Films by Women – Page 11

On Indie Rom-Coms, The Duvernay Test, and ‘Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong’

It was Viola Davis who commented about the lack of substantial roles as love interests for women of color on the big screen. … We see that familiar and very white narrative unfold between an interracial pair in ‘Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong,’ except this time it’s infused with cultural nuances that, while they don’t reinvent the wheel, offer a fresh perspective.

This guest post by Candice Frederick was originally published at Reel Talk Online and appears as part of our theme week on Interracial Relationships. It is cross-posted with permission.

It was Viola Davis who commented about the lack of substantial roles as love interests for women of color on the big screen. They’re often prostitutes, sexual victims, or practically asexual (meaning, their characters help the protagonist — a white woman — with her romantic dilemmas with no sexual desires of her own). It’s preposterous.

That said, I love that Jamie Chung plays the romantic lead in Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong, a film she also co-executive produced with her real-life hubby and co-star, Bryan Greenberg. I also love that Davis, Chung and other women of color in Hollywood are taking matters into their own hands by creating their own films and narratives (Davis even has a film production company). Chung partnered with writer/director Emily Ting on a story that lends itself pretty closely to Richard Linklater’s Before series in that it focuses on the dialogue between two strangers flirting with ideals on love, companionship, and ambition.

We see that familiar and very white narrative unfold between an interracial pair in Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong, except this time it’s infused with cultural nuances that, while they don’t reinvent the wheel, offer a fresh perspective. Take for instance, the fact that Ruby (Chung) is the fish-out-of-water American visiting Hong Kong for the first time, and Josh (Greenberg) is the white American living in Hong Kong for the past decade, who shows her around town. Too often it’s been the other way around where the Asian woman who lives in the non-American city, doesn’t speak any English, and falls for the mysterious (and culturally tone deaf) white American (this is is, of course, if the Asian female character isn’t playing a sex worker).

Another intriguing aspect of the film is that Ting is unafraid to approach dialogue that doesn’t avoid the fact that the two have different ethnicities and are enveloped in an open conversation where comments like “Oh, you have an Asian girl fetish?” aren’t out of place. In fact, they’re completely appropriate given the narrative.

But it takes a lot more than diverse romantic leads and authentic dialogue to make a great film. People of color characters don’t automatically legitimize a film. Though the conversation around “The Duvernay Test” (named after filmmaker Ava Duvernay), which challenges Hollywood to cast actors of color in substantive roles, is an important one to have, we must still advocate for characters that are interesting and three-dimensional. Sadly, Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong is just not enough — even with its commitment to depicting society as it really is: diverse. Both Ruby and Josh are underdeveloped and we don’t feel invested in their characters outside of the conversation that’s driving the plot. For a romantic comedy starring a real-life couple, it remarkably left me quite cold.

I want to see more of Jamie Chung on the big screen, and I am intrigued enough by Ting’s passion for the project to be interested to see what she does next. But I’m all set with this project.

Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong opens in theaters and On Demand February 12.

Rating: C

https://youtu.be/m4ATqbLDoNs

Creator/blogger of Reel Talk Online, Candice Frederick is a writer for hire, lover of snark, former magazine journalist, and co-host of the podcast, “Cinema in Noir.” She is also a Personal Lifestyle Contributor for Black Girl Nerds, and member of the Online Film Critics Society, Alliance of Women Film Journalists, and LAMB (Large Association of Movie Bloggers).

Seed & Spark: Alone, Then Among Many: On Filmmaking and ‘The Ladies Almanack’

The process of adapting ‘The Ladies Almanack’ for film has been exciting, but in the beginning, it was an incredibly lonely task; a lonely one for a long time. … Alone I had to discover what this film wanted to be, and the only way to do that was to listen carefully to the voices in the books of women, living and dead.

This guest post is by Daviel Shy.

The process of adapting The Ladies Almanack for film has been exciting, but in the beginning, it was an incredibly lonely task; a lonely one for a long time. I spent a year and a half of researching and writing before I approached anyone to be in the film, but that time gave the project the backbone it would need in order to grow. Alone I had to discover what this film wanted to be, and the only way to do that was to listen carefully to the voices in the books of women, living and dead.

I started with copious notes and copious daydreaming. At the time, I was the manager for a performance company who was on tour in the UK. Somehow, that tour is secretly written into the script between the lines; the train rides through England and Scotland; the quiet nights in hotel rooms. This is where I found the freedom and quiet to begin to see the film’s scenes crystallize in my head.

One brave task I took on early to ensure the future of the film: I checked with Djuna Barnes’ literary executors early on to be sure I could legally make this film. The answer, luckily, was yes.

Cauleen Smith, an artist I’ve admired for years, could see what a big idea this was from the very beginning. She advised me to learn French for the project, which helped immensely. She was the only person I would occasionally share ideas with before writing them. For example, when I described to her my vision for the film’s final scene, she said, “Film that first, as soon as you can. Do it now; don’t let it get stale.” I followed her advice, and indeed, this scene was shot almost a year before the rest of the film, during my preliminary scouting trip to Paris.

One of the resources I found most useful was Julie Taylor’s chapter on the novel Ladies Almanack in her book, Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism. Taylor writes: “Having it all is precisely what Barnes’ Ladies Almanack, with its non-compromising, gloriously greedy and accumulative notion of happiness promises the reader.” Her astute analysis gave me permission to bend the rules of storytelling, and the constrictions of no-budget filmmaking to be “gloriously greedy,” myself and attempt to “have it all.”

So I set about not to represent the women whose lives and work inspire me, but to invite these very people into the project themselves. Within another year I’d be sitting face to face with Hélène Cixous, Eileen Myles, or Guinevere Turner. Once I was able to reach someone personally, almost everyone joined the cast immediately, without pay or persuasion. They simply liked the idea. After reading about the project, Cixous said to me on the phone, “I can see what you are trying to do, and it has got to be done perfectly.” Most of the casting happened organically.

There is one exception to my casting luck: for a number of years I have been pen pals with the incredible artist and performer, Vaginal Davis. I cherished her letters stuffed with postcards from art shows, naked women cut from vintage porn catalogues, clippings of interesting art news in German, and other encouraging odds and ends that I’ve pasted onto my studio walls. Initially, I had envisioned her as Gertrude Stein, but she refused the suggestion three times in our letters, finally saying, “No way, baby! I am focusing on art, and do not want to perform in films anymore.” I couldn’t argue with that, but it worked out for the best, because artist Alison Bechdel recommended Terry Castle for the role. Terry owned the role beautifully, and enhanced our production in a different way: her wife Blakey cameos as the perfect Alice B. Tolkas.

Months before casting the role of Radclyffe Hall, I traveled on an Amtrak train to Kansas City, passing Illinois horses and barns. I thought of Deborah Bright’s essay, “Horse Crazy,” which I read and reread in graduate school. Then it clicked! I looked out the window, then wrote:

Reverse dream girls. May 2nd, 2014,
I am riding through Midwestern fields with Deborah Bright. She’s agreed to play Radclyffe Hall in my film, so we take to horseback, heading West. My Aunt lives in New Harmony, Utah, where the red mountains meet the green ones. We could be there by Wednesday.

There has been a certain magic protecting, driving, and following the making of this movie. I don’t necessarily understand it, and I certainly do not control it. I see my role instead as learning to listen to it and ride it, wherever it may lead.

Daviel Shy’s film The Ladies Almanack is now crowdfunding via Seed & Spark.

