Female Filmmaker – Bitch Flicks

‘Older Than America’: Cultural Genocide and Reparations

One female-helmed film that directly addresses the horrific psychological, cultural, and spiritual legacy of Native boarding schools on Indigenous families in the United States is ‘Older Than America,’ a 2008 release, directed and produced by and starring Georgina Lightning, from a script by Lightning and Christine Kunewa Walker. … Rain’s journey is part of the collective story of her community and her tribe…

This guest post by Laura Shamas originally appeared at Bitch Flicks and is reposted here as part of our theme week on Indigenous Women. | Spoilers ahead.

In July 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission released a major report entitled “Honoring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future” about the cultural genocide against Aboriginal children, due to abuse in Canadian residential boarding schools run by churches and funded by the state. The report is based on testimony from over 6,000 survivors; there are 94 proposals for reparation recommended. The Canadian Broadcasting System notes that the odds of dying in a native residential school in Canada (“1 in 25”) were higher than dying as a Canadian serving in World War II (“1 in 26”).

One female-helmed film that directly addresses the horrific psychological, cultural, and spiritual legacy of native boarding schools on Indigenous families in the United States is Older Than America, a 2008 release, directed and produced by and starring Georgina Lightning, from a script by Lightning and Christine Kunewa Walker. Lightning is a Canadian First Nations filmmaker, and a Maskwacis Cree, registered with the Samson Cree Nation. As the film begins, a graphic informs us: “This story is inspired by actual events.”

Tracing the devastating intergenerational effects of cultural and physical genocide, as part of colonialism, in a film about Native people is difficult and daunting, but Lightning’s approach is original and compelling, aided by a strong ensemble cast that features Native actors. The film begins on the Fond Du Lac reservation in northern Minnesota, as schoolteacher Rain O’Rourke (Lightning), awakes in the middle of the night from an ominous dream about a young man in a Sun Dance ceremony. Rain lives with her longtime boyfriend, reservation Police Officer Johnny Goodfeather (Adam Beach). She mentions to Johnny that they need to secure the door latch; it’s clear that “something” is getting in.

The film’s storyline is bifurcated, propelled by time; the plot of the present is jarringly interrupted by traumatic, haunting memories of the past, depicted in grey flashbacks. And the present is also connected to the future, as few are able to take action until the truth about the past is acknowledged. Ghosts also populate the present, filmed in color.

We follow Rain, the film’s protagonist, as she comes to terms with her past through visions and dreams, and her future, too, when she learns the disturbing truth about what happened to her mother and uncle at the nearby Catholic native residential school. Rain’s journey is part of the collective story of her community and her tribe; until the facts about what happened to Native students locked in a school cellar in the 1950s are revealed and the children properly mourned, Rain and the future of her tribe are in jeopardy. Children are “the hope” of any culture. When entire generations of youth are traumatized or killed by the church and state, what is the remedy? Older Than America looks for answers to this key question.

As Rain works in her job as a schoolteacher on the rez, she begins to have upsetting flashback episodes. An adult male spirit (Dan Harrison), the same one who was in her initial Sun Dance dream, appears more often, as her guide.

The importance and condemnation of the Catholic church, in regards to what happened to the community, is explored early in the film. Rain’s guardian, Auntie “Apple” (Tantoo Cardinal), consults in confession with Father Bartoli (Stephen Yoakam). We learn that Apple feels guilty for helping to commit Rain’s mother Irene (Rose Berens) to the Penrose Psychiatric Hospital. Father Bartoli says that Irene is delusional and must remain there for her own good.

Luke (Bradley Cooper), a geologist from Minneapolis, embodies the “non-Native” perspective in the film; as an outsider, Luke functions as a device to help a non-Native audience understand what’s happening on the reservation, since he can ask a lot of questions. He arrives to investigate a strange earthquake near a cemetery on the old residential boarding school property on the outskirts of town — now closed and condemned. Luke connects with policeman Goodfeather, whose father Pete is the tribe’s medicine man (Dennis Banks). Luke has his own vision in his car when he suddenly sees a former college roommate with a gun to his head. A significant line of dialogue in the film is said by Pete to Luke: “Some stories never make the history books.”

Luke has a theory about “plate collisions” that he’s exploring through his research in the region — a concept with metaphorical resonance throughout the rest of the film, applicable to the tension between: Native and white cultures; physical and spiritual worlds; Christianity and traditional Native beliefs.

It turns out that a wealthy developer is working with the current mayor of the town to turn the boarding school property into a deluxe resort. Luke continues his research at the Historical Society of Penrose County, where he eventually uncovers another earthquake story related to the school from the 1950s, involving Native students who died in a cellar.

The haunting ghosts of these dead Native students populate the film, and there’s a key line of dialogue that emphasizes “ghosts coming out of the closet.” Atrocities depicted in the film include a child being forced to swallow soap because she spoke in her native language, and Native children called “base savages” and then beaten.

The old school site affects Luke, as he goes back later to investigate the quake. He descends into a haunted cellar, where he finds a weathered sign inscribed with General Richard H. Pratt’s famous motto: “Kill the Indian – Save the Man.” Pratt is the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School; it’s considered the prototype for all Native residential schools in the United States, and based on a military model.

Luke asks Johnny, “Do you believe in spirits?” It’s revealed that Luke once had a Native American college roommate who killed himself, after the roommate’s father killed himself. Here, the theme of intergenerational Native suicide, due to the fracturing of families, is noted by a non-Native character.

Throughout the film, Lightning explores what happens when the trauma of genocide is disbelieved or forcibly silenced. We learn that it is Father Bartoli, aided by a complicit Auntie Apple, who is responsible for Rain’s mother Irene receiving electric shock treatments, for revealing what happened at the Catholic native residential school. Irene was silenced through the shock treatments and sedation, and Rain realizes how wrong this is: “You want to talk about crazy…”

Medicine man Pete educates outsider Luke on how cultural genocide works on families and identity, starting with taking children right from their mothers’ arms: “They tried to beat the Indian right out of us.” And: “There are two ways to conquer a nation: kill ‘em or take away everything that defines who they are.” A mysterious murder near the school grounds in the present day is hushed up, related to what happened at the native school years ago and Christianity.

One poignant part in the third act illustrates why Rain didn’t marry earlier in her life: out of fear, because she thought there was something wrong with her and her fractured family. But she comes to understand that it was due to the unreported abuse from the boarding school – as Rain, too, was separated from her mother by Father Bartoli and Apple when Irene tried to out the abuse. Rain finally confronts Apple, whose name means in Native culture “red on the outside, white on the inside.” Eventually, Rain frees Irene, and ensures that the children who had been killed at the native school in the 1950s are given a proper burial.

One of the important themes of this film is how to heal from a century of cultural and physical genocide — a topic entirely relevant to what’s happening in the world right now. Writer-director-actor Lightning provides several answers: truth, ceremony, and honoring the old ways – “things that are older than America.” In a sweat lodge ceremony, Rain learns that the adult male spirit who has guided her journey was her uncle, Walter Many Lightnings, who was punished at the school (Dan Harrison). In the sweat lodge, Rain is told, “Our dreams and our spirits cannot be taken.” Rain also learns the power of forgiveness: “The truths of the past… Forgive these people for what they don’t understand.”

Near the end of the film, rez radio announcer Richard Two Rivers (Wes Studi) observes, “Everything we Indians do is in a circle.” As Rain finally welcomes her mother Irene home, everyone gathers for a ceremony. Apple and Irene hug, a start on the road to forgiveness. But a card at the film’s end reminds us of grim facts: Native Americans were forced to enroll in boarding schools are recently as 1975, and Amnesty International reports that the death rate of the Native population is six times higher than any other ethnic group.

Older Than America traces the collective intergenerational trauma that cannot heal until the truth of it comes to consciousness, in a country, a community, a tribe, and in a family. The bond between mother and daughter is the main connection that galvanizes the reckoning of truth in Older Than America. Rain and Irene are united at the end, and we see the ghosts of the native school children and Uncle Walter fade away into the woods.

This film has been categorized as horror and sold under the title American Evil in the U.K. for its 2012 DVD release, probably because of its use of supernatural ghost characters. The atrocities that have been committed at Native residential schools in the U.S. are horrific. The U.S. should follow Canada’s example and begin serious discussions about reparation in America for abuse at Native residential schools. It is long overdue.

Laura Shamas, Ph.D., is a writer and mythologist. She is a member of the Chickasaw Nation. In 2014, she was part of “The Undisciplined Research Project” at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles and wrote about researching native boarding schools: “Memories That Haunt and Reaffirm.” Website: laurashamas.com.

On Breathing, Not Breathing, and Forms of Abuse That We Don’t Have the Words to Express

‘Breathe,’ the second feature-length film from French actor and director Mélanie Laurent, offers an unusually nuanced portrait of abusive relationships – specifically through the lens of a toxic friendship between two teenage girls.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Breathe, the second feature-length film from French actor and director Mélanie Laurent, offers an unusually nuanced portrait of abusive relationships – specifically through the lens of a toxic friendship between two teenage girls.

