Sometimes, the story we tell ourselves becomes the truth.
Weekly Directed By Women Viewing Guide
This week I am recommending a new dramedy starring Brendan Fraser, two of the best documentaries of the year, a Laura Poitras retrospective, and a short experimental work featuring Palestinian opera.
Co-written and directed by Hikari, the new Brendan Fraser film Rental Family is a real old fashioned charmer. Fraser stars as an American actor named Phillip who was a hit in Japan in a popular commercial years ago, but has been struggling to find substantial work ever since. That is, until his agent gets him a gig working for a “rental family” agency. Once on the roster he plays everything from a mourner at a fake funeral to a groom for a lesbian who wants to make her parents happy to a journalist giving a famed director one last chance to relive his glory days. But his most complex role comes in the form of the long-lost Dad of a young girl named Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), whose single mom (Shino Shinozaki) needs him in order to get her daughter into an elite school. Soon, Phillip’s new gig has him blurring the lines between performance and reality, while also rediscovering a sense of belonging and the singular joy of real, human connection. I saw this at TIFF early this year and I found it to be a lovely film that made me cry and miss my Dad immensely. The film opens across the U.S. today. You can find tickets and showtimes here. Also, read this great convo with the director and Robert Daniels.
Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks was one of my favorite films out of Sundance earlier this year. Here’s what I wrote out of its premiere:
Shot in a vérité style, the film follows Sara Shahverdi, the first elected councilwoman of her rural Iranian village (and the only female representative for any of the surrounding three hundred villages). “I’m always ready to ride my motorcycle…and to fight,” she tells us. From a young age, Shahverdi bucked tradition. Tired of rearing daughters, when she was born, her father raised her more like a son, allowing her to choose how she dresses, go into spaces typically reserved for men, and even learn how to ride his motorcycle. A divorced woman, she shocks those around her by living alone and not putting up with anyone’s bullshit.
Needless to say, Shahverdi is a badass. Before the election, we watch her confront one of her brothers who tried to swindle her sisters out of their share of their father’s inheritance. After the election, we see her use the completion of an election promise (getting gas hookups for the village) as a way to convince men to register half their houses in their wives’ names (to avoid the kind of inheritance drama at the center of a film like Inshallah A Boy). She even visits an all-girls school to inspire them to pursue their educations and resist the pressures of their families who push them towards child marriage, later taking a few of them on a motorcycle ride.
The film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for International Documentary at Sundance, opens this week at Film Forum in New York City.
I also saw Jesse Moss & Amanda McBaine’s Teenage Wasteland (fka Middletown) at Sundance and have not stopped thinking about it all year long. The film follows a group of high school students who take on political corruption and environmental injustice in their small upstate New York hometown in 1996. What started as an A/V assignment became something more when English teacher Fred Isseks sends his students to investigative the brown muck that has begun surfacing at the local dump. Soon they discover the root of this toxicity runs deep. Moss and McBaine combine archival footage from the class project entitled “Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed,” along with outtakes, diaries, and interviews with Isseks and several of his students thirty years later. What I particularly loved about this film is that Isseks never dupes his students into thinking they live in a democracy, exposing them to the corruption of our rigged system, but also encourages them to pursue their civic duty while not being afraid to speak truth to power. The film opens this week at Film Forum in New York City.
In the lead up to the December release of Laura Poitras’ new documentary Cover-Up, which she co-directed with Mark Obenhaus, the Paris Theater in New York City has programmed a retrospective of Poitras’ work. The series, entitled Secrets & Lies: Through the Lens of Laura Poitras, begins with an advanced screening of her new film on November 23rd followed by a Q&A with Laura Poitras and Seymour Hersh moderated by the great Mira Nair. Other films in the series screening include My Country, My Country, The Oath, CITIZENFOUR, Flag Wars, Risk, and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. You can read more about the series and get tickets here.
This week’s pick from the Palestine Film Index is Søren Lind and Larissa Sansour’s As If No Misfortune Had Occurred in the Night. Shot in exquisite black and white, this three-channel video work is an extension of Sansour’s previous futurist works. Here she has combines an Arabic-language opera about loss, mourning, and inherited trauma performed by Palestinian soprano Nour Darwis, with her signature flare for striking, layered visuals and a unique use of archive material to evoke the deep melancholy of a future differed. You can watch the short now on Criterion Channel.
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