Daviel Shy has written and directed nine short films. Her writing has been published by Taylor & Francis (UK) and University of Chicago Press. Her forthcoming chapbook, Grammar Rulse, will be published by Dancing Girl Press in July. The Ladies Almanack is her first feature film. www.davielshy.com

Seed & Spark: Unearthing Buried Voices with ‘The Ladies Almanack’

Systematized omission of women, gender non-comforming persons, queers, and people of color from history is still rampant in the arts, literature, and other fields of cultural production. I make ‘The Ladies Almanack’ in response to this erasure and in service of the hunger I feel for these buried voices.

This guest post written by Daviel Shy.

I was drawn to my research for The Ladies Almanack because of the rich interplay between the singular artist and her creative community. For the past four and a half years, I have run a semi-private event in my living room each month called L.M.N.O.P., or, Lesbian Movie Night Ongoing Project. The community that gathers for this event varies month to month, but the centrality of women’s voices and lesbians on-screen provides a context in which to gather. There is still something very powerful about coming together in a real room.

When I found the story of Natalie Clifford Barney hidden in the words of Djuna Barnes, I recognized that what Barney created in her Parisian home at 20 rue Jacob contributed to my commitment to L.M.N.O.P. While each artist featured in the film is a complex and prolific creator in her own right, Barney’s salon supplied a gathering place for their entanglement. My film, an adaptation of Barnes’ roman à clef, is a glimpse into that entanglement.

The excitement of the movie isn’t just based on Barney’s lesbianism: she was also a self-proclaimed pagan and anti-monogamist. She was a radical who lived her message. She made friends the center of her life and supported the work of other women both financially and through her connections. This is a virtue we can learn from today.

When Djuna Barnes approached the most prominent people in publishing about her unconventional book, Ladies Almanack, she was rejected. Never mind that the influential Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beech, and Gertrude Stein happened to be lesbians themselves: they were all deeply entrenched in supporting and furthering the works of the men around them. Not Barney. She began L’Académie des Femmes, to honor women authors and always put women first.

Systematized omission of women, gender non-comforming persons, queers, and people of color from history is still rampant in the arts, literature, and other fields of cultural production. I make The Ladies Almanack in response to this erasure and in service of the hunger I feel for these buried voices.

I’m part of a big family and my siblings keep me connected to the rest of the world. Without them I’d likely disappear into dusty archives, cult-cinema obscurity and D.I.Y. underground arts. My sisters, who are not artists (and not lesbians), are how I gauge what savvy and thoughtful mainstream women in society are into. Thus, a few years ago when my sister Yael tells me about this show called Orange Is the New Black, and then my sister Trysa raves to me about Transparent, I am excited and thankful. I wonder at how great it is that the mainstream is discovering that lesbian stories are not just for lesbians. These shows are opening doors for my work. Our culture is waking up to the fact that we need all of our voices.

The multiplicity of truth is evident when we listen to more than one monocultural voice. Women appear in each others’ fiction where they become mythologized and multiple; competing versions of events exist simultaneously. In my film work, I try to honor that complicated reality.

My work relies on a tireless belief in our collective ability to reclaim and rename our history and, in doing so, our future. The recruitment at the center of my practice is not participation, but initiation. I aim to turn the outsider in. Coming together, we acknowledge the singularity of this present, this temporary configuration that is equally as powerful as the pasts I research and reconstruct. And I believe that if we turn our attention to one another, we can realize our full potential as world-makers. My journey with The Ladies Almanack, and our current crowdfunding campaign on Seed & Spark, is a step in that direction.

‘Suffragette’: The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same

In fact, it made me even more upset at the fact that one hundred years later, we may have the vote but women are still facing inequality, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and poor conditions in the workplace. … I wasn’t expecting to be as taken aback by just how little has changed since the period ‘Suffragette’ is set. …It made me realize we need [feminism] more than ever.

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris. | Spoilers ahead.

I went to see Suffragette at the culmination of a day spent feeling utterly depressed at the state of women in the workplace and the world at large. As you can imagine, Suffragette did nothing to assuage my feelings. In fact, it made me even more upset at the fact that one hundred years later, we may have the vote but women are still facing inequality, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and poor conditions in the workplace.

The day in question saw my Twitter timeline full of defenses of cricketer Chris Gayle, who hit on a female reporter as she was trying to interview him after a game; Jamie Briggs, the minister for cities and built environments, who sexually harassed a young female staffer on an international trip; Peter Dutton, the minister for immigration and border protection, who called reporter Samantha Maiden, who stood up for the staffer in question, a “mad fucking witch” in a text message clearly not meant for her but somehow sent to her anyway (and this is the guy in charge of Australia’s borders!); and the two men who murdered their families as “good guys” suffering from mental health problems (an important issue in its own right but not at the expense of the safety of women and children).

So, heading into Suffragette I shrunk into myself as a form of protection from all the microaggressions I’d faced that day but I raged internally at the depictions of workplace inequality, sexual harassment and assault and the general placement of women as second-class citizens and, behold, this piece was born.

Workplace Rights.
In the laundry that protagonist Maud (Carey Mulligan), her husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) and friend and fellow suffragette Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) work, women toil away over steam and hot fumes. Maud herself was born at the laundry to a mother who was killed when a vat tipped on her only four years later. When Maud gets home, she washes her family’s own laundry and fixes her husband and son dinner. She endures sexual harassment and, it is implied, survived rape by the manager of the laundry, Mr. Taylor (Geoff Bell). All of this is viewed as inconvenient at best, a workplace hazard at worst.

After a day spent reading about the above-mentioned modern day examples of workplace harassment I couldn’t help but see the similarities. While the Gayle and Dutton incidents came to light because they happened in full view of the media, Briggs’ sexual harassment accusations are the exception to the rule: how many other countless examples of sexual harassment and assault have occurred but are swept under the carpet in an effort not to jeopardize positions or be looked on unfavorably by colleagues?

You Don’t Get a Cookie.
When Maud reveals these labor conditions (her standing up to her rapist happens later) in a votes for women hearing, the men on the board seem genuinely shocked. Prominent British politician and statesman David Lloyd George (Adrian Schiller) seems sympathetic to Maud’s plight however her testimony doesn’t convince him of her right to vote.

Maud’s husband, too, seems initially merely inconvenienced by her newfound interest in suffrage but, as the movie progresses, Maud’s feminism gets stronger and she spends more time in prison for demonstrating, he kicks her out of the house and adopts their son out to a rich family. He says he can’t be expected to work, run a household and look after their son — what Maud’s been doing this whole time — in a stark example of male privilege.

These are some of Suffragette’s more sympathetic male characters compared to anti-suffrage policeman Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson) and Mr. Taylor but, like men today who express astonishment when women reveal they’ve been harassed and assaulted and the belief that women do, in fact, deserve basic human rights, they don’t get a cookie for it.

Reproductive Rights.
As attacks on reproductive rights threaten to return to pre-Roe V. Wade levels, which is to say non-existent, in the U.S. and pap tests and STI blood tests will come at a price in Australia, they are mirrored in Suffragette. Abused spouse Violet steps down from the suffrage movement when she discovers she’s pregnant again, citing exhaustion at not being able to “take care of the [kids] I’ve got.” Maud is force fed in prison in a harrowingly triggering scene echoing rape, mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking to terminate their pregnancies, forced sterilization and any manner of other violations against women’s bodies. She asks Steed, when he expresses disdain over her disobedience of the law, “Why should I obey a law I had no hand in making?”

Check out Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan on the cover of @TimeOutLondon this week! More info http://t.co/nZxRwvNFdo pic.twitter.com/y6KWGLDOK4

— SUFFRAGETTE (@SuffragetteFilm) September 29, 2015

Black Lives Matter.
Much has been made about Suffragette’s whitewashing and rightfully so. There were literally no women of color in the film, despite the real-life involvement of Indian suffragettes, for example. And, in perhaps the most offensive portion of the film that was parlayed into a tone-deaf marketing campaign, suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep in a two-minute cameo) says in her famous speech:

“We do not want to be law breakers; we want to be law makers. Be militant, each of you in your own way. Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can further attack the sacred idol of property, do so. We have been left with no alternative but to defy this government. If we must go to prison to obtain the vote let it be the windows of government not the bodies of women which shall be broken.”