Based on a YA novel of the same name, Breathe (also known by its French title, Respire) follows an average, decently popular girl named Charlie as she is befriended and then betrayed by the exciting new girl at her school, Sarah. Sarah at first seems to be the perfect companion – her attention makes Charlie feel special, and they become close friends very quickly. As time goes on, though, and Sarah gets bored, her easy-going always-affable mask starts to slip, revealing an angry, demanding, hypercritical face underneath. Charlie, shocked by these changes, scared and uncomfortable, tries to figure out what she did wrong, why Sarah is acting this way, and what she can do to repair their relationship. When her efforts fail, Sarah gets more and more hostile, until their relationship reaches a jarring conclusion.

What makes Breathe so fascinating to watch is that it gets the nuances of abusive relationships right. Sarah honestly believes herself to be the victim in this friendship, and her confidence and sense of entitlement are enough to make Charlie question her own judgement. It isn’t that Sarah’s cold and calculating – she’s not the smooth-talking criminal mastermind that sociopaths are often portrayed to be – she’s just so self-absorbed that whether or not she hurts someone else isn’t a blip on her radar. She gets closer to Charlie whenever she wants something, and callously disregards her feelings again once she has it.

In the film’s most notable sub-plot, Charlie’s mother is facing a similar situation with her estranged husband. Outside observers keep telling her he’s just an asshole, but she argues that he’s never hit her, so she can forgive him for all the emotional abuse. Charlie finds herself acting out the same scenario with Sarah – forgiving her, even once Sarah’s made it clear that she isn’t a friend, trying to explain why Sarah is this way – feeling pity and compassion for her, because of her terrible home life – trying to be the bigger person and move on. In both cases, it’s clear to the audience that these relationships should end, but the question Breathe holds out to us is “Why don’t they?” Why are Charlie and her mother so unwilling to cut these ties; why don’t they just walk away? Why don’t we have the right words to talk about abuse when it doesn’t involve physical violence?

The performances from Joséphine Japy and Lou De Laâge as Charlie and Sarah are what make the movie. Breathe is, for the most part, about subtle forms of emotional abuse – about how the way you say something carries a message; the way Sarah teaches Charlie not to have boundaries by turning a few degrees cooler every time she encounters one; the way she uses a condescending tone to say things that aren’t true. I wouldn’t go so far as to call the movie understated, but it’s patient and careful in the work it’s trying to do, and so are its actors. Even though the story moves forward quite slowly, we’re drawn in by the characters – we want to understand what’s going on between them almost just as much as Charlie does.

Laurent’s similarly patient direction creates an effectively dark mood, like storm clouds gathering on the horizon – something that’s also captured in the international trailer. It’s not accurate to say that this is a world you want to live inside, as you’re watching, but it’s a world that’s interesting enough that you’ll want to sit with it and watch events play out.

One of the issues the film grapples with well is what constitutes bad behaviour – at what point you can accuse someone of having wronged you – and its subtlety and ambiguity plays into that. Often, our standard for whether someone has done something wrong lies in whether they’ve done something they didn’t have the legal right to do, but so much of human interaction is subjective that it isn’t (and can’t be) a crime to be mean to someone. It would be very hard for Charlie to objectively demonstrate that Sarah’s behaviour is harmful – that all the little things Sarah does have damaged her in some way – but we can see very plainly, watching this friendship play out, that Sarah is slowly destroying Charlie’s entire life. We can see very plainly that she’s doing something wrong, though it may be hard to say what it is.

There’s also a sense in which, watching this film as an adult, you want to say, “OK, she’s not your friend. Move on,” but that would be missing the point. Breathe is about exploring relational dynamics that we don’t have a framework for talking about – it’s about following the characters into a murky area full of confused and conflicted emotions, and watching how that confusion works against Charlie to stop her from just dumping Sarah and walking away. If I’m honest, there was certainly a time in my life when I also believed – as Charlie seems to believe – that someone had to do something objectively wrong in order for me to decide we weren’t friends. It couldn’t just be because I felt bad when we were together.

Breathe, like many YA stories, is a bit like watching someone wrestle with life problems I’ve already solved, but it’s also an important attempt to articulate those problems in an understandable way – to bring them out into the open and give us a new lens to see them through, and a new touchstone that we can use to discuss them.

If you want to feel uncomfortable in a good way and sink inside this insightful, carefully-constructed film, Breathe opens in New York on Friday, Sept. 11, and in Los Angeles on Sept. 18.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze

Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on the Female Gaze.

“… a person who can find the transfiguration of sex in her life is no longer a person who can be directed.”

– Catherine Breillat

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has spent her career exploring female sexuality. She hasn’t done so in a comfortable, easy way. When The Woman says to The Man, “Watch me where I’m unwatchable” in Anatomy of Hell, this could very well be Breillat’s message to her audiences as she presents female desire in harsh, jarring narratives that completely subvert the male gaze.

Normally, if we talk about subverting the male gaze and focusing on the female gaze in film, it’s cause for celebration. Finally! We scream. We’re coming!

Breillat’s female gaze is different, though. It pushes us to places of complete discomfort and sometimes disgust, and forces and challenges us to think about the deeply twisted cultural expectations surrounding women and sex.

Sometimes a shock is what it takes to bring us to places of transfiguration. We can’t smoothly transition to the female gaze after centuries of being surrounded and objectified by the male gaze. Breillat delivers shock after shock that serve to transfigure how we see ourselves and our culture. This isn’t comfortable, but it’s powerful.

The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.

Breillat’s first film, based off her novel, Le Soupirail, was A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille). Produced in 1976, it was quickly banned and wasn’t released in France until 1999. The film centers around 14-year-old Alice, who is discovering and attempting to navigate her sexual awakening. A Real Young Girl is avant-garde puberty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FXxS9VevE”]

There are moments in the film that are confusing and grotesque (most notably one of her fantasies that involves barbed wire and a ripped-up earthworm). While I found some of these scenes disturbing, I like being disturbed. The worm scene horrified me at first, but then I realized that when I was in high school, the hit teen comedy involved a dude literally fucking a pie. Teenage sexuality is weird and when we are faced with a teen girl’s sexuality–something we are not used to seeing (unless she is a sexual object)–in all of its confusion and vacillation between intense desire and disgust, we are uncomfortable. Breillat wants us to be uncomfortable; she wants to push us to the edge to that visceral experience that will challenge how we see both female sexuality and film depictions of female sexuality.

Fat Girl (À ma sœur!), released in 2001, follows two sisters–Elena, 15, and Anaïs, 12–as they vacation with their parents. Elena is conventionally beautiful, and while she likes boys and has experimented sexually, she wants to remain a virgin until she’s with someone who “loves” her. She quickly develops a relationship with a young man who is frustrated with her desire to not have sex. He pressures her into anal sex (which hurts her), tries to force her to have oral sex, and finally convinces her he loves her and she has sex with him. In all of these instances, Anaïs is in the room–feigning sleep, asking them to stop, or, when they finally have sex, crying.

Anaïs’s views on sex are very different than Elena’s. She is starting to feel sexual–she’s not a teenager yet, but she’s not a child. Her desires range from banana splits to having sex just to get it over with. She has sexual desires, and her responses to Elena’s sexual experiences show both naiveté and jealousy. Their ages, their exterior looks, their sexual experiences (or lack thereof) all inform Breillat’s treatment of the sisters’ relationship with one another, with their own burgeoning sexuality, and with a culture that insists on sexualizing Elena and ignoring Anaïs. Their desires–Elena as internalized (and then disappointed) object, Anaïs as frustrated subject–are common categories for adolescent girls to fall into.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHRJRbM2EAg”]

Fat Girl (read Breillat’s commentary on the title here) is disturbing in its depictions of some of Elena and Anaïs’s experiences. However, the end of the film is shocking and violent. After Elena and her mother are brutally killed at a rest stop, the murderer rapes Anaïs in the woods. The next morning, she tells the police she wasn’t raped, and she looks at the camera, in an ending that clearly reflects The 400 Blows. Like the Truffaut classic, we are saddened and disturbed at the life trajectory of our young protagonists, and have no idea where their lives will go from here. We just have a frozen young face staring at us, implicating us in their fate.

Anaïs, at the end, seems to embrace her rape (as her meaningless loss of virginity that she wanted) and deny its violence. This is made even more traumatic since her rapist murdered her mother and sister (her sister who had just become sexually active, and her mother who wanted to punish her for it).

The message here is that girls cannot win. A patriarchal culture–full of boys who think they’re entitled to sex and men who violently rape and kill women–cares little for female desire and agency. This world is a dangerous place for girls. This world treats pretty girls like objects, and unpretty girls like nothing. Their desires are complicated and real, but are eclipsed by toxic masculinity.

Released in 2004, Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie De L’Enfer) is a film that pulls together pornography, misogyny, and female sexuality in a way that shocks and disgusts (male reviewers in particular wrote scathing, condescending reviews of the film). The Woman visits a gay bar and attempts suicide in the bathroom–she is tired of being a woman and being hated by men, and surmises that gay men hate women the most. The Man, however, saves her and she offers to pay him to stay in her home for four days to “watch her where she is unwatchable.” What follows is, for some viewers, unwatchable.

