March 2025: The Book Tour, Part One
Monthly Roundup Post
Welcome to my monthly round up post. Here you will find all my writing from the previous month, plus a look at everything I watched. Also, more updates about my book!
Just a reminder that you can pick up a copy of Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors In Their Own Words and check out my book tour dates here. If you can’t make any of the tour dates, a limited number of signed copies are available from MZS.Press!
Even with all the prep for the first part of my book tour, I did also manage to write quite a few pieces — and conducted some of my favorite interviews I’ve ever done!
Sex, Love and Pickles: Amy Irving, Peter Riegert and Susan Sandler on Crossing Delancey
More Than Rage: Rungano Nyoni and Susan Chardy on On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Watchlist This! our March 2025 picks of the best new bubbling-under films: On Becoming a Guinea Fowl and The Assessment
As the book has made its way out into the world and I’ve gotten to screen films in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago during this first part of the book tour, I’ve also been overwhelmed by the coverage the book as received by my colleagues in the media. Here is a sampling of what has been written about the book so far, as well as some interviews with me and a podcast. As the second wave of the book tour starts up in the middle of the April, there will be more pieces and interviews coming as well.
RogerEbert.com: Writing Her Way: Marya E. Gates on Her New Book
Cineberry: 9 Woman Directed Films I Want to Watch After Reading Cinema Her Way
Los Angeles Times: Gas Food Lodging and the evolving state of women filmmakers, plus the best films in L.A.
AV Club: Karyn Kusama talks about that visceral Jennifer’s Body vomit scene in exclusive Cinema Her Way book excerpt
Chicago Tribune: In Cinema Her Way, female directors talk about struggle, survival and the industry
WTTW - Chicago PBS: Chicago Film Critic Highlights Contributions of Female Filmmakers in New Book Cinema Her Way
Cinema Femme: Spark of Access: Marya E. Gates on Her New Book, Cinema Her Way
Most of March consisted of re-watching on the big screen the amazing films I was fortunate enough to present with the first part of my book tour. I wrote about those experiences over on Letterboxd. But I did watch a few new-to-me films in March that were utterly fantastic.
Julien Duvivier is one of my favorite directors so I was excited when Criterion Channel added one of his silent films to the service last month. Mother Hummingbird features the ethereal Maria Jacobini as a middle-aged Baroness who falls in love with one of her grown son’s adult friends (the always delectable Francis Lederer) at a masked ball, and then flees with him to Algeria. Once again one of the great “we had faces then” type movies (just watch this clip!!!). I hope I’ll be lucky enough to see this on the big screen someday.
I wrote a lot about Eva Aridjis-Fuentes’ doc Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus a few weeks ago, but I want to reiterate that if you have a chance to see this film, don’t miss it!! A beautiful and moving tribute to an artist who was not fully appreciated in her time.
Along with interviewing the trailblazing Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour about her masterpiece Leila and the Wolves, we also talked about the new restoration of The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived. Both films are anti-colonial masterworks, and if you get a chance to see the new restorations as they make their way across the U.S., you absolutely should make them a priority.
Caryn Coleman of of The Future of Film is Female is truly doing the WORK. I wish I could have seen everything she programmed for her series Girls To The Front: Nineties and Now at MoMA on the big screen (I’ve seen almost every film already, just not all on the big screen), but I am glad I was able to see Alex and Sylvia Sichel’s All Over Me, which was the opening night film. Like Melanie Laurent’s film Respire, this captures that very distinct mood of a toxic, doomed friendship between two teenager girls in away that hits almost too close to home.
While I was in New York, I was also lucky enough to catch the new restoration and release of Robina Rose’s hypnotic 1981 masterpiece Nightshift. I think this is one best seen knowing very little about it, so it’s singular, oneiric energy will wash over you organically. The film is still making its way across the country right now.
Finally,
took me to a 35mm screening of River’s Edge, Tim Hunter’s incisive meditation on late Cold War era American nihilism and violent, casual misogyny. I really want to program this as a double feature with Jennifer Reeder's Knives and Skin.
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.
What a month! I'm so happy I got to be a part of it.