First of all, slavery is not a choice. Secondly, the above-mentioned use of this 1913 speech for a Time Out cover featuring the all-white cast illustrates just how far white feminism has to go in the inclusion of women of color.

14 officers show up at an Oregon #BlackLivesMatters protest

150 armed protestors: *crickets* #OregonUnderAttack pic.twitter.com/Jrgmc7KS2Q

— Yukio Strachan (@boldandworthy) January 4, 2016

Three queer Black women formed the #BlackLivesMatter movement after the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of police as “a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society.” Meanwhile, white ranchers are allowed to demonstrate “peacefully” — albeit armed — on seized government land (which let’s not forget was originally stolen from Indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago). Much like the attempts to bar people of color from demonstrating peacefully without militarized police forces (see above tweet) threatening them or mowing them down, Suffragette excludes women of color from its depiction of the suffrage movement by denying them a voice. But on the other hand, consider Pankhurst’s words above and some of the film’s early scenes in which demonstrators are attacked by policemen in the streets: Suffragette could also be viewed as an allegory for racist police brutality.

[NEW POST] My #Feminist Awakening & the Influence of #Beyonce's Pop Culture Declaration http://t.co/j5FqMvhPtu pic.twitter.com/ZmBE71DvAu

— Janet Mock (@janetmock) September 3, 2014

I’m Not a Feminist, But…
Upon Maud’s first arrest, she insists she’s “not a suffragette.” Where have we heard that before? Modern women’s baffling insistence that they, too, are not feminists seems to be in the news every other day. The online campaigns about why women don’t need feminism and celebrities being asked whether they are feminists have dominated the discussion in recent years reminded me of Maud’s colleagues at the laundry turning their backs on her when she’s outed for demonstrating and when she finally takes her revenge on her abuser. Internalized misogyny is as hard at work today as it was 100 years ago.

White women who do call themselves feminists, such as Emma Watson and Lena Dunham, are seldom met with much push-back, whereas Black women’s (those who do identify with a movement that has often ignored the contributions of feminists who are women of color and not with another movement such as “womanist”) feminism comes with a whole host of caveats. Despite Beyoncé’s spectacular embrace of feminism at the MTV Video Music Awards flanked by an emblazoned erection of the word, she’s still asked to qualify it. Black feminists such as Janet Mock, Roxane Gay and Amandla Stenberg are increasingly having their voices heard by the mainstream media while Kate Winslet refuses to talk about “vulgar” pay inequities in Hollywood and Patricia Arquette urges other marginalized groups to support women — and, let’s be clear here, she was talking about white women in the über privileged world of Hollywood. That’s not to say that Jennifer Lawrence, a fellow champion of closing the pay gap, doesn’t deserve to get paid as much as Bradley Cooper, but it partially ignores the struggles of women like Viola Davis and men like John Boyega to get paid as much as their white counterparts. And to intersect the two, all we have to do is look at this week’s Oscar nominations which resulted in no actors of color being recognized in the four main acting categories. Oscar noms = $$.

I wasn’t expecting to be as taken aback by just how little has changed since the period Suffragette is set. Sure, sexism and misogyny may not be as violent and blatant and we’re more likely to get up in arms when it is, but just because a few high profile women enjoy privileges far removed from what Maud and Violet in Suffragette and countless other women around the world face, doesn’t mean that we don’t need feminism. In fact, it made me realize we need it more than ever.

Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we have been reading this week — and let us know what you have been reading/writing in the comments!

A Year with Women: What I Learned Only Watching Films Directed by Women in 2015 by Marya E. Gates at Cinema Fanatic

Where Are All the Diverse Voices in Film Criticism? by Chaz Ebert at The Daily Beast

Why Are So Few Film Critics Female? by Katie Kilkenny at The Atlantic

The 10 Best Women-Directed Films of 2015 by Melissa Silverstein, Inkoo Kang and Laura Berger at Women and Hollywood

The Women of Star Wars Speak Out About Their New Empire by Meredith Woerner at The Los Angeles Times

Gina Rodriguez Writes “Love Letter” to Rita Moreno at Kennedy Center Honors by Celia Fernandez via Latina

Fuck You, Spike Lee: Chi-Raq Is an Insult to Do the Right Thing, to Black Women, and to Malcolm X by Ijeoma Oluo via The Stranger

Of Fear and Fake Diversity by Lexi Alexander

Going Home for the First Time: A Return to Cuba by Monica Castillo at RogerEbert.com

Carol Is the Lesbian-Centric Christmas Movie of My Dreams by Grace Manger via Bitch Media

The 11 Most Important Women of Color Moments of 2015 by Melissa Silverstein, Inkoo Kang and Laura Berger at Women and Hollywood

Mara Brock Akil Talks Doing the Work in Spite of Not Getting the Recognition She Deserves via For Harriet

Mustang Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven on Turkish film, L.A. riots and Escape From Alcatraz by Carolina A. Miranda via The Los Angeles Times

The Best and Worst LGBT TV Characters of 2015 via Autostraddle

Leia-Loving Feminists Have A New Hope for Female Roles in Star Wars by Sarah Seltzer at Flavorwire

Writer Phyllis Nagy Talks Adapting Carol by Nikki Baughan at Screen Daily

How Our February Cover Star Amandla Stenberg Learned to Love Her Blackness by Solange Knowles at Teen Vogue

Young Women Weigh in on the Hijabi Character on Quantico by Lakshmi Gandhi at NPR

Fandom vs. Canon: On Queer Representation in The Force Awakens by Maddy Myers at The Mary Sue

The Case for Female Filmmakers in 2015: Breaking Down the Stats by Carrie Rickey at Thompson on Hollywood

Laurie Anderson on Her New Film, Heart of a Dog by David Hershkovits at Paper Magazine

The Top 10 Film/TV Moments for Queer Women in 2015 by Dorothy Snarker at Women and Hollywood

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

Moonfaze Feminist Film Festival: Her Story Illuminated

Writer/Director/Actress and Moonfaze Film Festival Founder Premstar Santana has taken on the challenge of not waiting for Hollywood to feature feminist cinema. She is creating the platform that elevates feminist viewpoints from marginalized voices that rarely get the opportunity to shine.

On December 5, 2015 Writer/Director/Actress and all-around badass Premstar Santana created a phenomenal short film festival centering powerful feminist narratives. Presented inside of LA Mother, (a non-profit organization and multi-purpose creative space that is dedicated to nurturing women in business and the arts), Premstar carved out a safe space for diverse voices from around the globe to flourish. By creating this platform in conjunction with LA Mother, Premstar has taken on the challenge of not waiting for Hollywood to feature feminist cinema. She is creating the platform that elevates feminist viewpoints from marginalized voices that rarely get the opportunity to shine.

The one day evening event started off with a mixer where patrons could nibble on fresh popped popcorn, enjoy some libations and partake of tasty bites provided by a Korean BBQ food truck. Premstar introduced herself the moment I walked in and thanked me for supporting her event. I was immediately struck by her warmth and her sincere appreciation for every person who turned out. And there were a lot of people there. When it was time for the short film showcase to begin, every seat was filled, with an overflow audience sitting on the staircase and standing in the back. A packed house.