The Woman is naked for most of the film (a body double is used for vaginal shots), and The Man is played by an Italian porn star. His homosexuality serves to completely upend the typical male gaze. He’s disgusted by much of what he’s seeing and experiencing, and the understanding that this primal, visceral, shocking female desire is at the focus of the film (and has absolutely nothing to do with male desire) reflects a culture that typically focuses only on the male gaze and male pleasure. In this culture, female sexuality isn’t a consideration.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbFSZiT2-a4″]

When The Man drinks a glass of water with a used-tampon teabag, certainly the audience is meant to feel disgust. Perhaps some audience members actually gagged at the sight. How many scenes, however, in porn (explicitly) or mainstream film (suggested), feature women swallowing male excretions? Do we blink? Or is it just part of what we expect it means to be a heterosexual woman?

Jamie Russell astutely observes at the BBC, “For all the shocks, though, this is a stoically serious movie: it’s anti-porn, a transgressive sex movie that’s not against pornography but against the (male-dominated) objectification of women’s bodies.”

In an interview with The Guardian, Breillat articulated that her female gaze should directly threaten the male gaze, and that men should examine their own sexuality in the face of female desire:

“It’s a joke – if men can’t desire liberated women, then tough. Does it mean they can only desire a slave? Men need to question the roots of their own desire. Why is it that historically men have this need to deny women to be able to desire them?”

The reporter points out that Breillat had said “that censorship was a male pre-occupation, and that the X certificate was linked to the X chromosome,” and Breillat goes on to discuss the religious and patriarchal reasons to censor female desire, which is directly connected to keeping power away from women.

Breillat’s 1999 Romance was originally given an X rating (or banned in some countries). At Senses of Cinema, Brian Price notes that “Breillat’s statement was echoed in the French poster for the film, which features a naked woman with her hand between her legs. A large red X is printed across the image, thus revealing the source of the trouble: a woman in touch with her own sense of sexual pleasure.”

And that’s always the problem, isn’t it? Breillat’s work pushes boundaries and forces us to live in the intense intimacy and discomfort of a female gaze that we are unused to due to social oppression of women and women’s sexuality (at the hands of patriarchal religious and government systems). The literal and figurative red X over Breillat’s work–and female sexuality–needs to be stripped away to reveal what’s underneath–which isn’t always pretty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpH-V6kkOwI”]

___________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

‘Older Than America’: Cultural Genocide and Reparations

Children are “the hope” of any culture. When entire generations of youth are traumatized or killed by the church and state, what is the remedy? ‘Older Than America’ looks for answers to this key question.

This is a guest post by Laura Shamas.

In July 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission released a major report entitled “Honoring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future” about the cultural genocide against aboriginal children, due to abuse in Canadian residential boarding schools run by churches and funded by the state. The report is based on testimony from over 6,000 survivors; there are 94 proposals for reparation recommended. The Canadian Broadcasting System notes that the odds of dying in a native residential school in Canada (“1 in 25”) were higher than dying as a Canadian serving in World War II (“1 in 26”).

One female-helmed film that directly addresses the horrific psychological, cultural, and spiritual legacy of native boarding schools on indigenous families in the United States is Older Than America, a 2008 release, directed and produced by and starring Georgina Lightning, from a script by Lightning and Christine Kunewa Walker. Lightning is a Canadian First Nations filmmaker, and a Maskwacis Cree, registered with the Samson Cree Nation. As the film begins, a graphic informs us: “This story is inspired by actual events.”

Tracing the devastating intergenerational effects of cultural and physical genocide, as part of colonialism, in a film about native people is difficult and daunting, but Lightning’s approach is original and compelling, aided by a strong ensemble cast that features native actors. The film begins on the Fond Du Lac reservation in northern Minnesota, as schoolteacher Rain O’Rourke (Lightning), awakes in the middle of the night from an ominous dream about a young man in a Sun Dance ceremony. Rain lives with her longtime boyfriend, reservation Police Officer Johnny Goodfeather (Adam Beach). She mentions to Johnny that they need to secure the door latch; it’s clear that “something” is getting in.

We follow Rain, the film’s protagonist, as she comes to terms with her past through visions and dreams, and her future, too, when she learns the disturbing truth about what happened to her mother and uncle at the nearby Catholic native residential school. Rain’s journey is part of the collective story of her community and her tribe; until the facts about what happened to native students locked in a school cellar in the 1950s are revealed and the children properly mourned, Rain and the future of her tribe are in jeopardy. Children are “the hope” of any culture. When entire generations of youth are traumatized or killed by the church and state, what is the remedy? Older Than America looks for answers to this key question.

Luke (Bradley Cooper), a geologist from Minneapolis, embodies the “non-native” perspective in the film; as an outsider, Luke functions as a device to help a non-native audience understand what’s happening on the reservation, since he can ask a lot of questions. He arrives to investigate a strange earthquake near a cemetery on the old residential boarding school property on the outskirts of town—now closed and condemned. Luke connects with policeman Goodfeather, whose father Pete is the tribe’s medicine man (Dennis Banks). Luke has his own vision in his car when he suddenly sees a former college roommate with a gun to his head. A significant line of dialogue in the film is said by Pete to Luke: “Some stories never make the history books.”

Luke has a theory about “plate collisions” that he’s exploring through his research in the region—a concept with metaphorical resonance throughout the rest of the film, applicable to the tension between: native and white cultures; physical and spiritual worlds; Christianity and traditional native beliefs.

The haunting ghosts of these dead native students populate the film, and there’s a key line of dialogue that emphasizes “ghosts coming out of the closet.” Atrocities depicted in the film include a child being forced to swallow soap because she spoke in her native language, and native children called “base savages” and then beaten.

The old school site affects Luke, as he goes back later to investigate the quake. He descends into a haunted cellar, where he finds an weathered sign inscribed with General Richard H. Pratt’s famous motto: “Kill the Indian – Save the Man.” Pratt is the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School; it’s considered the prototype for all native residential schools in the United States, and based on a military model.

Luke asks Johnny, “Do you believe in spirits?” It’s revealed that Luke once had a native American college roommate who killed himself, after the roommate’s father killed himself. Here, the theme of intergenerational native suicide, due to the fracturing of families, is noted by a non-native character.

One poignant part in the Third Act illustrates why Rain didn’t marry earlier in her life: out of fear, because she thought there was something wrong with her and her fractured family. But she comes to understand that it was due to the unreported abuse from the boarding school – as Rain, too, was separated from her mother by Father Bartoli and Apple when Irene tried to out the abuse. Rain finally confronts Apple, whose name means in native culture “red on the outside, white on the inside.” Eventually, Rain frees Irene, and ensures that the children who had been killed at the native school in the 1950s are given a proper burial.

One of the important themes of this film is how to heal from a century of cultural and physical genocide—a topic entirely relevant to what’s happening in the world right now. Writer-director-actor Lightning provides several answers: truth, ceremony, and honoring the old ways – “things that are older than America.” In a sweat lodge ceremony, Rain learns that the adult male spirit who has guided her journey was her uncle, Walter Many Lightnings, who was punished at the school (Dan Harrison). In the sweat lodge, Rain is told, “Our dreams and our spirits cannot be taken.” Rain also learns the power of forgiveness: “The truths of the past…Forgive these people for what they don’t understand.”

Near the end of the film, rez radio announcer Richard Two Rivers (Wes Studi) observes, “Everything we Indians do is in a circle.” As Rain finally welcomes her mother Irene home, everyone gathers for a ceremony. Apple and Irene hug, a start on the road to forgiveness. But a card at the film’s end reminds us of grim facts: native Americans were forced to enroll in boarding schools are recently as 1975, and Amnesty International reports that the death rate of the native population is six times higher than any other ethnic group.

This film has been categorized as horror and sold under the title American Evil in the United Kingdom for its 2012 DVD release, probably because of its use of supernatural ghost characters. The atrocities that have been committed at native residential schools in the U.S. are horrific. The United States of America should follow Canada’s example and begin serious discussions about reparation in America for abuse at native residential schools. It is long overdue.

‘Miss Julie’ Is My Very Worst Date, Nineteenth Century Style

It’s hard to avoid the sense that this is a story about how the rich are in decline – how complacency has made them helpless and weak enough for the poor to pull them down. It’s hard to know if we’re supposed to think that John has the right idea by using Julie as a stepping stone to move toward his goals – if we’re supposed to think she deserves what she gets because she was stupid and drunk and coming onto him. The play seems to think so – Chastain and Ullmann seem to disagree – the movie itself seems to be a confused mixture of the two viewpoints.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Now on DVD, Liv Ullmann’s adaptation of Miss Julie is a complicated, if not always very uplifting, exploration of the intersection between class and gender. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, there’s still a thin angry thread of hatred for women and poor people vibrating under the surface. Spoilers for a story that’s over a hundred years old.

