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Weekly Directed By Women Viewing Guide
This week I am recommending a new absurdist Zambian drama, a documentary about a cult musician, a new horror film, the films of Joan Micklin Silver, a short documentary about birders on the U.S.-Mexico border, and a documentary about the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
But first, a reminder that I will be singing copies of my book and introducing Karyn Kusma’s Girlfight this Saturday at the Southampton Playhouse and also this coming Tuesday night at the Nitehawk Cinema - Williamsburg. Both presentations are in collaboration with The Future of Film is Female. I also curated a Cinema Her Way starter pack over at Letterboxd!
Also, Payal Kapadia’s romantic and stridently feminist drama All We Imagine As Light will be having a live streaming premiere on Criterion Channel this Sudany at 8p.m. ET. Do not miss it!!!
I first saw Rungano Nyoni’s sophomore feature On Becoming a Guinea Fowl at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival last summer and was completely blown away. A pitch-black comedy that slowly reveals itself to actually be a generational tragedy, the film follows a woman named Shula (newcomer Susan Chardy in a star-making turn) after she finds her Uncle Fred lying dead on the side of the road. The subsequent traditional funeral proceedings become more and more absurd as it becomes increasingly clear that Uncle Fred was actually an abuser, and Shula and her cousins (Elizabeth Chisela, Esther Singini) share an unfortunate bond because of his actions. I had the privilege to speak to Nyoni and Chardy about the film for RogerEbert.com. Here’s a bit from our conversation:
I was unfamiliar with the guinea fowl as an animal or as a metaphor when I first watched it, and I was really taken with the way you used the animal throughout your film, with the video, and where you take it by the end. I would love to know at what point in the writing process with this story did you think the guinea fowl was going to be that central metaphor?
Rungano Nyoni: I know how it started. I divided the film up into chapters when I wrote it because I thought I was being really smart. And I’m like, “It’s like Lars Von Trier!” So I had chapters, and they were all titled with Bemba parables. And one of them, which was towards the end, involved the guinea fowl. I liked the saying, so then I realized, okay, I’m just being pretentious. I don’t need these chapters. So I removed them. But that one saying stuck with me. So, I started researching. For some reason, I started looking at guinea fowls, and probably avoiding writing. Then I found out so much stuff about guinea fowls.
That saying is true, and in our culture, it has loads of meanings. It can mean healing. Guinea fowls are also synonymous with being resilient and so many other cool things. I had always thought they were sort of sexy chickens, but they’re not. They are not chickens. They’re on a different level. Then I realized, yes, she is becoming a guinea fowl. This makes sense. So I changed the title. I’m an expert on guinea fowls now if anyone needs one. In an early draft of the script, I had one of the characters say the parable, but then it came across too preachy, so I removed it, and then I changed it into the show.
You can find more information about the film over on A24’s website, although they once again do not seem to have a listing for where the film will be playing. I’ve done my best to find where it is playing in a few markets. It opens at the Angelika Film Center in New York City this weekend, the Gene Siskel Film Center here in Chicago on March 14th, various Laemmle Theatres in Los Angles, Film Scene in Iowa City, and The Jacob Burns Film Center on March 21st, and the Roxie in San Francisco on March 28th.
I am a huge fan of the song “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus, and when I read she passed away a few years ago I was devastated, especially because at the time she was still a cult figure without much information about who she was outside of this one song. Not long afterwards I found out that filmmaker Eva Aridjis-Fuentes was completing a documentary about her. The legend goes that Q, real name Diane Luckey, was driving her cab one day working out a song in her head when she picked up Jonathan Demme and his music supervisor. They were impressed and asked her to send them her demo. She did and Demme put the song “Goodbye Horses” in both Married To The Mob and, most memorably, in Silence of the Lambs. He also featured her as the singer at Tom Hanks’ birthday party in Philadelphia, where she performs a cover of David Bryne’s “Heaven.” After that appearance, she disappeared from the public eye. For twenty-five years, the question lingered: what happened to Q Lazzarus? Aridjis-Fuentes was also a major fan and one day after calling a ride service fate stepped in to answer the question. The enigmatic Q was her driver, and the film Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus was born. Over the next three years Aridjis-Fuentes filmed hundreds of hours of footage with Q as she filled in the gaps of her life — both during her brush with fame via Demme — and why she “disappeared” from that life. The result is a beautiful tribute to a woman who was larger than life and extremely talented, but who was also, I fear, ahead of her time. We learn that Q did have meetings with record execs, but that no matter how good her music was, a large, Black woman singing rock and roll was not “marketable.” So she went to London, got a band together, was making a name for herself, and then one fateful misstep led her down a path of substance abuse and poverty. What I loved so much about this film is that after every obstacle that came her way, Q found the strength to pick herself back up. Aridjis-Fuentes largely lets Q tell her own story, and she appears to tell it warts and all. She’s funny and effervescent, even when her story gets extremely sad. One sequence is so potent, Aridjis-Fuentes returns to it twice: just before the COVID pandemic shut the world down Q was prepping for a comeback tour. Aridjis-Fuentes films her singing along to “Goodbye Horse” a cappella in her kitchen. Her voice is as powerful and beguiling as it ever was. “Goodbye Horses,” she says, “that’s the real Q Lazzarus, y’all.” It’s a transcendent moment, an artist at one with her art. The film opens this week at the Rio Cinema in London and The Nuart in Los Angeles, and will screen at the Angelika Film Center in New York City on March 14th and Facets Film Forum in Chicago in May. You can find more screening dates here.