The opening film, Luna — written, directed by, and starring Premstar herself — immediately set the tone for the rest of the festival. Premstar’s film let me know that she was not bullshitting about her clarion call to elevate the game. Luna, is an experimental film that introduces us to a woman performing a sacred ceremony inside a circle of burning candles in a dark room. There is a blood offering, an incantation that opens another dimension, and the woman finds herself surrounded by nature and facing a mirror image of herself who simply says “Hello, I’ve been waiting for you…are you ready?” Our protagonist then responds by asking “For What?” Her question is answered by her second self, “To dance.” The film ends with a gorgeous shot of Premstar standing on a sunlit beach watching ocean waves, the full moon high above her head. The piece resonated with me emotionally, and I had the rare moment of instantly recognizing a fellow sister/creator. After watching her other work in the festival (the sci-fi tinged Dos Lunas) I understood Premstar to be a thoughtful and gifted artist. Her work is deeply personal, poetic, and at times haunting. She creates compelling cinema, so I felt confident that I would enjoy the films presented. I felt like I was at a cinema tapas bar, nibbling on all the various films she was spreading before us at LA Mother.

The films themselves ranged from comedy, horror, experimental, dramatic thrillers, documentaries and even a Bollywood drenched piece that had a shocking ending that delighted the receptive audience. One of the crowd favorites was a 6-minute French comedy film called Papa Dans Maman (Dad in Mum) written and directed by Fabrice Bracq. In the film two young sisters hear their mother and father having sex. They try to decide if they should go inside the bedroom to investigate when they hear an unexpected arrival downstairs. The humor worked because of the expressive faces of the young actresses, and the tension that was created by the one sister peeking through the bedroom keyhole and telling the other what she sees.

Another standout piece was the aforementioned 12-minute U.S. Bollywood-Punk Musical, The Pink Sorrys, written by Ben Stoddard and directed by Anam Syed. A deadly girl gang seeks retribution after one of their own is sexually assaulted. The graphic ending was pretty bloody and followed the rape/revenge trope popular in ’70s exploitation cinema. I enjoyed the unique mash-up to tell an unpleasant story about violence against women’s bodies. And come on — Bollywood. Punk. Musical. You got me.

Afghan rapper Sonita Alizadeh directed and stars in a music video called Brides for Sale where she spits her own rap lyrics advocating for the end of forced marriages globally. In Diyu (written and directed by Christine Yuan), a teenaged girl is caught between heaven and hell in a strangely hypnotic experimental film that won the Best Director Award at the end of the evening.

The festival found the right balance of showing some serious life-altering narratives alongside lighter fare that was equally compelling in different ways. One of my other comedy favorites was a film starring Moonfaze’s Festival Manager Sarah Hawkins. Roller Coaster (written and directed by Sarah’s father Bradley Hawkins) is a sweet tale about Emily, an aspiring actress who sets out for an audition, only to encounter obstacles that may cause her to miss her big break. The film playfully highlights the plastic-looking homogeneity of casting calls where women feel the need to look a certain way (mainly white, thin, surgically enhanced or bleached in some way). What struck me about Sarah Hawkins as an actor is that her face had that classic oldschool natural beauty that I miss. In fact, that is what struck me about most of the films in the festival. All these wonderful new faces that don’t have the bland manufactured Hollywood “look.”

At the close of the festival, awards were given in various categories for Best Screenwriting, Cinematography, Acting, Best Experimental Film, Best Documentary, and Best Director. I left the festival elated and impressed with the quality and variety of the films I watched.

A few days later, still excited about the festival, I contacted Premstar and invited her and Festival manager Sarah Hawkins to talk about Moonfaze on the Screenwriter’s Rant Room Podcast I co-host. It was important to give these feminist filmmakers another platform to talk about their work. You can listen to the podcast here.

Premstar said she conceived the idea for the festival in the summer of 2015, and less than six months later it came to fruition. Feminist filmmakers are hungry and ready to share their stories and 2016 will see another Moonfaze Film Festival. As I told Premstar and Sarah on the podcast, the work that Moonfaze has done is reminiscent of song lyrics done by the acapella singing group, Sweet Honey in the Rock. The lyrics are, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Simply put, we don’t have to wait for someone else to do this work. Fam, we got this. We really do.

Premstar Santana and all the filmmakers involved in the very first Moonfaze Film Festival are bold, unapologetic, and creating new life-giving narratives. I look forward to the 2^nd Annual Festival. You should too.

For more information about the Moonfaze Film Festival and Premstar Santana, check out these websites:

premstarsantana.com

moonfaze.lamother.com

Staff Writer Lisa Bolekaja is a speculative fiction writer, screenwriter, podcaster, Sci-Fi slush reader for Apex Magazine, and a devoted cinefile. A former Film Independent Fellow and a member of the Horror Writers Association, her fiction can be found on Amazon.com.

‘The Red Card’: A Short Film that Treats Young Adults with Respect

Trigger warning: rape and sexual assault | Watching a young adult have to navigate the social stigmas of rape and sexual assault in a small high school community is what pushes this film past the danger of falling into a trope that some filmmakers use as an easy way to tell women’s stories.

Trigger warning: rape and sexual assault

When I took fiction writing as an undergrad, the male grad student teaching the course complained that all girls ever wrote about was rape, that he was tired of it. “Wasn’t there anything else to write about?” he asked as he looked at the women in the room. As he ranted, I curled the page edges of my story I loved — which was about rape. I remember the power of writing a sentence about grass between my toes, the first time my imagery sang in my own head. My story was a young writer’s story as she tried to make sense of power dynamics and gender restrictions.

When I watched Dana Brawer’s short film The Red Card, I had two responses. First, I thought to myself, ANOTHER film that relies on the trope of rape? And then I checked myself. Why on earth would I think that? As if the world doesn’t need to hear another story about rape? My second response was to remember that blustering idiot teaching my class and shutting down my voice as I started to dip my toes into an art, much as Brawer is doing now with her thesis film. So I am grateful there’s a new film about rape. Let’s keep making them and ensuring the stories of rape survivors aren’t silenced.

Sam is a semi-geeky, comic-book-reading girl on the periphery of the highly charged sexual popular clique at a private school. She speaks to the young adult for whom this film was intended, and I certainly would have connected with her as teen. Brawer writes:

“Too often, stories about high school fall into cliché. They’re campy, corny, romantic, perhaps inspiring, but few of these films touch upon the deeper and secretive pains felt by high school students. These formulaic scripts about both boys and girls chasing an unrealistic ideal of love don’t begin to show the truth about the confusion and exploration of self that signifies such an important developmental time, and I’ve grown tired of coming of age stories that can be misleading to teens and young adults.”

And she’s right. The saccharine crap fed to young adults in the theaters is demeaning to the experiences of that population, and a film that speaks to them on a mature level is greatly needed.

Sam gets ~~invited~~ lured to a party in the woods where girls are hunted. If they are caught, they belong to the group of drunk teenage boys hoping to get laid, with or without consent. The party scene in the woods is an eerie red, making me wonder if there was going to be some kind of horror element.

When Michael begins to kiss Sam, she likes it. Then when he pushes further, she doesn’t and expressly says so. I wondered if there was going to be an element of Teeth, a vagina dentata or some other kind of intercession. But there isn’t. Her knee does the work to get him off of her.

The most interesting part of the movie is the set of scenes after the assault scene. Sam has to return to school where Michael attempts to apologize — perhaps — by giving her the sweater she left in the woods. All of the other students are looking at her. She has to figure out how to live in this new world where everyone is talking about her — after living a quiet teenage life of library work and comic books. Watching a young adult have to navigate the social stigmas of rape and sexual assault in a small high school community is what pushes this film past the danger of falling into a trope that some filmmakers use as an easy way to tell women’s stories. By complicating Sam’s response, Brawer offers something new, which is what we should be asking our younger filmmakers to do.

