Female Film Critics 24/375
Pleasure offers confrontational hard-to-watch fare. Immensely controversial upon its belated release, Swedish writer/director Ninja Thyberg’s bold narrative feature will continue to invite debate for its explicit portrayal and implicit indictment of the adult entertainment (porn, to be exact) business.
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Swedish director Ninja Thyberg’s debut feature Pleasure pushes the boundaries between objective storytelling and voyeurism, and it does so with a heavy dose of realism, including a majority of the cast coming from the adult film industry itself, which makes the film both absorbing and very hard to watch. It’s impossible not to feel a sense of dread throughout Pleasure, and that is exactly the point.
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After fifteen years of directing short films and documentaries, Swedish filmmaker Frida Kempff has turned to feature fictional filmmaking with her suffocatingly intimate portrait of mental illness, Knocking. A film both simultaneously subtle and confronting, with Knocking Kempff achieves the perfect balancing act that holds the humanity of those living with mental illness such as Molly at its core.
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The Swedish film Britt-Marie Was Here begins with the title character asking, “How do you live a life?” As deeply philosophical as this sounds, her answer is an amusing, disarming exploration. For Britt-Marie, a sixty-three-year old housewife, discovers her husband Kent’s long-term affair—at his hospital bed after he had a heart attack.
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Writer/director Amanda Kernell’s thoughtful, beautifully crafted first feature is an intimate, compelling coming of age tale of a Sami girl who must choose between her denigrated indigenous culture and mainstream Swedish lifestyle. Sami Blood is a heart-wrenching eye opener. Continue reading…
When a film transports you to a society you never knew existed, it can prove magically transcendent while incredibly moving. Add an adolescent female discovering what she is capable of and you have me hooked. That happened last year with The Eagle Huntress, a documentary about a Mongolian girl’s singular feats with her regal bird of prey. And it happens again in a far different arena with the 14-year-old female Laplander who is the focus of Sami Blood, a Swedish coming-of-age drama handled with an impressive delicacy of purpose by first-time filmmaker Amanda Kernell.
Read moreIn her feature film debut SAMI BLOOD, director/writer Amanda Kernell offers a moving coming-of-age story of two sisters, members of
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