Miss Julie is a pretty straight-forward story about class differences at the turn of the nineteenth century. Based on the 1888 play of the same name, the movie follows Julie, the daughter of a wealthy Baron, as she tries to seduce her father’s Valet, John. It isn’t a romance story – Julie and John don’t love each other. In fact, they kind of hate each other, but they’re two people who happen to be in close proximity, and they’re bored. Because it’s based on a one-room play, most of the action consists of watching two people argue with each other long past the point when most of us would walk away, and the drama consists mostly of trying to figure out which of them is The Worst.

The film moves through roughly four stages, marked by unexpected changes in John’s behaviour.

In the first, and best, and most palpably uncomfortable stage. Julie sexually harasses John in a style I’d like to call 50 Shades of Awkward and Unpleasant. In Jessica Chastain’s portrayal, Julie pretends to be more confident than she is. She wants John to like her – she wants him to be infatuated with her – and, because he isn’t, she abuses her power over him by ordering him to behave as though he is. There’s a creepy and overtly sexual moment when she makes him start kissing her boots, but there are also much sadder and mundane requests. She makes him dance with her, bring her flowers, and offer her a glass of wine. And each time he grudgingly, angrily does any of these things, she smiles and thanks him as though it were his idea, trying hard to pretend that it was.

Even at this stage in the story, there’s a pitiable element to Julie’s power. It’s true that she can coerce John into doing whatever she wants him to do, but it’s also clear that she doesn’t know what she wants from him at all. John’s much more worldly, and, behind his clenched, contemptuous expression, we can tell that he sees her much more clearly than she sees herself. He’s annoyed mostly because she’s playing stupid, childish games with him – not because he feels threatened by her presence. There’s an uncomfortable vulnerability to Julie in these scenes, even on the first viewing, because we can see that she’s exposing all her weaknesses to John without knowing.

The second stage of the story comes when John – quite suddenly, almost like he’s gotten fed-up and reached a breaking point – confesses that he’s actually in love with Julie. He has, in fact been madly, passionately in love with her for years, and that’s why it torments him so much when she teases him this way. Julie is surprised by this, but pleased, and there’s a bit of the normal Heathcliff what-will-your-family-think we-can-never-be-together stuff before they both cross a line and have sex.

In the third stage, John starts to look like a douchebag. He lies to and manipulates the kitchen maid he’s dating, and turns on Julie as soon as he has enough power to do so. Because she’s a woman, and this is 1888, she can’t ever tell anyone she had sex with a servant. Julie’s also afraid she might get pregnant, and she’s shocked that John would lie to her and pretend to be the perfect (which, in her eyes, means subservient) boyfriend just to get her into bed. John’s happy he wrecked her life and crows over the fact that she’s now just as gross as him. With the class barrier gone, he now has more power because of his gender, and he slut-shames her for, like, an hour in the middle of the movie. As Julie starts to get more panicked about what she’s done and what’s going to happen to her when everyone finds out, John tries to convince her that the only way to salvage the situation is to steal her father’s money and run away with him, so that he can start the business he’s always dreamed of. After a lot of coaxing, Julie goes along with this plan, but John changes his mind again.

In the final and shortest stage of the movie, the sun starts to rise and John sobers up and realizes that he’s been too ambitious for his own good. He doesn’t want to take the risk of running away with Julie anymore – he wants to stay in the comfortable little life he’s made for himself as the Baron’s servant. This is, after all, The Way of the World. Julie’s still in a state of total crisis, though, and he needs to stop anyone from finding out about what happened with her, so that he doesn’t lose his job. So, he convinces her to kill herself, and that’s the end.

Miss Julie is really obviously interested in the intersection of class and gender – like, obvious to the point that Julie and John do a little bit of dream interpretation, discussing how they’re always climbing or falling in their sleep – but, because the author’s take on the situation is kind of horrible, it’s hard to tell where the movie comes down. If you don’t want to read Strindberg’s entire introduction to the play (which I am told is even more misogynist in its original version), suffice to say that John’s a special kind of Poor because he wants to be refined, but he’s still dirty and ignorant on the inside, and Julie is a man-hating half-woman who’s destroying the fabric of society because she doesn’t know her place.

It’s also not surprising that Chastain had a tough time with the idea that Julie kills herself because John tells her to. I have a tough time with that, too, and I’m not sure I buy her explanation that it’s ultimately empowering because Julie was suicidal all along and wanted John to help her self-destruct.

Director Liv Ullmann seems to want us to understand Julie not as a horrible deviant, but as a victim of her circumstance, reacting in an understandable way. The film opens with a sequence in which we watch a young Julie wander bored and alone through her father’s mansion, and implies that her interest in John is born from the same lack of playmates, coloured by a strange naiveté that comes from leading a sheltered life. (Chastain is also much older than Julie, making her awkwardness and innocence seem like a psychological outcome rather than the product of youth).

At the same time, it’s hard to avoid the sense that this is a story about how the rich are in decline – how complacency has made them helpless and weak enough for the poor to pull them down. It’s hard to know if we’re supposed to think that John has the right idea by using Julie as a stepping stone to move toward his goals – if we’re supposed to think she deserves what she gets because she was stupid and drunk and coming onto him. The play seems to think so – Chastain and Ullmann seem to disagree – the movie itself seems to be a confused mixture of the two viewpoints. This version of Miss Julie isn’t so much a reaction against or dialogue with the original as it is a faithful performance that tries to sneak in a more empathetic worldview around the sides. It’s very interesting, but I’m not sure it completely succeeds.

Aside from the movie’s weird politics, Chastain and Colin Farrell are both very interesting to watch, but it’s a long haul. I wasn’t kidding when I said it’s mostly two hours of people fighting in the kitchen. That’s something that doesn’t work as well without the visceral immediacy of a stage.

All in all, I’m not sorry I watched this, but I enjoyed the first leg of the story, which seemed to be uncomfortable on purpose, more than I enjoyed the last legs of the story, which seemed like the playwright’s ghost was giving us the finger.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.

The Making of a Caribbean-Canadian Sci-Fi: ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’

When speaking over the phone, Sharon’s enthusiasm for this pioneering adaptation of a Caribbean Canadian sci-fi novel emanates as though this was a fresh and newly discovered idea. In fact, Sharon has been working on creating this film for the past 15 years (while also establishing herself as a published playwright, writer, actor and award winning director) and although the journey has been long, she strongly believes that now is the perfect time to transition this well-nurtured idea into tangible reality.

This guest post by Amanda Parris appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Interview with the filmmaker below.

I was in my first year of university when I first read Nalo Hopkinson’s critically acclaimed novel, Brown Girl in the Ring as part of a Humanities course entitled Cultures of Resistance in the Americas. It had never occurred to me to think of futuristic dystopias and sci-fi literature as part and parcel of a resistance culture that has sustained African Diasporic cultures in the Americas until I was introduced to this work. A few pages into the novel, I was hooked. Located in the city where I have spent most of my life, the story is set in Toronto, a downtown core cordoned off from the surrounding suburbia where the rich and wealthy have fled. In the opening pages Hopkinson sets the scene:

When Toronto’s economic base collapsed, investors, commerce, and government withdrew into the suburb cities leaving the rotten core to decay. Those who stayed were the one’s who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave. The street people. The poor people. The ones who didn’t see the writing on the wall, or who were too stubborn to give up their homes. Or who saw the decline of authority as an opportunity. As the police force left, it sparked large-scale chaos in the city core: the Riots. The satellite cities quickly raised roadblocks at their borders to keep Toronto out. The only unguarded exit from the city core was now over water, by boat or prop plane from the Toronto Island mini-airport to the American side of Niagra Falls.

Nalo Hopkinson

Seventeen years after the publication of Brown Girl in the Ring, Toronto was named the No. 1 city in the world to live in by The Economist. But who benefits or lives the reality of this status? The rise of condo-mania in the downtown core has also led to the rapid gentrification and resulting dislocation of numerous communities – the individuals affected fit a disturbingly similar profile to the ones that Nalo envisioned eventually cordoned off from health care, electricity and technology. Her description of The Burn, that walled-off section of Toronto, feels hauntingly familiar and it is this resonance that writer/director Sharon Lewis feels will hook people into the film adaptation of the novel that she is currently working on: Brown Girl in the Ring – The Prequel.