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Colleen Lutz Clemens is a Bitch Flicks staff writer and assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.

Rewritten History: Affecting in ‘Brooklyn’, Not So Much in ‘Suffragette’

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made ‘Brooklyn’ is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group.

I’m never enamored of the cleaned-up, ambiguity-free nostalgia that movies, especially mainstream ones, serve to their audiences in the guise of “history” so I avoided John Crowley’s Brooklyn (written by Nick Hornby from the novel by Colm Tóibín) about an Irish immigrant, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) in the US. The Irish have been romanticized in films as early as The Quiet Man (a new release when the film takes place) and romanticized among Irish Americans for as long as the Irish have been coming to the US. But when Brooklyn began raking in awards (especially for Ronan) I decided to see it.

I was surprised at how enjoyable and skillfully made Brooklyn is: I cried when everyone else did and gasped when the rest of the audience did too, but in spite of its excellent art direction and affecting performances the film is mostly hokum. New York in the 1950s is a place where no one the main character hangs out with smokes (when all of the men and the majority of women were smokers). Most of the characters barely drink (just one glass at Christmas) and, except for a child’s brief outburst at a family dinner table, (“I should say that we don’t like Irish people”) none of its white, working-class, ethnic characters have any problem with any other ethnic group. In the actual 1950s, my mother, just a few years younger than Eilis is in the film, lived in an Irish American neighborhood in Boston, much like the one the film shows in New York and wasn’t allowed to date Italian boys because, her father explained, “They beat their women.” We never find out what the main characters in Brooklyn think of Jewish people (since the church still taught then that the Jews killed Christ, that opinion probably wasn’t favorable) because none of them encounter any, even though plenty of Jewish people lived in Brooklyn in the 1950s. And Black people in this film are at the farthest periphery: two women in a crowd crossing a street and a Black couple is shown on the beach at Coney Island.

Eilis’s family in small-town Ireland is prosperous enough that her sister works as a bookkeeper and they live with their mother in a decent house, but Eilis immigrates anyway to a sales clerk job, arranged by a kindly priest (Jim Broadbent), at a department store in New York. In other words, she’s the kind of immigrant even the Republican party of today would like: white and “respectable.” She’s not the kind who comes to the country without papers, or has to learn English, scrub floors or work as a nanny and she doesn’t have an impoverished family in her home country to worry about. When being well-cared-for in her new home becomes too much for Eilis, her suddenly sympathetic boss (Jessica Paré) has the priest swoop into the store break room and tell Eilis he’s signed her up for bookkeeping classes at Brooklyn College. He tells her, “Homesickness is like most sicknesses. It will pass.”

Priests in the US at the time took collection money from their parishioners and gave them very little in return so to have one dole out college tuition after arranging a sales clerk job seems far-fetched, and for the recipient of both favors to be a young “marriageable” woman the priest barely knows seems like something from a parallel universe. For women in the 1950s, especially those in the working class (even ambitious ones like Eilis) the endgame was marriage, not a career. “Real” men (especially working-class ones) didn’t let their wives work outside the home (unless the family was poor), but Eilis’s middle-class, Italian-American, plumber boyfriend (Emory Cohen, a standout in a very good cast) walks her home from her night classes and loves hearing about her studies. His parents and his brothers seem equally charmed instead of exchanging nervous glances and asking, “You’re not a career girl, are you?” The only way a daughter-in-law in that type of family in the 1950s could work would be in her husband’s business — and even then she probably wouldn’t be given a salary for the first decade or so.

What priests did then (and for decades afterward) was browbeat women for working when they had children at home: if they encouraged women to go to college, the goal was for the women to find husbands there and never work outside the home again. If their husbands then beat or neglected them, the priests told the women they must be at fault (this mindset was a secular one at the time too) and they must never, ever get divorced. At the boarding house where Eilis lives she talks about marriage with a woman whose husband has left her for “someone else.” We never have a clue, in all of Eilis’s longing for her old hometown that a woman in that same situation wouldn’t be able to get divorced in Ireland until the very last part of the 20th century, a detail that a woman screenwriter or director probably wouldn’t leave out.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15syDwC000k” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette (with a screenplay by Abi Morgan) is another film I put off watching, because even with its creaky plot device of seeing historical events through the eyes of a fictional “composite” character the film apparently still managed to leave women of color out of the fight for British women’s suffrage as well as omitting another integral element, the queerness of some of the most famous suffragettes.

The film isn’t as bad as I feared it might be (or perhaps it just looked good compared to the film I saw just before it: The Danish Girl) but its problems are not just because it’s about white, straight women. Carey Mulligan does what she can with the lead role, Maud, who works at the laundry and is radicalized by a coworker–and by witnessing police beating up “Votes for Women” protesters. The film could do a much better job of integrating present-day concerns with what happened to “radicals” then, with its scenes of not just police brutality and political groups using bombs and violence as a means to bring about change, but the treatment of political prisoners and the force-feeding of hunger-strikers.

We see Helena Bonham Carter in another old-fashioned role: the audience/main character’s guide to the movement but we don’t see what we do in Brooklyn’s portrait of the women in the boarding house: the sense of the group of women as a clique, a cornerstone of the women’s suffrage movement which needs to exist in any radical political movement. If a woman’s family and old friends think her ideals are anathema, she needs to find peers who share those ideals and who will be her new friends — and new family. Except for a few, not very compelling scenes, we don’t get the sense of Maud as part of a group that supports her, just that she’s an outcast from her old life. The film contains very little we haven’t seen before and what’s new in it is allowed onscreen only very briefly: like the idea that Maud, who has worked most of her life including her childhood, would find motherhood her first opportunity to engage in play.

The film instead becomes a guessing game of what horrible thing can happen to Maud next. Suffragette has the chance to contain more dramatic tension when a police captain asks her to be an informant in exchange for dropping charges (another situation with present day parallels). He tells his men, “We’ve identified weaknesses in their ranks. We’re hoping one of them will break.”

But instead of considering the offer or pretending to inform while acting as a double-agent, Maud just writes an impassioned letter to him about the righteousness of her cause. In the end, Maud is just as dull and unimaginative as the film is, which is a shame, because the real-life figures in this fight were never boring.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘The Violators’ and ‘Wildlike’: Two Films Deal with the Trauma of Child Abuse in Different Ways

[Trigger Warning: for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault] To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways?

This is a guest post written by Holly Thicknes.

Trigger warning for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault.

Wildlike and The Violators: two independent films released on festival circuits to rip-roaring acclaim. Both are debut features from Frank Hall Green and Helen Walsh respectively, and both deal with the uncomfortable subject of the sexual abuse of teenage girls. Yet the two films left me with very different impressions.

To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways? If ever we are to believe that films can influence society for the better, surely we must look for critical self-awareness along with satisfying storytelling (where abuse is more than just a tool of the narrative that progresses the story). The guise of the art house genre has a history of being perceived as absolving films of the representational issues of rape as spectacle, as if the festival-to-independent-cinema distribution package amounts to an automatic stamp of approval (perhaps anyone seeing Gaspar Noé’s Love will take a moment to cast their minds back to the bitter experience that was his Irreversible, shown at Cannes in 2002). But explicitness — or as some might view it, uncut realism — in representing the sexual exploitation of women in itself is problematic if it serves no purpose other than the pleasure of spectacle. And so it is a delicate balance which filmmakers must strive to strike: an honest representation, made — crucially — for the right reasons.

