Love is an endless act of forgiveness.

Weekly Directed By Women Viewing Guide

Nicole Kidman in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady

This week’s guide is all about the perils of womanhood, the solidarity of sisterhood, the contradictions of love, and the inevitability of death.

Giuseppe De Domenico and Martina Scrinzi in Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio

I recommended writer-director Maura Delpero’s Oscar-contender Vermiglio last month when it had its qualifying run in New York (where it is still playing at the IFC Center), but the film is slowly starting to make its way into more art house theaters across the country, including Los Angeles where Delpero will participate in Q&As at the Laemmle Royal following the 7:00 P.M. screening on January 3 and the 1:00 P.M. screening on January 4, and the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago. You can find more screenings as they are announced here. I also had the pleasure of speaking with Delpero for my column this month at RogerEbert.com, so here is a little bit from our conversation:

I also like the idea that back then, it was easier to accept that life is bigger than us, and can be very tragic and that they can die. That war makes death quite normal and quite okay. If one dies, there’s another one. To us, it is really difficult to accept. Now, we try to control a lot of life. So when death happens, it’s a tragedy. At that time, there was an acceptance of the fact that nature is bigger than us. We are little. We also tried to refer to this photographically because the references I passed to Mikhail Krichman, the DP, were mostly Romantic period paintings, where often the men and the women are very little in front of the enormity of nature, which is completely indifferent to men because she does her might.

Cynthia Scott’s The Company of Strangers is an empathetic act of docufiction