The Prequel puts the coming-of-age story of the novel’s protagonist, a young girl named Ti-Jeanne, front and center. The film will illustrate her first steps as she moves into the role of the heroine that she becomes in the novel. Beyond an exploration into the particular otherworldly gifts Ti-Jeanne possesses and her ability to navigate the dystopian landscape that defines her home, Ti-Jeanne’s character is also challenged by a more familiar narrative of conflict between her Caribbean and Canadian cultural identities. When speaking over the phone, Sharon’s enthusiasm for this pioneering adaptation of a Caribbean Canadian sci-fi novel emanates as though this was a fresh and newly discovered idea. In fact, Sharon has been working on creating this film for the past 15 years (while also establishing herself as a published playwright, writer, actor and award winning director) and although the journey has been long, she strongly believes that now is the perfect time to transition this well-nurtured idea into tangible reality. Last week Sharon successfully completed a crowdfunding campaign to support the film. Achieving this recent milestone has affirmed her belief that there is an audience out there excited for a story like this and that the moment is now for the film to be realized. She says,

Well I think we’re in the zeitgeist. I think that the novel and the film are coming to life in an appropriate time. I’m not sure if in 1998 we would have understood that this is so relevant to our present day lives. I think that with the rise of social media and technology we have a lot more access to those images so all of a sudden Ferguson, Baltimore, Detroit, all of those are in our consciousness in a way that it wouldn’t have been in 1998 because we didn’t have the same kind of access and the people living within those situations didn’t have the same kind of access. We see the rise of public videos being used in legal battles. That was never the case in the late 1990s. So all of a sudden police officers are being held accountable according to public videos. It doesn’t mean that they’re always being held to justice but they’re actually being held accountable which again is being used as a catalyst for people to riot. In the film that is the trigger for all of the things that happen. There is an economic collapse and the poor people are tired of being poor and they rise up. I think that if you look at why they are rising up it’s because there’s an access to social media in a way that they didn’t have before and then the only way to shut them down is to seclude them and cut off their electricity and cut off their ability to communicate with the outside world where their reality is going on.

Corporate and government decisions to seclude a section of the population following their mass politicized mobilization as a result of increased connectivity and communication feels eerily prophetic in the current era recently dubbed “Black Spring.” Sharon revealed that part of Nalo’s inspiration for the novel came from poignant observations of the harsh realities occurring south of the border:

When I talked to Nalo she was inspired by Detroit in terms of what post-apocalyptic Toronto would look like and this is 1998. So she was in Detroit and looking at a city that basically had an invisible wall around it. You had all the wealthy industrialists living in a particular area and then all the Black neighbourhoods were burnt out, abandoned, policed – heavily policed and the public school system was on its way down. So that’s the Toronto that you’re going to see in my film.

Although set in Toronto, Sharon recognizes that this story of economic flight and extreme disconnection and alienation is one that can resonate beyond the city’s borders. As a child of the Caribbean Diaspora, the extremes of wealth and poverty sitting side-by-side in an imbalanced yet normalized fashion is disconcertingly familiar for Sharon:

I spent a lot of my childhood in Jamaica and Trinidad and a lot of that reality is already there. There were already people that were cut off from technology or cut off from electricity who were having to make do. And right across the street they were seeing the glistening lights. I remember in Jamaica driving through Kingston and on the hillside you’d see people living in zinc shacks, still walking to the river to get water and then just a couple of feet down from them was this massive, beautiful house with satellite dishes and massive technology.

Sharon Lewis

Prescient in the film will be the way that these kinds of divergences in experiences create walls between people – sometimes physical but often subconscious – thereby separating them from each other in ways that enable the current world order:

There is a wall but like any ghetto there’s an invisible wall. There’s a wall that basically you don’t step into the other world because you don’t belong there. And you won’t see the wall in the film because again my whole point is your own psychological barriers are much more destructive than any actual physical wall that’s built.

The setting constructed by Nalo Hopkinson in her novel was, as are many dystopian landscapes, a prophetic warning of what will come to be if we continue to ignore the signs of the times. And yet it sets itself apart from other popular dystopian literary tales with a distinctly Caribbean Diasporic influence, one which director/writer Sharon Lewis is excited to push aesthetically in the cinematic adaptation. She cites Marcel Camus’ 1959 Oscar Award-winning film Black Orpheus as a key inspiration in imagining an aesthetic that is steeped with a heavy Carnival influence:

I’ve never seen a Caribbean set in a dystopia. I’ve never actually seen a dystopia that has a Caribbean aesthetic. For me it makes sense because what I saw in the reality of Jamaica or Trinidad where people had to adapt with little resources…it’s dystopia. Aesthetically it will be interesting because you’ll see Caribbean people and that will affect the way they dress and you know the food and all of that, but also in the way that they talk and the way that they relate to each other in terms of what those moral values are.

To step into the unchartered territory of Caribbean-Canadian sci-fi film, Sharon has cast a wide net in considering her aesthetic and story inspirations. She celebrates the rise of female heroines in Sci-Fi and Fantasy film such as Bella Swan in Twilight, Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games and Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. Although an avid fan of sci-fi, the unbelievable dearth of Black female heroines in the film genre has meant that Sharon has had to look elsewhere for reference points when conceptualizing the heroine Ti-Jeanne for Brown Girl in the Ring – The Prequel. She cites Julie Dash’s seminal film Daughters of the Dust as a key inspiration in seeing Black women as magical, full, and rich characters.

With the success of her crowdfunding campaign, Sharon has launched a Brown Girl Movement, led by women of colour who are coming together to tell this story in a new genre that will inevitably feel strangely familiar for so many: that of the Caribbean-Canadian sci-fi.

To learn more about Brown Girl in the Ring – The Prequel, visit the website.

Amanda Parris is writer from the 6ix who dreams of screenplays to come, has a couple of theatre plays under her belt and sometimes really geeks out and writes for “the academy.” In her spare time she is an actor, Critical Hip Hop educator, and producer of all things cool, creative, and disruptive that started from the bottom. You can follow her on Twitter at @amanda_parris

“You’re Not My Mother!” Bodies, Love, and Survival in ‘Advantageous’

In these moments, and in those unspoken moments when she savors placing long sweet kisses on Jules’s cheek, we see Gwen’s resistance. “Know your value,” Gwen tells Jules. It’s not found in good grades, not in getting into the best school, not in a newer and “better” body, but in sensory and emotional human pleasures.

Gwen and Jules talking in the park, surrounded by green grass, tall trees, and the river.

Written by Colleen Martell as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

Advantageous, which began streaming on Netflix on June 23, is a dystopian science fiction film that asks, “Are women really going backwards going forward?” It explores this question through the relationship between a single mother, Gwen (played brilliantly by Jacqueline Kim, who co-wrote the film), and her daughter Jules (Samantha Kim, also brilliant), and the painful choice Gwen makes in order to give her daughter a chance at succeeding in a misogynist, racist, ableist, and economically unjust world. It’s a subtle and slow film, as visually beautiful as it is haunting.

Writer and director Jennifer Phang first produced Advantageous as a short film in 2013. The short offers some helpful background information: we learn that the year is 2041; the world population is 10.1 billion, and the U.S. unemployment rate is at a staggering 45 percent. Technology has rapidly advanced. The significance of these facts is fleshed out in the full-length film. Homeless, destitute women people the world of Advantageous. Child prostitution is on the rise. Income inequality has been made drastically worse by the dismantling of the public school system. The only educational opportunity for children who aren’t from elite families is to win a spot in the few remaining magnet schools. Jules doesn’t get into a magnet school, and at the same time Gwen loses her job as the spokesperson for the Center for Advanced Health and Living because they are looking for a younger, “more universal” (which, according to Phang in an interview with Mark Asch at The L Magazine, in this case means “non-specific, multi-racial”) face to market the company.

Advantageous struck me as an incredibly embodied, earthy story. Jules and Gwen are outside in parks a lot, walking through green grass and sitting under tall, shady trees. They listen to music together, eyes closed and breathing deeply. They play piano and sing together sitting shoulder to shoulder; they sleep cuddled in bed together; and they eat pecan pie out of the pan together. Jules is often dancing or drawing. She wants to have children; she wants a big family. Gwen and Jules play a guessing game in their apartment: is it the woman upstairs or downstairs who is sobbing? Sometimes the answer is both. Sometimes the answer is Gwen. We see women sleeping on park benches, living in flower beds. The physicality of women, Asian American, Black, and white women, and of Gwen and Jules’s bond, is palpable.

Jules listens to women cry, above, below, and in her apartment

In contrast, the Center for Advanced Health and Living promises freedom and liberation from bodily limitations: “Be the you you were meant to be.” The Center encourages people of economic means to discard their diseased or disabled bodies, or even just their disliked bodies, and to transcend “race, height, or health” by transferring themselves into “better” bodies. A new body is “a pragmatic response to today’s unforgiving job market,” they promise. Economic disparities and unfair hiring practices got you down? Become someone who is hirable. Their message, propagated by Gwen, is one of empowerment: free yourself from anxiety and depression by overcoming your disadvantages in a new body.

This contrast is one of the film’s most deeply felt questions: if women could change their bodies to fit the latest trend, could they succeed in a discriminatory, patriarchal society? But at what cost?

Gwen’s answer to these questions is complicated. Unable to find work elsewhere, Gwen agrees to be a test subject for the Center’s mind-body transfer so that she can keep her job and put Jules through school. An experienced spokesperson in a younger, more ethnically desirable woman’s body: the perfect employee. Although we might celebrate her sacrifice for her daughter at whatever cost to herself, this act shows Gwen playing along, putting her faith in a system that has not really served her. In agreeing to undergo an extensive, self-altering procedure she in effect tells Jules to also keep playing along. “I can’t let her become one of these women who would do anything,” Gwen explains her choice to her boss at the Center. And yet Gwen is now one of those women, willing to do just about anything the system asks her to do in order to stay afloat in it.