Green’s Wildlike premiered at the Hamptons Film Festival in October 2014 and was the winner of over 40 Best Film awards at various other festivals. The film promises a scenic hike across Alaska, an unlikely friendship of substitution between a teenage girl and an older man and a tense chase by an abusive, ominously unnamed uncle. It delivers all three with invigorating authenticity: the photography and performances meld together to perfectly tow the line between documentary-inspired art house flick and melodramatic Alaskan road movie. The script and Green’s direction soar in moments of transition, where all the action is embedded in the faces of the characters (articulated with faultless performances all around, namely by Bruce Greenwood as male lead Rene) or else the gruff, ever-changing landscapes, and the contemplative essence of the story feels overwhelmingly all-encompassing. There is an endearing sweetness in the father-daughter friendship being cultivated with very little words but plenty of weighted glances. All the substance is there, evidently so, affording it its success and status as a breakthrough debut.

But for all of Wildlike‘s strengths, what I simultaneously can’t forgive it for nor realistically expect of it is the fact that the guesses feel clumsy around the depiction of the central female character’s abuse. They feel second hand, peripheral, flat.

In blatant contrast, The Violators is uncompromisingly captured from 15-year-old female protagonist Shelly’s perspective, and centered around the effects of the sexual exploitation she suffers. It is a film lovingly cultivated by acclaimed novelist and writer/director Walsh, who turned her hand to filmmaking for the first time with the kind of surety that relevant experience for the subject at hand affords you. She reached back into her childhood, where she grew up on the periphery of Cheshire, England, on the same streets and dockland walks we see depicted in the film, and drew out a story about a community of people suffering from the cyclical nature of abuse that forever seems to renew until someone or something finds the strength to break the cycle.

Through the eyes of Shelly, played by acting revelation Lauren McQueen, we see the people of this community play a daily game of chance with the hand they have been dealt. Exploring, as the story does, violation, no one person is made to claim all the blame and no one is absolved entirely, epitomized in Shelly’s complex character role of both sensible mother figure and misled, reckless child. Walsh hints at the details of an abusive father, in jail but possibly being paroled soon, to her and her self-sufficient siblings, and the prospect of it hangs like a spectre over everything so that current moments of violence feel grounded in her damaged past. True as the film is to real life, abuse does not change the centre of gravity of anyone else’s world, but instead informs the path that particular victim takes for the worse.

This perspective is where Wildlike falls down on the representational front, making it into a paternal film about a father-and-daughter-type friendship ever blooming in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness that sidelines the protagonist’s abusive experiences. To be fair, there is nothing insensitive about Green’s portrayal of MacKenzie (Ella Purnell), whose angsty teenager status is drawn onto her face with the filmic trope that is black eyeliner, but beyond this rightfully possesses no superficial traits that simply pigeonhole her character. The scenes of abuse are deliberately not treated as spectacle, but with impressive restraint and disgust-inducing visceral sound effects that imply rather than show (a storytelling technique that Green applies with great success throughout). But the effects of the incidents are observed from the outside, in manner of a concerned father who might look on at his daughter going through her troubled teenage years with genuine concern but bafflement. We are never invited into MacKenzie’s personal space to understand her motivations, and are instead left to second guess how messed up she must be from her experiences. Consequently, when she does break her sullen silence in a burst of emotion, the dialogue feels clumsily roped together in a bid to sound spontaneous but which comes off as whiny.

Unsurprisingly it is much easier to sympathise and identify with Rene, the recently widowed middle-aged male hiker that MacKenzie latches onto, firstly at the whiff of a meal ticket but then being tentatively drawn towards a kind and understanding father figure. Bruce Greenwood is a dream in the role, who we are introduced to in a moment when his defenses are down, in the rue of privacy whilst lying in bed, reminiscing about his late wife, without knowing that MacKenzie is actually hiding under his bed having snuck into his hotel room to nap for the night during her journey to Seattle. His male vulnerability in the wake of the manipulative uncle figure from whom MacKenzie is running is an instant catch: he is afforded an intimate look that we never get to see of her. A few silhouetted crying scenes do not cut it by any stretch.

Green has never claimed, as far as I know, to have made a film directly commenting on the lasting effects of sexual abuse on an underage girl in the hope of enlightening his audience. The meeting point of the two films is their examination of the resilience of vulnerable people in the face of attack. Wildlike does this beautifully — arguably more successfully than The Violators. But having seen both films at film festivals this year with directorial introductions, the contrast between representational intention is blatantly stark. Should films ever sideline child molestation? Should the primary victim’s account ever feel viewed from a distance? And should the issue even ever be used in a film by a male writer/director, one with undeniable storytelling skill, which gets the film into a bunch of festivals with its indie look, but uses the sensitive issue to invoke drama? It’s for everyone to individually make up their minds, but for my part I’m left with the uncomfortable feeling of having watched a film about teenage molestation and incest told superficially from the perspective of the female victim but in reality from the perspective of a man.

Holly Thicknes is a freelance film critic and editor of female-focused film blog Girls On Film. She lives and works in London, studies printmaking, and helps organise themed short film events for Shorts On Tap. She is particularly interested in the ways in which films help people carve out spaces for themselves in an increasingly lonely society. You can follow Girls On Film on Twitter at @girlsonfilmLDN.

‘3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets’ and the Aftermath in ‘The Armor of Light’

Marc Silver’s documentary ‘3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets’ which airs on HBO Monday, Nov. 23, won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and is an attempt to remind us of the particulars in the shooting of Black, suburban teenager, Jordan Davis, on the third anniversary of his death.

The following is partly a modified repost.

Enough unarmed Black people have been shot by white people (including cops) in the past few years that, except for the most famous cases, the circumstances of each shooting has begun to blur into the others. We hear a victim’s name that sounds faintly familiar and we have to ask ourselves, “Wait, what happened to him (or her) again?” We know the victim ended up dead but we forget what took place before–and in the few cases in which the killer is put on trial, what took place afterward.

Marc Silver’s documentary 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, which airs on HBO Monday, Nov. 23, won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and is an attempt to remind us of the particulars in the shooting of Black, suburban teenager, Jordan Davis, on the third anniversary of his death. The three and a half minutes of the title refers to the total amount of time Davis and his friends were in a car at the combination gas station and convenience store when he was shot and killed by a white man, Michael Dunn, who had parked next to their vehicle. As is mentioned in the film, the media glommed onto the dispute between the two being about “loud music” when the shooting was, at its core, about white fear of Black people.

The film focuses on Dunn’s trial (the verdict of which I had forgotten) in which he famously claimed that Davis had a gun (which no witness saw and we see police tell Dunn in their own video “There were no weapons in the car,”) and so used the same “stand your ground” defense (in which one doesn’t have to be threatened to shoot and kill but just to “feel” threatened) under the Florida law which was the basis for George Zimmerman’s acquittal. Dunn had, according to his fiancée, Rhonda Rouer, downed many rum and cokes before the incident (they had just come from his son’s wedding reception) so was probably driving drunk–and could have been pulled over for doing so. But of course no additional consequences exist for grabbing and shooting a gun while under the influence.

Dunn, with his dead eyes, a mouth that always seems on the verge of a smirk and a voice that sounds like that of a mild-mannered cartoon character is not a bright man, as his jailhouse letters and phone calls (excerpts of which we hear over stunning footage of Jacksonville: the cinematography is also by Silver) attest. We hear Rouer at one point tell him firmly that they should discuss the legacy of his actions (he postures himself as some kind of cultural hero) “at another time.” She was probably cognizant that whatever he said to her could be used against him. He readily admits to being a killer but repeatedly denies he’s a racist, though his remarks about other prisoners and the teens, including Davis, in the car he shot at say otherwise.

