Female Film Critics 24/375
British writer/director Andrea Arnold has focused her best films on impoverished, hard-scrabble lives in England’s county Kent where she grew up. In her latest film Bird, set in Gravesend, Northeastern Kent, she leavens the struggles of twelve-year-old Bailey with a welcome infusion of fanciful, magical realism in the figure of title character Bird.
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Bailey, who is 12, is growing up in a squat outside London with zero adult supervision. She doesn’t lack for parents, but her father is not much more than a child himself and her mother is currently living with a violent and terrible man. That’s the world presented in Bird, a coming-of-age drama from writer/director Andrea Arnold starring newcomer Nykiya Adams as the observant Bailey.
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This year, the Cannes Film Festival spotlighted a rich diversity within its Official Selection Jury, including prominent women like Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) and the Jury President, Oscar-winning director Greta Gerwig (Barbie). The festival celebrated the achievements of many female filmmakers and actresses, who not only appeared on screens in the South of France but also took home prestigious awards. The festival was a powerful celebration of women’s contributions to cinema, setting a high standard for future events.
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With the Cannes Film Festival on the way May 14th – 25th, this year’s awards season will officially begin. Out of all those promising films on the slate from Oscar winner Emma Stone in her next collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos, Kinds of Kindness, to Andrea Arnold’s Bird, a lot of movies that sound good on paper will be thrown against the wall to see if they stick. In the past decade-plus, Cannes has become a battle ground in the fight for female representation. The balance has changed.
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It’s easy to look at a black-and-white dairy cow and imagine rolling green pastures, picturesque farmhouses, and buckets of frothy fresh milk. In other words, the picture book version of bovine life. The reality is quite different. A fly-on-the-wall (or fly-on-the-haunch, actually) look at the day-to-day life of a cow on a dairy farm in Kent, England, director Andrea Arnold’s unflinching documentary Cow captures that reality in a way that’s both moving and meditative.
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Andrea Arnold’s bracing documentary may take time to pull some viewers into the Fred Wiseman-like immersion on an English cattle farm. But as cows are routinely milked, handled, herded into one pen after another, across mud-soaked floors and under buzzing bright lights, a rhythm sets in. The routine is the point. These are service animals; the unnamed humans who brusquely command them (“c’mon, girlie”) and corral them are just doing the day in, day out business of taking from them until there is nothing left to take.
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Maternal instinct makes Andrea Arnold’s first feature documentary doubly challenging to watch, and that is most certainly the point. Cow takes the audience on an intimate journey alongside a dairy cow named Luma. Be prepared for your view of the bovine to drastically change. Cow is a shocking film that might turn you into an animal rights advocate. The up-close and personal handheld camerawork has a gritty feel. Cow shows us things we cannot unsee. Luma’s daily routine consists of milking, breeding, and getting shoved in any given direction.
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IFC Films is acquiring North American rights to Cow, a new documentary directed by Academy Award-winning English filmmaker Andrea Arnold. Shot over seven years, “Cow” had its world premiere in the newly created Cannes Premiere section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in France.
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Andrea Arnold’s career shows what a woman filmmaker’s ‘can do spirit’ can do. The career path she’s created for herself has brought her from the difficult circumstances of a child raised in a single parent home in the environs of a working class ‘estate’ in suburban London to the coveted and exalted position of series director for a highly acclaimed and high ranking television series. Along the way, she’s won an Oscar and become an OBE, and accrued numerous other awards and honors for her femme-centric films. Arnold’s filmography is stunning in its inventiveness and variety, but it is her exceptional leadership as director of HBO’S Big Little Lies Season Two, which began airing in June that puts her in AWFJ’s July SPOTLIGHT.
Read moreBritish filmmaker Andrea Arnold signs to direct Big Little Lies. Disney signs Ava DyVernay, Niki Caro and Anna Boden (partnering
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