On the other hand, Gwen spends much of the film offering Jules a different narrative. Jules asks her mother, “Why did you have me, when you knew the world was so bad and you had to struggle so much?” She agonizes, “I don’t know why I’m alive.” Gwen answers that life is worth living because of music, good food, and being loved by your mother. The head of the Center, Ms. Cryer (Jennifer Ehle), undermines Gwen’s optimism about finding another job at her age when technology has advanced so much. Gwen pushes back: “There must be something in a mere human existence that has value.” In these moments, and in those unspoken moments when she savors placing long sweet kisses on Jules’s cheek, we see Gwen’s resistance. “Know your value,” Gwen tells Jules. It’s not found in good grades, not in getting into the best school, not in a newer and “better” body, but in sensory and emotional human pleasures.

This double message is what makes the film so heartbreaking: Gwen shows that life is worth living because of all of these embodied experiences, but then she gives up experiencing those things in her own body so that Jules can compete in the socioeconomic system as it is. What we as viewers are witnessing is the deal Gwen strikes between her resistance and her compliance. We are left to wonder if what she got (economic security for Jules) was worth the price she paid (her body).

Gwen grieves as she prepares to say goodbye to her body

There are hints of civil unrest all throughout the film. A broadcast refers to a rebel group called the “Terra Mamona” (according to my subtitles) bombing (corporate?) buildings (is this some sort of ecofeminist activist group? A girl can dream). Her boss Fisher (James Urbaniak) informs Gwen that corporations fear what might happen with so many unemployed desperate men on the street, and so “there is talk among recruiters about letting women stay unemployed” and forcing them back into the home in favor of hiring men. In other words, there are dissenters, and if recruiters are afraid that unemployed men will revolt, it’s easy to imagine the unemployed women we see sleeping in flower beds and on park benches organizing their own revolution. Women — specifically women of color — have long been at the forefront of resistance movements in the U.S. and elsewhere, after all.

As a result, I fantasized about a different narrative, one in which Gwen perhaps joins or starts a rebellion, fighting for her right to hold her daughter in her own arms, against exploitative corporations and cost-prohibitive schools and unemployment, fighting with and for the homeless women in the parks. But that is not this story. This story is an allegory of the terrible decisions disadvantaged women are often forced to make in order to survive in a corrupt social structure, clinging desperately to the hope that if they do certain things “right” the next generation will succeed in a system that was set up to fail them. In an interview with Emily Yoshida at The Verge, Phang said that, “most of my life I’ve been trying to humanize and normalize perceptions of people who are not your standard Caucasian-looking American.” If there’s any hope in the film, then, it’s that the loss of the tactile inter-generational bond between Gwen and Jules is so striking that it makes those relationships all the more meaningful in our own place and time.

See also at Bitch Flicks: Leigh Kolb’s “Advantageous: The Future is Now,” and Holly Derr’s “Advantageous: Feminist Science Fiction at Its Best”

Colleen Martell, a writer based in Pennsylvania, is apparently obsessed with watching dystopias this summer (see here and here). Find her on twitter to talk about bodies and film and the end times: @elsiematz.

‘Advantageous’: Feminist Science Fiction at Its Best

Though this happens in a future in which cosmetic surgery has become much more than a matter of lift and tuck, Koh’s struggle with whether and how to change her body for the sake of her daughter and her career, combined with the behind-the-scenes machinations of the corporation, casts a complicated light on the present struggles of women trying to succeed in both career and motherhood while facing the social pressure to stay young and be perfect.

This guest post by Holly Derr previously appeared at the Ms. blog and appears here as part of our theme week on Dystopias. Cross-posted with permission.

A sighting of that rare bird called feminist science fiction is truly a thing to celebrate. It does exist, sometimes by accident (see Alien), and sometimes on purpose (see almost anything by Octavia Butler). With Advantageous, a film written by Jacqueline Kim and Jennifer Phang, directed by Phang and starring Kim, the feminism is entirely purposeful.

Influenced during her studies at Pomona College by the work of such experimental filmmakers as Cheryl Dunye and Alexandra Juhasz, Phang has always tried to represent a diverse world in her films and to tell stories about identity, specifically Asian and Asian American identities. Speaking on the phone from her San Francisco office, she told the Ms. blog that when the Independent Film and Television Service approached her seeking proposals for science fiction shorts, she jumped at the chance to make an Asian American woman the center of the film. When actor Ken Jeong (The Hangover, Community) saw the short, he was so moved that he offered to help turn it into a feature, and that feature went on to win the Dramatic Special Jury Award for Collaborative Vision at Sundance.

The central character in Advantageous, Gwen Koh (Kim), is the spokesperson and head of The Center for Advanced Health and Living, a cosmetic surgery company that has developed a way for the aged and infirm to move their consciousness into a younger, healthier body. When the center decides that Koh is too old to continue as their spokesperson—just as her daughter is entering an elite and very expensive private school—she decides to undergo the body-changing procedure herself.

In reality, she has been manipulated into making this decision by the real head of the center, played by a (somewhat ironically) beautifully aging Jennifer Ehle. Though this happens in a future in which cosmetic surgery has become much more than a matter of lift and tuck, Koh’s struggle with whether and how to change her body for the sake of her daughter and her career, combined with the behind-the-scenes machinations of the corporation, casts a complicated light on the present struggles of women trying to succeed in both career and motherhood while facing the social pressure to stay young and be perfect.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnBT0izYi7A”]

Not coincidentally, Koh, in collaboration with the company, chooses not only a young body into which to transition, but also a more ethnically ambiguous one (Freya Adams). Phang said that she cast Adams “not just because she’s a great actor, but also because she was able to play someone with a universal look. So the audience has to explore what is it about her that makes them want her to be the look of their company.”

Koh isn’t eager to take the extreme step of cosmetic surgery, so before undergoing the transition she attempts to find work through an agency she has worked with in the past. She discovers, however, that the voice on the other end of the phone is not only not a genuine supporter of her work, but isn’t even human, leading to one of the most profound conversations in the film:

Gwen: Drake, are you human being?

Drake: That’s a funny question. How do you define a human being?

Gwen: Do you have blood running through your veins? Do you get thirsty?

Drake: That is a definition of a human being?

Gwen: I didn’t know.

Drake: That sounds more like a human being. Not to know.

To say that Advantageous is a meditation on the meaning of life sounds cliché, but I can find no more fitting phrase. Both the mother and daughter at the center of the film spend the film’s duration in the pursuit of fulfillment, improvement, and a seemingly ever-elusive kind of achievement, and the tempo of the film ensures that both the characters and audience have plenty of time to think about what fulfillment really means.

Phang considers herself an idealist, and it is true that in this film, to a certain extent, daughter and mother both secure the kind of success for themselves that this near-future world believes to be paramount. But, as with the kind of feminist art that intends to make its audience think, most of the questions about the actual meaning of human existence are left unanswered. The 12-year-old daughter, Jules (Samantha Kim), states twice—once to her original mother and once to her mother-in-a-new-body—“I don’t know why I’m alive.” Though her mother offers a few answers, and different ones each time, the meditative quality of the daughter’s question and her mother’s answers makes it hard to believe that either finds much comfort in them.

In fact, even the background moments of buildings being blown up by terrorists are greeted not with terror but with an attitude of resignation that such things cannot be helped, and the process of changing bodies is more like the passage of time during sleep than the usual explosive, special-effects ridden climaxes of most science fiction movies. The most gripping moments of the film are found in the reactions of Gwen’s family to the consequences of her choice, beautifully revealing that even in a world where technology has become advanced enough to change the nature of life, being human is still a matter of feeling intimacy, love, and loss, of wanting to understand something that is inevitably just out of our reach and, ultimately, of accepting that no matter how successful or rich you are and no matter how technologically advanced our culture is, being human is mostly a matter of not knowing.

Phang is already hard at work on her next two films: One is a science fiction romance adapted from a play by Dominic Mah called Look for Water. The other is a film about climate change based on the work of real-life scientist Inez Fung, which she hopes will inspire audiences to reengage with climate change issues before it’s too late. She was recently awarded a $40,000 Kenneth Rainin Foundation grant from the San Francisco Film Society to support herself while developing these projects, something Phang told the Ms. blog she wouldn’t be able to live without:

I am fortunate to live in a time when organizations understand that in order to have sustainable media careers, women need support of some sort. The SFFS has a visionary program called Filmmaker360 that aims to change the representation of women in genre films by supporting women creators, which is a big deal for me and a big deal for women.

Advantageous is currently streaming on Netflix.

This review is dedicated to Michele Kort, who taught me how to be journalist and how to live in the human state of not knowing.

Holly L. Derr is a feminist media critic who writes about theater, film, television, video games and comics. Follow her @hld6oddblend and on her tumblr, Feminist Fandom.

‘Sex(ed)’: How America Learned About Sex

The footage could be overwhelming (Goodman analyzed 500 films), but she presents it all in a way that leaves the viewer satisfied but wanting more information–just like a good documentary should.