In spite of his claims, and his high-priced attorney trying to sew doubt in the jurors’ minds (and media coverage of the trial giving equal time to the defense’s arguments, no matter how specious) we come to understand Dunn shot and killed Davis because the teen annoyed him. Throughout the trial and outside the courtroom, Dunn expresses as much remorse for this killing as another person would for swatting a mosquito or a gnat. He’s an extreme example of a mindset that many white people in the US have, including those in Jacksonville, and we hear (briefly) from another local racist (who also probably doesn’t consider himself a racist) outside the courthouse and see, in beach footage, one woman’s swimsuit bottom is decorated with a large Confederate flag.

The courtroom drama of 3 1/2 Minutes is as compelling as that of any narrative film. Outside the court, the film features Davis’s parents, Ron Davis and Lucia McBath, talking about their son and even includes home movies of when he was a baby, so I didn’t expect the moment I started to cry would be during Rouer’s testimony. She was, after all, the person who partied with Dunn in their hotel room after she knew that he had shot Davis (the film never reminds us that the two drank more and ordered pizza after the killing) and apparently she never told Dunn to turn himself in (Dunn was arrested when they returned home, but only because a witness noted his license plate). In the jailhouse calls with Dunn she’s supportive and talks about how much she loves and misses him, as Dunn, convinced he’ll be acquitted says the first thing he’ll do when he’s out is “make love” to her. When she’s first sworn in, the camera focuses on her shaking hand (she even raises the wrong hand) as she takes the oath. With her final testimony we find out why she’s so distraught. In her earlier testimony she had told the jury about the conversation she and Dunn had before she had left the car to go into the store (a little before he shot Davis) “He said, ‘I hate that thug music,’ and I said, ‘I know,”’ and the resignation and hopelessness in her voice at that earlier moment takes on a deeper meaning.

I’m not sure why I cried during her testimony. Perhaps because if more white people told the truth (the bar is so low) either about their actions or about those of their fellow white people, more of the victims’ families might see some justice.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKbCoRA__UI” iv_load_policy=”3″]

We don’t see much of the anti-gun advocacy, Davis’s mother, McBath, took up after Davis’s death, except a brief look at her testimony before Congress, in which the oily piece of slime known as “Ted Cruz” counters her. We never hear much of what she’s thinking during the trial: the in-depth interviews are with Davis’s father. In 3 1/2 Minutes we mainly see McBath cry and sometimes pray, which I’m sure she’s done plenty of, but is not all that she’s done.

To see the aftermath of the trial, watch the excellent and multi-layered documentary The Armor of Light, the first film directed by Abigail Disney who has had a prolific career as the producer of films including She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, Pray The Devil Back to Hell, and Vessel. Much of the film’s promotional materials emphasize the trajectory of Rob Schenck, a white Evangelical minister and fixture of the far right, who comes to see his “pro-life” views must include a stand against the National Rifle Association (NRA). But the more interesting person in the film (who gets about equal screen time) is McBath. Her dentist father was part of the NAACP in 1960s Illinois, so McBath immediately understands the racial aspect of her son’s killing and others like it, but Schenck doesn’t bring up race until the film is more than half over. We in the audience see a marked difference in how a white congregation and a Black congregation react to his new rhetoric against guns and the NRA.

What goes unsaid in the conversations of right-wing, white men and the repeated montage of white guys at gun shows is the connection between gun violence and masculinity: the popular fantasy articulated by many of the men to be “a good guy with a gun” who stops “a bad guy with a gun” by shooting him, something which even many police officers rarely, if ever, do. While the men talk about “protecting their families” I thought about all the women who are threatened or killed by guns their own husbands, boyfriends, and acquaintances point at them, a concern to which these men seem purposefully oblivious. Instead, they talk about the government taking away their guns with the same vehemence they would about government taking away their balls.

Also fascinating is McBath’s meeting with Schenck in which both cite Bible passages to make their points, but which concludes with McBath in tears telling him, “It’s vitally important that you help. They will listen to you.” McBath states later, when she is alone on camera that although she doesn’t “condone” abortion, she would never interfere with another woman’s reproductive choice, but feels like she and Schenck have some common goals around guns, saying, “This is what this is all about: fighting for life.” We see her (again) testifying in front of Congress, and she eventually quits her job to devote her time to being the spokesperson for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

I couldn’t help being a little cynical about Schenck’s intentions. He keeps citing the Bible and Jesus for his newfound, anti-gun mindset but with his long support of right-wing politicians (including members of the Tea Party) I wondered if he had read any of the many Bible passages in which Jesus ministers to the poor, the people those same politicians build their careers disparaging while defunding public programs meant to benefit them.

We see the slow, frustrating course McBath and Schenck have ahead when Schenck meets with three other anti-choice stalwarts (all white men, of course) across a table and tries to persuade them the NRA is antithetical to Christian values, asking, “Is that a pro-life ethic?” Two of the men yell at him in response, but he seems to sway the third, a triumph we can’t help hoping will repeat itself at other tables across the country.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSP0Soy8ACk” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘Heart of a Dog,’ Not the Life of a Wife or Widow

Anderson was working on her film, ‘Heart of a Dog’ (in theaters now; it will be shown on HBO at a later date) when Reed died and she then took a year off before finishing the documentary. The film contains a loosely connected series of stories and images but is mostly a meditation on grief and death with a focus on her dog, a rat terrier named Lolabelle. What it isn’t about, at least not directly, is Reed, though he has a cameo in the film.

When Lou Reed died just over two years ago, a lot of people focused on the person he had spent his last years married to, performance artist, musician and composer Laurie Anderson. I’m always very wary when the public reacts to the private lives of well-known people, whether commenting on Halle Berry’s latest divorce or on Anderson, who has been internationally known since the early 1980s, but whom many seemed to first take notice of as Reed’s widow. She reacted to this sudden thrust into the spotlight (Anderson works and tours constantly but Reed’s was a more familiar name and face) with a rare thoughtfulness and grace. She wrote about how she and Reed met and came to be married with humor and a distinct lack of sentimentality (after their impromptu wedding, she had to rush out to perform in a concert). Still I hoped the demotion from being known as an acclaimed artist in her own right to being known mostly as the wife of a famous, dead artist didn’t last.

Anderson was working on her film, Heart of a Dog (in theaters now; it will be shown on HBO at a later date) when Reed died and she then took a year off before finishing the documentary. The film contains a loosely connected series of stories and images but is mostly a meditation on grief and death with a focus on her dog, a rat terrier named Lolabelle. What it isn’t about, at least not directly, is Reed, though he has a cameo in the film. When Anderson talks about “we” and “us” in relation to the dog we can presume she is talking about Reed, but she never mentions him by name. While Anderson describes in detail the last moments of her mother’s life, anyone looking for a similar scene about Reed (Anderson has written about his death, but doesn’t include it here) will be disappointed.

I admire Anderson’s resolve in not letting the voyeuristic tendencies of the public dictate the content of her work, and, as a longtime fan, was prepared to defend this film against the sexist snark I’ve seen directed toward it in some reviews. One male critic complained the narration was delivered in a “sing-song” voice, which is a little like complaining that Bob Dylan’s vocals are “too nasal.” Anyone who has listened to any of Anderson’s work (although she is a performance artist, most of her recorded work is audio; Dog is only her second full-length film after Home of the Brave, a filmed concert from 1986) will recognize the cadence she uses in the narration here, first describing a dream in which she gives birth to her dog. Doctors present Lolabelle to her in a pink blanket saying, “It’s a girl!” She explains that the birth had been a kind of performance because she had arranged for the doctors to say scripted lines and for the dog to be sewn into and then removed from her abdomen–which caused Lolabelle considerable discomfort. Anderson explains, “She wasn’t a puppy.”

