Since I will be attending the San Francisco Silent Film Festival at the end of the week, this week’s guide is early! I’m recommending a few streaming picks, plus another must-see retrospective of a trailblazing filmmaker.
Not A Pretty Picture — trailblazing director Martha Coolidge’s 1976 documentary-fiction hybrid re-telling of own rape — screens this Thursday at the Los Feliz 3 in Los Angeles, kicking off an eight-film retrospective at the American Cinematheque over the next few weeks. Most films will be screener in 35mm and several will include Q&As with Coolidge herself. I am jealous of everyone who gets to attend this — especially the rarely screened gems Angie and Lost In Yonkers. This retrospective also serves as homework for my book, as Coolidge is one of the amazing directors that I interviewed for my forthcoming book Cinema Her Way (coming TBD 2025 from Rizzoli).
I saw Anna Margaret Hollyman’s short film Wüm at last year’s Chicago Critics Film Festival and it left me in absolute stitches. Jack Ferver stars as Bennett, a nonbinary new parent to a 3-month-old daughter named Edie, who arrives late to Wüm, a chic “Mamas Group” and must deal with a never-ending barrage of micro-aggressions from the group’s many influencer moms. You can watch the film now on Kanopy.
I saw Iva Radivojević’s experimental documentary Aleph at the New Directors/New Films Film festival a few years ago and truly do not have the words to describe it. This labyrinthine film takes its inspiration from a short story by Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges and sees Radivojević weave a travelogue from the stories and dreams of her subjects — actors, performers, musicians and non-professionals — who inhabit ten countries and five continents through poetic imagery and magical realism. Poet Anne Waldman voices the dreamer, who traverses the globe as she journeys through the experiences of these disparate lives. You can stream the film now on DaFilms.
This week’s pick from the Palestine Film Index is Dominique Dubosc’s Palestinian Stories, which is a series of vignettes, mostly with the storytellers in direct address towards the camera, filmed between 2001 and 2008 that the filmmaker describes as “dreams, urban legends, letters from prison, and testimonies.” One of the stories is told by a man who goes months separated from his wife and children because of rules regarding Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank. This quote in particular hit hard, “I want to live with them but the Occupation won’t let me. The Occupation makes me live according to its own logic; the logic of violence and of the separation of human beings.” You can watch the film on Dubosc’s Vimeo and learn more about the project on her website.
The Cinema 4 Gaza auction is still raising funds for Medical Aid for Palestinians
I have written about Cameroonian filmmaker Rosine Mbakam a few times now, including when her first narrative film Mambar Pierrette was playing in theaters earlier this year, but I’m highlighting her again because that film and two more of her documentaries are now on the Criterion Channel. Wildly, I’ve seen three of her docs, but the two on the Channel now will be new-to-me! Mbakam’s films are intimate in feel, yet epic in scope as she uses cinema to illuminate inner lives of West African women living in Cameroon and abroad. You can watch these three films now on Criterion Channel, while a few more of her docs are available on Ovid as well. Also, I encourage you to check out Robert’ interview with Mbakam out of Cannes last year.
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