Written by Leigh Kolb.

“How did you learn about sex?”

This is a question that can launch us all into stories of our own formative years. I remember my mother–a former home economics teacher–showing me a diagram of the uterus, and factually answering the (many) questions I had, and looking through the textbooks my father–a biology teacher–had strewn around the house. I remember my public elementary school, when in fifth grade girls and boys were separated, and we were taught about periods and given deodorant and pads all wrapped in pastel and hope. A year later, we were separated again, and we girls watched graphic slideshows of STI-ravaged genitals and were given gold plastic purity rings.

Unlike fractions or sentence fragments, our experiences with “official” sex education vary drastically, ranging from helpful, to hilarious, to heartbreaking. Likewise, unlike learning to cook pasta or change a tire, our families’ roles in teaching us about sex are typically not accompanied by cookbooks or users’ manuals. Sex ed in America has historically been the wild west.

Most of us, in recalling our formal sex education, have memories of the film reels shown to us in our pre-pubescent and pubescent school rooms. The history of sex-education films in America is fascinating, and tells us more about ourselves than one might expect. Brenda Goodman‘s documentary, Sex(ed): The Movie shows us a treasure trove of clips from sex-ed films through American history. From early 20th century “hygiene films” and wartime moral panic films, to Disney cartoons and obscure 70s masturbation celebrations, Sex(ed) takes us on a history of not only how we have approached sex ed, but also how we have approached STIs, women, masturbation, menstruation, homosexuality, and relationships. Sex(ed) tells America’s story through archival film clips and in-depth interviews with experts and individuals who have been affected–for better or worse–by their sex education.

Goodman covers a great deal of ground in a concise documentary. She does an excellent job of presenting the clips and interviews with a humanity that is often lacking in the films themselves. The hilarity that ensues from some of the old films is balanced with the tragic weight of anti-gay rhetoric films of the 1960s and the rise of toxic abstinence-only education in the 1990s. The footage could be overwhelming (Goodman analyzed 500 films), but she presents it all in a way that leaves the viewer satisfied but wanting more information–just like a good documentary should.

Watching Sex(ed) is like watching America’s answer to “How did you learn about sex?” What we learn is that what we learn–or don’t learn–can have devastating consequences. We should watch and learn more so that we can more adequately teach future generations about their bodies, sexuality, and relationships. When we answer how we learned about sex, we are also answering how we learned to be human. And as a society, we need to demand better lessons and better answers.

Sex(ed) is available at First Run Features and Amazon.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj1Vl4nWU3g”]

___________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

‘The Loneliest Planet’ and the Fracturing of Masculinity

This guest post by Cal Cleary appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

It’s a frequently stated truism that the patriarchy hurts men the same way it hurts women. The system of rigid gender expectations can be punishing for anyone who doesn’t conform to its strictures. Those punishments aren’t just external; failure to live up a made-up masculine ideal can cause considerable internal anguish. Few films have dealt with the transformative strength of that failure as powerfully as The Loneliest Planet. Written and directed by Julia Loktev, loosely adapting Tom Bissell’s short story “Expensive Trips Nowhere,” the film is, in part, a powerful meditation on the way a single moment can clash with a man’s internalized expectations to destroy his sense of self.

The Loneliest Planet is, essentially, a movie with three characters. Nica (Hani Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael García Bernal) are engaged, a pair of active world-travelers who can tackle any challenge together. Before their wedding, they visit the country of Georgia, where they hire a guide, Dato (renowned Georgian mountaineer Bidzina Gujabidze), to take them on a long hike through the nation’s incredibly scenic countryside. Along the way, they meet a group of heavily armed men who are suspicious of the trio, questioning them briefly. Then, they walk back, exploring more of Georgia’s gorgeous natural landscapes.

That really is it for plot. But the key twist in the film’s halfway point is what gives the film its power, and there’s no real way to discuss what the movie is saying about masculinity without first talking about the twist. So, for the spoiler averse – and this is the rare twist best experienced without knowing quite what to expect – I suggest taking a break and checking the movie out now. For those who’ve seen it, or who don’t mind a bit of foreknowledge, however, read on…

The key moment, the scene that gives the film its shape, happens at the halfway point, when the trio meets the armed men. Neither Alex nor Nica share a language with him, so they aren’t sure what the confrontation is about. Despite the presence of guns, Loktev shoots the scene in a fairly low-key manner, highlighting not the tension but the lack of control for the two tourists. It is this lack of control that makes Alex so uncomfortable. He tries to insert himself in a conflict that Dato appears to be handling well, demanding to know what’s going on – only to find a large rifle leveled at his face. Alex’s immediate response is to push Nica in front of the barrel and hide behind her – but only for a second. After that gut reaction, he reasserts himself, pushing Nica back behind him and aggressively posturing for her, recklessly pressing his forehead to the rifle’s barrel.

It turns out to be a false alarm. Dato talks the armed men down, and then he accompanies Nica and Alex as they walk back home. At no point do any of the characters discuss what just happened. Alex grows immediately taciturn, and Nica is clearly uncomfortable. Something very fundamental about their relationship has changed, and Julia Loktev does an amazing job at showing how differently Alex and Nica see that event without ever coming out and saying it.

Throughout the first half of the film, most characters outside the small group instinctively defer to Alex, a role he happily relegates to his equally competent partner. A group of locals approached as they seek out a guide ask Alex if Nica is his wife – she answers. They ask Alex if Nica can carry a heavy-enough load to be an effective hiker – she answers. Early in the film, during a perilous river-crossing, Dato has concerns that Nica can make the trip safely, but Alex lets Nica go first, and has no doubts that she’ll be able to handle herself. Alex is comfortable not taking the lead, despite what everyone else expects, and Loktev constantly reinforces that through the staging and the shot composition, as well as frequent interludes that highlight the physicality they have in common, the confidence they have in their own bodies working precisely how they want.

Alex is, in many ways, the ideal of the modern man: Handsome, athletic, intelligent, well-traveled, well-off financially but still environmentally sensitive, and with a romantic partner he treats as an equal. Because of this, he has no trouble shrugging off the gendered stereotypes expected of his relationship in the first half of the film. But as soon as he is given reason to doubt his own traditionally defined masculinity, it all falls apart. Suddenly, he thinks Nica needs help lifting her own pack, needs help steadying herself while she takes off a shoe – help he himself refuses to accept from her later, when he twists his ankle and tries to shrug it off. It isn’t the external expectations that get to him, the fear of judgment from other people, but his own concern that he isn’t man enough. The specifics of how masculinity presents may have changed from the days of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” a story with thematic and structural ties to Loktev’s film, but the way some men react when they begin to question their own masculinity has not.

Nica, of course, is shaken up just as much as Alex by the event with the gunman, but the way Loktev and her performers portray the aftermath, their violations seem very different. As portrayed by Furstenberg, Nica seems to feel betrayed by Alex’s action, but she is clearly willing to forgive him as she processes what happened. She begins to open up again. Alex, on the other hand, seems to feel unmanned. Both characters are profoundly shaken up by the incident, but Nica fears for her life, no longer certain if she can trust her partner, while Alex fears that he looks weak. Which is, I guess, a purely visual way of expressing Margaret Atwood’s classic sentiment: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

The Loneliest Planet is a difficult movie in a lot of ways, telling almost its entire movie nonverbally. Indeed, the characters’ feelings and relationships are mostly defined by their staging and the camera’s movement, which can make the long, dialogue-free stretches feel slow. Until you start to notice the way the landscapes change to counter the emotional state of the characters, or the way walking order during the hike can define relationships. Until you realize that the film is very much about language, and that the things Alex and Nica can’t bring themselves to say are far more important than any words they may use to paper over the issue.

The Loneliest Planet ends in uncertainty. Alex and Nica are back together, but the casual intimacy of the film’s earliest moments is gone, perhaps forever. Even at the end, Alex is more withdrawn. He has learned something very dark about himself, and it’s something he still can’t quite process. You can be a sensitive multi-lingual world-travelling guy who looks like Gael García Bernal, but can you still consider yourself a man, he seems to wonder, if you’re a coward?

Cal Cleary spends most of his time judging others, writing film and comic reviews for GeekRex and novel reviews for Luxury Reading. When he’s not writing online, he’s librarianing in rural Ohio, and he definitely hasn’t figured out that librarianing is not a real word. Follow him on Twitter (@comicalibrarian) for links to more of his work.

Seed & Spark: Why I Have a Giant Lady Crush on Elizabeth Banks

This is a guest post by Jeanette Bonner, who is currently crowdfunding through Seed & Spark for her latest project.

I will admit it: I’m a beauty-magazine buyer. I want to be one of those people that shun them the way I shun impulse-buying those “Stars: They’re Just Like Us!” magazines at the grocery store. But there are certain times when it’s really ALL my brain wants to process, even though I know I should be learning about tragedy in China/ Supreme Court misdoings and failures/ who Amal Clooney is saving this month.

Occasionally, some of them have content worth reading. Many of them, like Allure and Marie Claire, have recently gone pro-fem and are really letting the world know who’s the most ass-kicking female of the moment.

