prize at this year’s Tribeca film festival, which is awarded to recognise the work of female writers or directors whose film is making its North American premiere at the festival, and it’s easy to see why. Adult Life Skills is based on writer/director Rachel Tunnard’s short film Emotional Fuse Box and centres on the character of Anna (Jodie Whittaker). Anna is approaching her 30th birthday and struggling to cope with recent life events, which are gently revealed to us throughout the film via flashbacks and Anna’s visual manifestations of the past as she attempts to live in the here and now.
Love Between the Covers is a doc telling the story of the savvy female community that has built a powerhouse industry sharing love stories.
What happens when a doctor, a goat, and an impotent man converge in small town Kansas in 1917? Something you probably wouldn’t believe if it wasn’t told to you in a documentary or by some other authoritative source, because the story is wild, weird, and very nuts. What happened was that doctor John Romulus Brinkley developed a goat-to-human testicular transplant that cured the impotent man, launching him to fame and fortune while the rest of America sunk deep into the Great Depression.
Varda Bar-Kar’s latest documentary Big Voice follows the lives of a Santa Monica school choir over the course of a year, under the instruction of their inspirational yet no-nonsense teacher. Mr Huls, teacher extraordinaire, is an intriguing character – full of passion and with motivation to make the choir bigger and better than ever before. Whilst Mr Huls is certainly the driving force in the documentary, it is Bar-Kar’s interviews with the students which are arguably most interesting.
Every year, we get countless reports that there isn’t enough diversity in Hollywood storytelling. In the past couple of weeks alone, GLAAD’s annual media report has shown that LGBT diversity is only visible in TV, whilst Asian-American actors have begun a protest website called “Starring John Cho”, to highlight the lack of leading roles given to people of their ethnicity. A story that needs to be told There was a line in GLAAD’s celebration of diversity in independent cinema that rung alarmingly true, as they highlighted that diverse audiences shouldn’t have to look to the arthouses for films that relate to them.
I was on holiday with two of my closest friends last week. Amidst the flow of beer, the puffing of cigarettes and the non-stop giggling, the conversation turned to our grandmothers. We talked about how our grandmothers had grown up in such a different time to ourselves, how we are (as women) afforded things that our grandmothers would never have been.
In this third episode of The Power of Film, I spoke with the lovely Samantha Shada. She is a director, hosts the screening series Seeking Our Story, and she works at one of the big studios – a busy lady who has a lot of unique insights into the world of film! We spoke about a lot, from film in general and symbolism in film, the status quo of the studio system (and, very interesting, the current state of film marketing) to film preservation.
PJ Woodside and her partner, Steve Hudgins at Big Biting Pig Productions in Madisonville, KY are creating quite a stir in the independent horror scene. They’ve put out a film a year for the last decade. Their most recent film, Frances Stein, was recently released on Amazon Prime and has been getting a steady stream of five star reviews.
You may be wondering why you are reading a review for a film initially slated for release in 2014, after its première at the Los Angeles film festival, in the here and now of 2016. It tells us a lot about contemporary cinema and the struggle independent films face in finding distribution that this well-made film has waited two years for a wider release when there have been countless lesser films clogging our screens in the intervening time. It has been with the recent support of Ava DuVernay’s company ARRAY that Echo Park has found a cinematic release in LA and New York as well as an international release through Netflix and, if you are looking for something different to the sometimes saccharine cuteness of US indie romances, I would encourage you to seek this film out.
Over at our official Facebook page, we are currently posting daily film recommendations, with each week being a different theme. This is a collection of those recommendations! This week’s theme is female-directed horror films.
People often tend to demarcate their lives by coordinating them with macro-narratives. For instance, the segment of your life that took place during the George W. Bush administration, or the Vietnam war.
Despite The Falling Snow is a film by novelist and filmmaker Shamim Sharif. The film is based on her book of the same name and plays out over two time periods. In 1950’s Moscow Katya is a spy for the Americans and is encouraged to marry and steal secrets from the young politician Alex.
Modern creatives have taken many liberties with the subject of vampire/werewolf lore. Films such as Blade and the Underworld series’ brought slick, Hong Kong-style hyper-violence wrapped in a trench coat, whereas Twilight added teenage brooding and sickly bubble gum romance, which many purists would rather see vanish into a sparkly haze. Emma Darks’ latest short Seize The Night fits categorically into the first grouping.
