Supporting Indie Film
Directed by Maria Anastassiou, a portrait of the filmmaker’s mother at home in Nicosia. Now retired, she devotes herself to learning new skills including drawing, playing piano, painting Greek Orthodox icons and taking university classes in history and ancient Greek mythology.
Continue reading “Review: Piano Practice”
Written and directed by Stéphane Riethauser, a family saga based on private archive footage, where a flamboyant 90-year-old grandmother and her filmmaker grandson (Riethauser) explore the development and transmission of gender identity in a patriarchal environment.
Continue reading “Review: Madame”
Written and directed by Heidi Ewing, co-written by Alan Page, ambition and societal pressure propel an aspiring chef to leave his soulmate in Mexico and make the treacherous journey to New York, where life will never be the same. Starring: Armando Espitia, Christian Vazquez, Michelle Rodríguez, Ángeles Cruz, Raúl Briones, Arcelia Ramírez, Pascacio López, Michelle González, Iván García and Gerardo Zabaleta.
Continue reading “Review: I Carry You With Me (Te Llevo Conmigo)”
Written and directed by Jooyeon Lee, filmed during lockdown, a performance film about care centred around a phone conversation between a cleaning agency employee and a woman trying to empty a locked fridge. When the two women meet-up they engage in a strange dance through the streets of Seoul, locked together back-to-back in a movement of mutual support and dependence. Starring: Seungmin Chu and Un Lee.
Continue reading “Review: Back to Back”
Directed by Kiran Kaur Brar, an autobiographical account of a second-generation British South Asian woman’s experiences with the police, racism and violence in London.
Continue reading “Review: Boots on Ground”
Directed by Anya Tsyrlina, a found footage documentary in which material taken from late-Soviet propaganda films about gender equality is reconstructed to imagine a world populated entirely by women. The film depicts women performing an increasingly broad range of roles from the mundane to the extraordinary.
Continue reading “Review: All Other Things Equal”
Written and directed by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, deep in the forests of Piedmont, Italy, a handful of men, seventy or eighty years old, hunt for the rare and expensive white Alba truffle-which to date has resisted all of modern science’s efforts at cultivation.
Continue reading “Review: The Truffle Hunters”
Written and directed by Seth Breedlove, co-written by Heather Moser, nearly 400 years since the origins of the legend of the Rougarou first began to circulate, people are encountering the creature once again. The truth behind these vicious, horrifying brushes with the unknown will make your blood run cold. Does the Rougarou still stalk the swamps of southern Louisiana?
Continue reading “Review: Skinwalker: The Howl of the Rougarou”
Written and directed by Sam Hobkinson, the dramatic tale of a woman whose holocaust memoir took the world by storm, but a fallout with her publisher, who turned detective and revealed an audacious deception created to hide a darker truth.
Continue reading “Review: Misha and the Wolves”
Written and directed by Peter Nicks, co-written by Sean Havey and Kristina Motwani, and executive produced by Ryan Coogler. Oakland as a tantalizing case study. In a city that struggles with rising crime and health care woes, its public school systems aren’t exactly equipped to prepare youth for the travails of young adulthood.
Continue reading “Review: Homeroom”
Directed by Kristine Stolakis, former leaders of the “pray the gay away” movement contend with the aftermath unleashed by their actions, while a survivor seeks healing and acceptance from more than a decade of trauma.
Continue reading “Review: Pray Away”