May’s issue of Allure featured another gorgeous blonde starlet with fan-blown hair waves of envy, in a gorgeous dress none of us will ever own, looking wrinkle-less and flawless as usual. That lady was Elizabeth Banks.

I will begin by saying that Elizabeth Banks is totally on my radar. If you are a producer and an actress who does comedy (as I am), you will sit up and take notice when other ladies – especially comediennes – break the boy-code barrier and succeed at straddling that fine line between marketable (aka “attractive to audiences”) and powerful (aka running your own series and being a lady-boss). You can probably think of three straight off the bat. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are the Queens, Mindy Kaling comes next. Then I would suggest Jenny Slate (who went from SNL reject to Create-Your-Own-Content baller), and then I bet your next thought is for the two Best B*tches of the Moment: Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. But I bet your thoughts don’t naturally then go to Elizabeth Banks, even though they should.

Sometimes as a producer, you have to physically lend some extra support.

Elizabeth Banks first caught my attention in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, as the overtly promiscuous hot party-girl type. She has an orgasm in a bubble-bath in front of Steve Carrell, and I thought – “Man. That girl is fearless. It takes a lot to not only put aside your pride and have an orgasm in front of Steve Carrell, but do it in a funny way that doesn’t automatically make you want to slut-shame her and write her off. She’s a badass.” She was, of course, in a lot of things before that, Wet Hot American Summer being one of them, but after The 40-Year-Old Virgin, just like the way it seems everyone owns a green car the moment you think of buying a green car, she suddenly seemed to me to be everywhere.

I don’t need to list her credits to you to prove she’s awesome, and that’s not my point either. We all know she’s talented and Hollywood loves her and yeah she’s pretty and funny and held her own against Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock. Here’s why I have a lady-crush on her – this quote, from the aforementioned Allure interview:

“If I had to pick a theme of the things that I do,” Banks says, “it would be: Girls win.”

Pitch Perfect, a hard-core “girls win” -kinda movie, was Banks’ first hit of the production company she started with her husband. When the original director wasn’t available for Pitch Perfect 2, the studio asked Banks to direct it herself:

“Once you get offered a studio job, as a woman, it’s really hard to say no because they don’t let women do this very often,” she says. “So I knew I needed to embrace it and I couldn’t mess it up. Because if you mess it up, they don’t let you do it again, and you become representative of female directors as a whole. Like, ‘See, girls can’t do it!’’ [Allure, June 2015]

BOOM. They asked, and she stepped up to the plate. Without reservation. No one asked politely. No one had to convince her. She did not seek out permission. They offered her something with a TON of responsibility and she accepted, despite probably already being overwhelmed with producing the damn thing AS WELL AS acting in it (it’s not an easy feat to wear all three hats, as I learned with my web series, Ghost Light, for which I’m the writer, producer, and also actor).

I have often found in my life – and certainly this is true when it comes to producing my own web series – that I seek permission before I do anything. It takes me a long time to wrap my mind around a new idea. I consider myself spontaneous and risk-taking yes, but if someone offers me something outside of my comfort zone, anything that I haven’t previously decided that I can do, I don’t take action immediately. I wobble, waiting for someone to convince me. Skiing? “I’m not sure I can, I’ve never been and I hear a lot of adults have accidents their first time.” Malaysian food? “I’ll go if you tell me what to order.” How about doing something crazy, like moving to North Carolina to start a business? “What! I don’t know the first thing about starting a business. Or North Carolina!” You see what I mean.

We all do this. Psychologists say this is our ego keeping us safe, because risk equals danger, and danger equals death. I know that if some huge studio head asked me to direct a $30 million dollar movie with a cast and crew of nearly 300, I’d balk. I’d make excuses. I’d say, “I don’t know how, I don’t have enough experience, I don’t have time.” Instead, Elizabeth Banks said, “Of course I’ll do it. Because if I don’t, just by saying no, as a woman – I fail.”

Her next project as a producer is an HBO movie based on the life of tennis star Billie Jean King. In her Allure interview Banks said, “Billie Jean King’s activism is mind-boggling. She has a Presidential Medal of Freedom. She’s so inspirational.” And just like that, she’s off and running again, no doubts in her mind that anyone could tackle this film better. Because why would they? She’s a kickass, empowered, inspired, strong woman who makes her own path in this crazy industry and in her life.

As are we all, right? AS ARE WE ALL.

Jeanette Bonner is an award-winning actor, writer, and producer in NYC. She has been writing informally since the age of 5, and is now combining her love for writing with her passion for theater. In addition to Ghost Light she has written and produced the one-woman show Love. Guts. High School. It premiered at the 2012 Midtown International Theatre Festival, where it won nominations for Best Actress and Best Solo Show, and then went on to the Chicago Fringe Festival, where it was named a top ten “Critic’s Pick” by Time Out Chicago. Last year it received top reviews at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where she performed it 23 times (whew!). As an actor in New York, she has performed with Magic Futurebox, Manhattan Theatre Source, and Vital Theatre Company, and workshopped plays with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Abingdon Theatre, and Primary Stages. She has been a company member of improv troupe National Comedy Theater for seven years, and in her downtime she shows tourists around town as a licensed NYC tour guide.

Seed & Spark: Finding Ourselves In Our Work

We are so quick to label adolescent girls as these terrible, unruly, hormone-driven monsters, but underneath the name-calling and back-stabbing, where do the behaviors originate? It’s easy to say that we, as women, should be holding one another up rather tearing each other down, so why do we lash out so quickly at one another?

the youtube diaries that became the installation, yr a slut (2010) — The *YouTube* diaries that became the installation, *yr a slut* (2010)

This is a guest post by Megyn Cawley.

Sluts, famewhores, gold-diggers – all terms I was encouraged and paid to use while working in the entertainment media industry in my early 20’s. After a long stretch of unemployment post-undergrad in the late ’00s (hello, recession), I gladly accepted a position as an editorial assistant with a somewhat infamous media company. Initially, I was so stoked to have landed the job, but the thrill of “working in Hollywood” quickly wore off. My workdays became a daily exercise in shaming women’s appearances and pitting them against one another. It was difficult for me to digest that my weekly paycheck depended on perpetuating these antiquated stereotypes and gender divisions. Who am I to publicly deface any woman as an “off-the-rails coke whore” or “lezbot”? How is a broke lil’ feminist with minimal job experience supposed to stay afloat in an inherently misogynistic industry without defaulting on her student loans? By turning to art.

Although leaving my job was not a realistic option at that moment in time, I realized if I could make films and videos aligning with my feminist point of view, they would somewhat diffuse the growing pit in my stomach screaming, “WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR MORALS, GF???” While attending the California Institute of Arts for my MFA in Film & Video, I started scavenging YouTube for video diaries of teenage girls for an installation. The first-person videos feature young girls publicly declaring their classmates and frenemies as “sluts” and “whores,” all while giggling, suggesting punishments for the girls who may or may not have wronged them. I felt like I was watching a real life version of the the snark I perpetuated at my job. When cut together in rapid succession, the nonstop string of of these girls publicly humiliating their peers from the safety of their bedrooms quickly turned barbaric. We are so quick to label adolescent girls as these terrible, unruly, hormone-driven monsters, but underneath the name-calling and back-stabbing, where do the behaviors originate? It’s easy to say that we, as women, should be holding one another up rather tearing each other down, so why do we lash out so quickly at one another?

still from girl (2012) — still from *girl* (2012)

I began exploring the psyche of the adolescent female for my graduate thesis film, GIRL. I interviewed women of all ages and backgrounds, asking them a series of the same questions – “How would you describe your teenage self?” “When did you become conscious of wanting to belong to a certain clique or social circle?” “Did you ever feel isolated or depressed?” and so on. Although the experiences varied from woman to woman, the psychology driving their behaviors was almost identical- the desire for validation of self. Surprise, surprise- teenage girls have an inherent desire to be accepted, to have their existence validated by someone outside of themselves. If I feel self-conscious about my appearance, you better be damn sure I’m going to make you feel self-conscious too. I soon realized, through making the film, that being open and candid about our personal experiences in adolescence, our empathy for one another as adults can grow tremendously.

My goal is to bring that understanding of commonality of self to my newest project, LIL’ MER (currently crowdfunding on Seed & Spark). The short film is an experimental retelling of the classic Hans Christen Andersen fairy tale, The Little Mermaid, using the framework of the story to explore gender identity and self-actualization. The story centers around Mirabella, a young woman struggling to express her inner self, and turns to a late night infomercial for the solution. The desire to shed our insecurities and feel free be our true selves is one of the hardest struggles we encounter, and by making this film, I think I may be one step closer in my own path to finding her.

Megyn Cawley is a multimedia artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. By channeling nostalgia and camp ethos through the juxtaposition of analog and digital media formats, her work explores the expression of ego, self and gender identity. Megyn holds an MFA in Film & Video from the California Institute of the Arts, and has exhibited her films and multi-channel installations across the western US. She is currently in pre-production and crowdfunding for her latest short film, LIL’ MER.