April 2025: It's a strange world, isn't it?

Monthly Roundup Post

It’s a bit weird writing this monthly round up this month. I began the month celebrating the re-discovery of two films from singular director Karen Sperling, then I spent the better part of ten days celebrating the life and work of the late David Lynch at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, and I was supposed to end the month doing a book event at the Cascadia International Women’s Film Festival. However, the day that I got into Washington State, my Mom called to tell me that my Dad was admitted to the E.R. I got on a plane immediately and headed to Reno, where we are still in the hospital. If you haven’t already seen my announcement, I will not, unfortunately, be attending the rest of my book tour events, including the Atlanta Film Festival this weekend. Most of the scheduled screenings are still happening, so please check in with the individual theaters if you had been planning to attend one of them.

Laura Dern in David Lynch’s surreal masterwork Inland Empire

All this said, I still want to share the work I did in April, and I will still have a few pieces that will be dropping throughout May (including my Directed By Women Viewing Guide, which I still plan to publish weekly as long as I can). I’m just trying to roll with the punches right now.

So, here’s what I wrote in April, plus some podcast appearances.

• Female Filmmakers in Focus: The Films of Euzhan Palcy

• Podcast: Christmas Movies Actually #132: Night of the Comet (feat. Catherine Mary Stewart and Marya E. Gates)

• Podcast: Exiting Through The 2010s: Beyond The Lights

• Letterboxd Watchlist This! our April 2025 picks of the best new bubbling-under films: Blue Sun Palace and Tendaberry

• Transformation and Rebirth: Constance Tsang on Blue Sun Palace

I also did a few more podcasts and interviews for my book Cinema Her Way:

• Autostraddle : The Greatest Women Filmmakers Are Mad for a Reason

• Podcast: The Brattle – Episode 81: Cinema Her Way

• Podcast: Free Space - How To Watch Cinema Her Way

• Podcast: We Need To Talk About Oscar - From Film Critic to Author: Marya E. Gates on her new book - Cinema Her Way

• The Film Stage: Recommended New Books on Filmmaking: Visionary Female Directors, De Palma’s Underrated War, Almodóvar, and Anthony Mann

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David Lynch with his son Austin in Out Yonder — Neighbor Boy

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I did a lot of rewatching in April, mostly due to the one book tour date I did attend (shout out to my friends at The Brattle!), the David Lynch retrospective at the Music Box Theatre (with a pitstop at the Somerville Theatre), and watching movies with my Dad in the hospital.

Here are the new-to-me and rewatch standouts:

• While we only screened Karen Sperling’s film The Waiting Room, I was also fortunate enough to see her first feature Make a Face, which I think Block Cinema curator Michael Metzger and I hope will get a public screening as well sometime in the not-too-distant future. Both films are completely singular works of art that are as transformative as they are unsettling, somehow placing the viewer directly in the disorienting experiences of each film’s protagonists. If you like the film April (which, side note, I will have an interview with writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili dropping next week), I think you will enjoy Sperling’s films. Hopefully they will become accessible for more audiences to discover soon.

• David Lynch is my favorite filmmaker, and so the retrospective at the Music Box Theatre was a deeply rewarding experience for many reasons. I love a good theatrical rewatch, I also love studying the various themes and motifs that arise throughout the works of filmmakers over decades (hence the interview style of my book). The programming, which also included his shorts and commercial work, really allowed me to dive deep into those connections throughout his work. There were also some just truly transcendent moments for me, like seeing both The Elephant Man and The Straight Story back to back, which was emotionally overwhelming, but also deeply cleansing. I also appreciate that I was able to catch up on rarities like his Out Yonder series, which are three twenty-minute shorts that are as absurd and unsettling as they are funny, and very much in step with his Dumbland era. There were two documentaries that were made during the production of Inland Empire, entitled Lynch (One) and Lynch 2, that I really enjoyed watching right after the screening of the film. Both docs give us a fly-on-the-wall view from pre-production through the shooting of the film, with tidbits about his life and philosophies mixed in through insightful, and often very funny, stories that he shares throughout. We also get to see more of what he is like as director on set. If you are an aspiring director, both docs would be invaluable resources. And, of course, getting to see The Return: Episode Eight (Gotta Light?) on the big screen with a packed audience is something I am going to cherish forever. I wrote a lot about each watch and rewatch (forty-one in all!) over on Letterboxd, which you can read here.

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Stills from Karen Sperling’s singular work The Waiting Room

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P.S. - Don’t forget every week on Friday afternoons paid subscribers get my Directed By Women Viewing Guide, with picks for new releases and streaming hidden gems.

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It’s been that type of month.

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