The story/dream comments both on the role of dogs and cats as surrogate children (especially for those of us who aren’t raising kids) and of our own manipulation of our animals, so they will seem more child-like to us. Other sequences are less evocative: Anderson talking about the distinctive qualities of rat terriers reminded me of every dog person who has bored me with arguments about the superior traits of whatever breed of dog they happen to have. And Anderson’s illustrations of her dog’s entrance into the Tibetan Buddhist version of purgatory are striking and detailed, but perhaps not the best vessel for her talent.

When Anderson brought up her Buddhist beliefs I cringed a little. As a white person who has spent a fair amount of time in rooms full of white, privileged people who are also interested in Buddhism, I would gladly live the rest of my life without hearing one more of them begin a sentence, “My teacher says…” And I would recoil even more from a documentary narrator who intoned, “My pastor says…” Godard’s Goodbye to Language, in the scenes of his own dog, Roxie, showed more of the mystical dimension of our relationship to our animals than any of the “spiritual” talk in Heart of a Dog does.

To be fair, Anderson’s other work shows she is much more than a woman who loves dogs and has a Buddhist teacher: her most recent live installation featured a man who was imprisoned in Guantánamo. And in the film, her unique storytelling style is a perfect fit for the death of her mother who, “in a high voice I had never heard from her before,” formally thanks everyone gathered in her room for coming and hallucinates animals looking down at her in the bed from the ceiling. Anderson also tells a harrowing story from her childhood, but when Anderson mentions that she never really loved her mother, we never get more than a few hints about why.

I’m always complaining about films that have great cinematography and acting and an inadequate script, but besides the snappy animated version of Anderson we see at the start of the film, Dog’s visual components can’t equal the high points of the narration. After the umpteenth scene that has superimposed rain droplets streaming down, like tears on a face, over vintage footage of Anderson and her siblings as children or a contemporary rural snowscape, I wanted to say, “Okay, we get it. Let’s move on.” This film’s disjointed structure and emotional reticence would make a better album than a movie. An album also doesn’t demand an engaging overall story to hold our attention, but many of the scenes in this fairly short (75 minute) film had me (briefly) nodding off.

The film would probably connect more with an audience if Anderson had included more references to her and Reed’s relationship, but I respect her refusal to make this film about death about his death. Heart of a Dog, even as a love song by Reed plays over the closing credits, is a reminder that Anderson was much more than a wife and remains much more than a widow.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Girls and Women in the Middle of Nowhere: ‘The Wonders’ and ‘Bare’

In some ways Wolfgang could be a stand-in for all the directors and other outsiders who naively idealize and misinterpret contemporary rural settings and the business of farming.

In a scene early in Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders the main character, an adolescent girl named Gelsomina (a radiant Maria Alexandra Lungu), her short-tempered beekeeping, farmer father (Sam Louwyck), her slightly younger sister Marinella (a charming Agnese Graziani) and her two youngest sisters, twins who delight in not doing what they’re told and making messes, are taking a break from the hard work of the farm to splash and scream in an impossibly crystalline body of water. Then a man, fully dressed in black pants and shirt makes his way through a shallow lagoon and tells them they must be quiet. “We’re shooting,” he says. When they follow him back to an idyllic small waterfall set against a backdrop of a rock cliff, we see “the shooting” isn’t the hunters we heard at the beginning of the film but a camera crew and a beautiful, white-wigged, costumed, famous TV host (Monica Bellucci) shooting a promo for a new reality TV series that will take place in the region and feature local, farming families competing against each other on camera for a large cash prize.

“Countryside Wonders will be here,” the host announces to the camera and even after the shoot is finished, Gelsomina who, as the oldest, is her father’s main helper in transporting the bees, collecting honey and even removing stingers from his neck, can’t stop staring at the host who gives her one of the jeweled clips from her wig. Gelso wants the family to be part of the competition, but her father, Wolfgang, whose Italian is clearly not his first language and seems to have some vaguely apocalyptic beliefs that have driven him into farming with his family in the countryside, says, “We don’t need that crap.”

In some ways Wolfgang could be a stand-in for all the directors and other outsiders who naively idealize and misinterpret contemporary rural settings and the business of farming. Rohrwacher shows us not just the hard work and financial precariousness of the farm, that just one forgotten chore can potentially put into ruin, but also little slights, like when a customer at the farmers’ market asks if the price of the farm’s honey has gone up, in a tone that implies it’s not worth what the family is charging.

Wolfgang’s neighbor, who grew up in the area, is more philosophical about the reality show, “Maybe we will get some jobs or some tourists.” When he’s on the show, wearing the ridiculous costume the producers force all of the contestants into, he knows just what role he should play, complimenting the host, telling her he’s always wanted to be on her show, lamenting his status as a bachelor and getting the women in his family to sing a “traditional” song for the audience. Gelsomina’s stunt, in which she lets bees crawl out of her mouth while the troubled, 14-year-old boy who lives with the family whistles, is met with much less enthusiasm from both the host and the live audience.

The Wonders could also refer to the film’s gorgeous cinematography shot by Hélène Louvart, whether the scene includes that unnaturally glass-like lake, the crumbling farmhouse, the Tuscan countryside or the open, tender faces of the women and girls (including the girls’ mother, Angelica, played by the director’s sister, Alba Rohrwacher). The beekeeping scenes are surprisingly absorbing, as Gelsomina in her protective suit removes the swarming insects from the thick branch they coat into an open container or finds a pile of dead bees and in the bottom of another and declares them, “poisoned.” I have only a slight fear of bees, but I shuddered at some at these scenes, so anyone with a more serious phobia might want to look away. And anyone who has ever questioned the sanitary standards of small farms will want to look away from a number of scenes showing the gathering of honey in this family operation.

As beautiful and well-acted as the film is, I couldn’t help thinking once the credits rolled, “Is that it?” Although the film has opportunities for great emotional sweep it consistently avoids them by deliberately cutting away or downplaying action that would engage us more fully with these characters and their story. In some shots Lungu looks like she could have been painted by Modigliani and the film itself is more of a static portrait than an emotionally moving story. We spend a lot of time looking into Lungu’s face, but besides her desire to be on TV and get closer to the farmhand, we never really find out what she’s thinking.

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Stateside, another new film from a women-writer director that takes place far from the city is Natalia Leite’s Bare. Glee’s Dianna Agron and Paz de la Huerta (believably androgynous and a little grubby) are respectively, Sarah, a meek, young woman in small-town Nevada, working (and getting fired from) a series of menial jobs and Pepper a sexy, shoplifting drifter in a truck.

Inside this film’s sometimes over-the-top melodrama it has some acutely observed moments, like when Sarah’s best friend disparages a woman they both know, then over a period of time, the two of them become best friends and Sarah is the one they whisper about. We see the aimless wandering of the group of slightly past-high-school kids who don’t have anything like college plans, drinking, driving and shouting in the wide Nevada deserts and canyons. Other films show scenes like these only as preludes to disaster: this one just lets its bored, restless characters blow off steam.

Agron and de la Huerta have great chemistry and unlike many similar films about young women together, Bare doesn’t shy from showing these two characters having sex and, at least on Sarah’s part, falling in love. The film also has a more realistic take on working in a strip club than we are used to seeing in films, though the way the film equates dancing naked for money as degradation, the same way it makes Sarah’s sexual awakening with Pepper coincide with her being able to really let loose onstage, is a little retro. Agron is a lot better than I expected her to be (Glee isn’t exactly renowned for its great dramatic performances) and the film is beautifully shot (by Tobias Datum) but, as is too often the case with both indie and Hollywood films, the script is nowhere near the level of the performances or cinematography–and a good script is what makes a good movie. Maybe someday both Hollywood and the indie world will learn this lesson.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.