Mati Diop’s ‘Atlantique’ (‘Atlantics’) turns to the women left behind
In Mati Diop’s short film Atlantiques (2009), three young Senegalese men sit around a bonfire in Dakar at night, one…
Narrative
Céline Sciamma’s ‘Portrait de la jeune fille en feu’ (‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’) explores the boundlessness of poetic love
“Do all lovers feel like they’re making things up?” one woman asks another in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune…
Lorene Scafaria’s ‘Hustlers’ and the Anatomy of the Scam
Recently our headlines have been dominated by young female scammers: scammers whose exploits are spoken of with breathless fascination. Their…
Dominga Sotomayor’s Unstable Utopias: ‘Too Late To Die Young’ (‘Tarde para morir joven’)
Utopias critique by differentiation, springing from a lack. They work, writes Lucy Sargisson, “by creating distant spaces whence to interrogate…
A Magnificent Filial Debt: Love and Family in Lulu Wang’s ‘The Farewell’
It’s difficult for me to process The Farewell, a film so acute in its approximation of the shape of my…
Fantasy Without Catharsis: María Paz González’s ‘Lina From Lima’ —TIFF
María Paz González’s first narrative feature Lina from Lima (2019) is a musical comedy about migrant life in Chile that…
Fate and the State: Sophie Deraspe’s ‘Antigone’ —TIFF
Sophie Deraspe’s film adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone updates the central themes of the original – family, exile, state power and…
On Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn’s ‘The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open’ —TIFF
Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn’s The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open follows a day in the life of…
‘You Don’t Know What You Want, Do You?’ The Life And Work of Jane Arden
Jane Arden (a pseudonym possibly drawn from a ‘girl reporter’ comic strip, or a correspondent of Mary Wollstonecraft, or both,…
On Mourning and Paralysis: Anna Sofie Hartmann’s ‘Giraffe’ —Locarno
In Anna Sofie Hartmann’s debut feature Giraffe (2019), the underwater tunnel being built to connect Denmark with Germany is bestowed with a kind…
In The Name of The Mother: Maura Delpero’s ‘Maternal’ —Locarno
What is motherhood? Maura Delpero’s Maternal (Hogar, 2019) shows a world in which two paradigms of maternity – the single…
The Persistence of Fairy Tales: Choice and Desire in Sophie Hyde’s ‘Animals’
Andrea Dworkin calls fairy tales, “the first scenarios of women and men which mold our psyches”, teaching fundamental cultural lessons…
Portrait of Isabella Eklöf
“I’ve always had beef with the kind of film where danger lurks in the shadows because I find that very…
On Looking but not Seeing: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s ‘Never Look Away’
The title of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away (2018) is an imperative: don’t look away from art, evil,…
The (Not So) Queer Failure of Chanya Button’s ‘Vita and Virginia’
Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West met at a party.i According to historical records this was a dinner party, but in…
Fragments of Lucrecia Martel’s ‘The Headless Woman’ (‘La mujer sin cabeza’, 2008)
1. In Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza, 2008), the protagonist bears her guilt so singularly you…
A Different Kind of Duration: Lila Avilés’s ‘The Chambermaid’
The Hotel, Room 47: an open suitcase; mussed bedsheets; a torn postcard of Venetian sights, its eight pieces carefully re-assembled….
Aude Léa Rapin’s ‘Les héros ne meurent jamais’ (‘Heroes don’t die’) takes on the ethics of the documentary film – Cannes
Aude Léa Rapin’s Les héros ne meurent jamais (Heroes don’t die) begins with Joachim (Jonathan Couzinié), a thin, bearded young…
No other voice: Claire Denis’s ‘High Life’
Claire Denis’s latest film, High Life, opens with an exchange of voices: the cry of a baby, Willow, and the…
Rebecca Zlotowski’s ‘Une fille facile’ (‘An Easy Girl’) takes on the cliché of the woman of leisure – Cannes
Rebecca Zlotowski’s Une fille facile (An Easy Girl) opens with a contradiction. A quotation from 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise…
Chaining Female Reproduction to Analogy: Kantemir Balagov’s ‘Beanpole’
“What would happen to a woman after the war, when there is a tectonic shift in her mind, her nature?”1…