Happy endings in documentary films are rare, but this story of empowerment is certainly one of them. In fact, it’s pure inspiration. Rafea is a very engaging leading lady, and her personal story provides the perfect foil for penetrating the issues of women’s rights in the Middle East, and leading in to the larger story of how the solar panel school in India, and other such projects, are liberating women social and economic repression and servitude around the world. Read more>>

2013 marks the 20th Anniversary of Sheffield DocFest and they chose to celebrate it in style. Read more

During June, 2013, the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, a nonprofit association of leading professional critics and feature writers who work in print, broadcast and online media in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, has presented four EDA Awards to women directors for their outstanding achievements in documentary filmmaking. Read more>>

The Alliance of Women Film Journalists announced seven nominees for a special EDA award, created to celebrate POV’s 25th anniversary. The winner will be announced at POV’s 26th-season launch party at its headquarters in Brooklyn, N.Y. on Thursday, June 6, 2013.

With this EDA award, the AWFJ will honor the best female-directed film from the curated program MoMA Selects: POV, a 25th Anniversary Retrospective, presented at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in February and March of 2013. A jury of five AWFJ members selected the nominees. Read more>>.

Recent events indicate that gender often plays a role in popular film criticism. In February of this year, Rex Reed, film critic for the New York Observer, made an issue of Melissa McCarthy’s weight in his review of Identity Thief. This incident followed closely on the heels of a (now former) male editor at the Niagara Falls Reporter ordering a critic to refrain from reviewing films with strong female characters.

While such anecdotal stories are attention getting, they reveal little about the relationship between gender, film critics, and movie reviews. Read more

Compassionate Jordan Turner (Halle Berry) is a veteran Los Angeles 911 dispatcher who’s still recovering from a traumatic incident – six months ago – when she was unable to save a teenage girl from the clutches of a psychopathic murderer. Working as an instructor, she shows new recruits around the vast, high-tech Emergency Call Center that’s known as The Hive, as the same “911: what is your emergency?” greeting is methodically repeated at every desk. Read more

Keeping with his usual dark themes, South Korean director Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) makes an assured American debut with this stunning psycho thriller – a cruel, calculated coming of age story that glides elegantly through topics of sexual awakening and fractured family values Read more>>

At Salem Film Fest 2013 (March 7 to 14 in Salem, Massachusetts), the Alliance of Women Film Journalists (AWFJ) has presented EDA Awards to two superb films directed by women. Read more>>

In The We and the I, Michel Gondry makes good on his Be Kind Rewind promise.
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Set in 1945 in the Bavarian countryside just after Germany has surrendered near the end of W.W. II, this is the coming-of-age/survival story of teenage Hannalore Dressler (Saskia Rosendahl), nicknamed Lore, who is left in charge when her parents are taken into custody for war crimes during the Third Reich. Just before her mother (Ursina Lardi) departs, she instructs stolid, responsible Lore to take her four younger siblings – ranging in age from an infant to pre-teen – to their grandmother’s house, some 500 miles to the north, near Hamburg. Read more