Female Film Critics 24/375
Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints’ intriguing documentary gives us a glimpse into the ancient South Estonian tradition of the women’s smoke sauna, a kind of blending of a smokehouse to preserve meats and a sauna of preserve the bonds between women, as well as ancient folkways and the women’s own sanity. The purpose of the smoke sauna is the relax the body and the mind. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood shows us this world by immersing us in it.
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Subject takes a look at the ethics of documentary filmmaking, and particularly at what happens after the film is released. There are interviews with numerous people who were in documentaries as subjects or other participants, but not the directors of those films. There are, however, other documentary directors speaking about documentary filmmaking, just not about their own films – except where the director and the subject are the same person. Documentaries are having a moment right now, and even have become part of pop culture. We assume (or would like to assume) that what a documentary presents is true but is that always the case.
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Natalia Almada’s non-linear documentary opens with that unseen female narrator talking about how once parents didn’t know a baby’s sex until the child was born, women carried babies in their bodies for nearly a year without knowing gender — as if this condition of having to wait was a phenomenon from a distant past. The narrator then goes on to talk about her baby being cared for by machines – perfect machines replacing imperfect parents – and wondering about how her child will grow up in this modern world that is covered in solar panels and harvests food that is grown without sunlight or soil.
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Set in Chile during the brutal, oppressive Pinochet dictatorship, Chile ’76 is a film that sneaks up on you, starting like a quiet drama about a wealthy woman who is satisfied with her settled life, but gradually morphing into a white-knuckle thriller about life under Pinochet. Aline Kuppenheim’s sensitive yet striking performance drives this thriller, as we are drawn into her world and her changing feelings. An impressive debut by a actor-turned-director Manuela Martelli, Chile ’76 is a chilling, powerful political thriller as a woman’s view of the world around her is shaken to its foundations in the film’s devastating conclusion.
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Charlotte Rampling steals the show as a feisty alcoholic grandmother in the New Zealand cross-generations family drama Juniper. She is a joy to watch in this little drama, and although the ending is a bit too neat in director Matthew Saville’s semi-biographical film, Rampling shines like the sun from start to finish.
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At the beginning of the documentary-like Israeli drama Cinema Sabaya, we learn that the word “sabaya” pronounced correctly in Arabic means a group of women but mispronounced it means “women prisoners of war.” It was a term ISIS used to describe the Yazidi women they held captive 2014 and can even imply “sex slave.” It is an interesting start to Orit Fouks Rotem’s slow-burn but ultimately powerful drama, one that touches on cross-cultural issues as well as on what shared aspects in women’s lives.
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Stacey Tenenbaum’s Scrap is the kind of documentary film that invites you into its world, to look closer at something seemingly ordinary which suddenly becomes intriguing, and perhaps even a bit profound. In this case, it is the realm of metal objects whose useful lives have ended – scrap metal – but which are being re-used, restored or reborn as art.
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Empire of Light takes place in a grand old movie theater that is now slowly fading away in early 1980s, with a loyal movie-loving staff still selling tickets and popcorn to dwindling audiences. You would expect such a movie to be a love letter to the movies, or at least old movie theaters, fondly recalling the glory days of actual film on reels and the magic of movies. Writer/director Sam Mendes’ nostalgic drama does start out that way, but then it drifts off into something else, a plot touching on mental illness and racial tensions in the 1980s, and involving a May-October romance.
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Stephen Frears’ true story-inspired comedy-drama The Lost King is a charmer with a thoughtful underdog theme, starring the wonderful Sally Hawkins as an amateur historian who locates the long-lost grave of King Richard III, the last Plantagenet king. The grave’s location had eluded professionals for centuries. The discovery made headlines around the world, but even better, was that the person who pulled off this discovery, Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins), was an ordinary middle-aged woman who turned amateur historian – or maybe history detective is more apt – after seeing a production of Shakespeare’s play.
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Saleh Bakri and Lubna Azabal deliver moving performances as a traditional tailor and his wife struggling to make a living in one of the oldest medinas in Morocco, in writer/director Maryam Touzani’s moving, thought-provoking human drama The Blue Caftan. Although the drama features a traditional craftsman practicing a fading art, at its heart, The Blue Caftan is really about love in its various forms, romantic love, a love of a craft, and more. It is also a showcase for some striking performances, particularly from Lubna Azabal, in the story that takes surprising twists, and is by turns powerfully dramatic, funny, touching, or heart-wrenching, as this excellent French Moroccan, Arabic-language film unfolds
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