This week I am recommending the short films of India Donaldson, a Lucy Walker retrospective, a 4K restoration of a misunderstood comic masterpiece from Elaine May, a U.K. series focused on Black girlhood, a deep dive into the films of Kelly Reichardt, and a short documentary about the founding of a Palestinian orphanage and school.
Leading up to the theatrical release of India Donaldson’s Sundance hit Good One next week, Metrograph At Home is presenting two of the filmmaker’s short films. In her 2019 short Hannahs, a compelling examination of urban loneliness, a mysterious and charming young woman cons her way into a woman’s apartment with a sympathetic story about a missing friend. Her 2021 short If Found follows a young woman obsessed with dogs to the point that she regularly makes strangers uncomfortable petting their dogs. This obsession comes to a head when she finds what may be a lost dog one day while walking on the beach. Like her feature debut, these shorts feature luscious cinematography, enigmatic performances, and raise unsettling questions about human nature. The series is accompanied by a great conversation between Donaldson and fellow indie filmmaker Eliza Hittman. If you don’t subscribe to Metrograph at Home, you can watch both shorts on Donaldson’s Vimeo.
As documentarian Lucy Walker’s latest film Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, a portrait of only woman to have scaled Mount Everest 10 times and her struggles to build a life for herself and her children in America, hits Netflix, the Paris Theater in New York City is showcasing her work with a career retrospective. Starting this weekend ten of her films — five features and five shorts — will be presented, including Oscar-nominated Waste Land about artist Vik Muniz and wild fire doc Bring Your Own Brigade (I spoke to Walker about this film during its release in 2021). You can read more about the retrospective and get tickets here.
Screening as part of their series Defamed to Acclaimed, a 4K restoration of Elaine May’s satirical comedy Ishtar will be screening all week at the IFC Center. Tonight’s 7pm screening includes an introduction by Carrie Courogen, author of the new Elaine May biography Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius. You can check showtimes and get tickets here. Courogen will also be presenting the film at Sag Harbor Cinema on August 12th.
I’ve recommended Ayoka Chenzira’s Alma’s Rainbow several times now, but it’s always worth putting back on your radar! After it’s U.K. premiere last week, the film will be screening at several theaters across the U.K. this weekend as part of Tape Collective’s series entitled Snapshot: Black Girlhood on Screen (tickets and showtimes for this weekend can be found on their site). This weekend’s screenings also include an event at the Sheffield Film Festival with a a special introduction by Asma Kabadeh. The film will also play with special introductions at a couple of cities in the future including in Manchester on August 21st with an introduction by Rosalyne Norford and Lexi Cinema in London on September 9th with an introduction by Rōgan Graham.
Another filmmaker I have recommended a lot but will always continue to do so is Kelly Reichardt, four of whose films are currently screening on Mubi. Here’s a bit I love from their description of the series:
Reichardt, who edits her own films, imbues elongated moments of quotidian minutiae with a subtly political radicalism. These scenes invite us to reconsider our understanding of time and its meaning, which is slyly dictated by capitalist values. To immerse ourselves in Reichardt’s cinematic wanderings is to open our eyes to a new way of looking at time, space, and life itself.
The films featured in the collection are River of Grass, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, and Certain Women, all of which I love deeply and each of which speak to a different facet of what it is to exist as a woman in this country at any given era of its existence.
If you want to go even deeper into the work of Kelly Reichardt the Criterion Channel has her sophomore film Old Joy (as well as Certain Women) and a 28-minute conversation between Reichardt and critic and screenwriter April Wolfe. For the rest of Reichardt’s filmography, you can watch Night Moves on Prime, First Cow you can rent from most digital services, and Showing Up is available for free on Hoopla.
A few weeks ago I recommended Sahera Dirbas’ documentary A Handful of Earth, about the expelled residents of Tiret Haifa who aim to keep their village history alive through their oral storytelling. This week’s pick from the Palestine Film Index is another short documentary from Dirbas. 138 Pounds in My Pocket: The Story of Hind Al-Husseini - Women, War and Welfare in Jerusalem packs a lot of history in its 18-minutes. The film focuses on just one story from the life of social worker and feminist Hind Al-Husseini — the founding of Dar Al Tifl School. Al-Husseini’s achievements are so innumerable that the director of the school states towards the end of the doc, "Even a thousand European men would not be able to do what Arab women have done. One example is Hind Al-Husseini. Men and governments are unable to achieve what she did." Just from the brief survey of her life that we get in this short that statement doesn’t seem like too much hyperbole. The strand of her life this doc focuses on starts in 1948 when took in 55 orphaned children that she found on the streets of Jerusalem near the Holy Sepulcher Church after their parents were murdered during the Deir Yassin massacre. The orphanage began in the home Al-Husseini shared with her mother, where the women showed the children love while also providing them with an education. The orphanage later blossomed into the Dar Al Tifl School. While the film is rooted in tragedy, it ends on a hopeful note because Al-Husseini was a pragmatist whose whole life was dedicated to the uplifting of her people, specifically women and children, and helping them seek their futures. As one of the contemporary students tells the filmmaker, “If you get stuck in your past you cannot look to the future.” You can watch the film here.
Showing Up is one of my favorite movies <3 Wish more people saw it