Unfortunately, I was not a big fan of the screenlife J-horror Bloat from writer-director Pablo Absento, but it might work for some viewers! The film stars Ben McKenzie as a Marine named Jack whose plans for a Japanese vacation with his family go awry when an “insurgent attack” calls him back from his bereavement leave to his Middle East base. His wife and two sons go on the trip alone, with Jack checking in on them via FaceTime and text messages. Soon, though, the idyllic trip goes haywire when his youngest son nearly drowns, then begins exhbiting odd behaviors that lead Jack to believe his son has become possessed by a mythological Japanese spirit known as a Kappa.
Here’s a bit from my review for RogerEbert.com:
Absento's film resembles others produced by the screenlife subgenre's pioneer Timur Bekmambetov, whose producing credits also include the Unfriended and Searching franchises. Unfortunately, while the editing of the various elements that make up Jack's screen life is slick, it's also a missed opportunity for pushing the format forward. Occasionally Absento hints at the irony of Jack's job, in which he uses his screen to streamline the killing of unseen "militants," with his attempt to patch up his broken family life through the same screen, as when Jack orders a drone to give his song for his birthday. There's also some cheeky meta-humor when one of the many folders on Jack's desktop is labeled "Crypto," a reference to McKenzie's real life crusade against the crypto economy.
Yet the ease with which Jack can track his family’s locations with Apple device software like “Find My” and buy surveillance cameras to spy on them in the name of gathering proof, or that Hannah can order prescription drugs and have them delivered while on vacation, is presented with little to no commentary about what any of it says about the current state of human lives lived online, let alone the anxieties of contemporary family life. By the end she also flirts with the same “family annihilator” tropes that Osgood Perkins explored in Longlegs, but without any real depth or point of view.
You can find tickets and showtimes for the film or rent it on digital here.
I’ve been so swamped with finishing work before heading off on the first leg of my book tour that I haven’t yet had a chance to check out Prarthana Mohan’s Picture This which is available now on Prime or Paola Cortellesi’s There’s Still Tomorrow, which is opening at the Angelika Film Center in New York City, various Laemmles in Los Angeles, the Midtown Art Cinema in Atlanta, and a few dozen more theaters across the country. You can find more showtimes and theatres here. I’m hoping to catch up with both films soon!
I’ve recommended the films of Joan Micklin Silver many times, but since several of them are currently streaming on Criterion Channel, including a new glorious restoration of one of my all time favorite movies — Crossing Delancey — I felt it was high time to recommend them again.
Also, over at RogerEbert.com I spoke to screenwriter Susan Sandler, star Amy Irving, and the pickle man himself Peter Riegert! Here’s a little bit from that interview:
Peter, did you have an inkling that Sam the pickle man would become an archetypal dream man all these years later?
Peter Riegert: Not really. In my experience, that’s the kind of phenomenon that happens within a culture by generation or, in this case, generations. Because it’s an unactable thing to me, it’s hard to act like an archetype. I just thought the writing was so spectacular. The writing was rich, and Joan got an extraordinary cast together. I recognized Sam’s value as a part, but I would be lying if I said I knew it would have the impact it had. And what’s nice is that it has survived its time.
The pickle man as someone to wish for happened when the movie came out. I had endless people come up to me on the street and tell me they were the pickle man or were going to marry the pickle man. And the fact that it’s kept going to your generation and younger is very moving because Sam is just a very special character.
I recently saw a post going semi-viral on Substack that included screenshots from a viral post I had on Tumblr at the start of quarantine in 2020. It’s from a heartfelt 37-minute long short film by Otilia Portillo Padua called Birders. It’s one of five short documentaries executive produced by Gael García Bernal for a project called Rio Grande, Rio Bravo. I suspect more people have seen my screenshots of this one beautiful sequence than have actually watched any of these films, so I figured it was time to suggest them here! In tracing how migrant birds travel back and forth over the border each year and crafting a portrait of birdwatchers on both sides of the border, Birders offers subtle commentary on immigration and migratory workers who come from Mexico to work in the United States. You can stream the film now on Netflix.
This week’s pick from the Palestine Film Index is Monica Maurer’s Why? Filmed in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the film features brutal footage of the devastation the invasion wrecked on the civilian population, especially Palestinian refugees. Like many of Maurer’s films the footage is accompanied by narration that contextualizes what exactly we are seeing. In one sequence the narration explains how the Israeli military is conducting their genocide with weapons manufactured in America that are designed for "total destruction" of civilian life that cause inoperable bone and tissue damage, often leading toward amputation and death, and for a second I had to double check that this film was made in 1982 and not over the last year. A warning that this film includes incredibly graphic footage of the aftermath of these bombs (although if you've been paying attention to the reporting out of Gaza then you've probably, unfortunately, seen comparable horrors over the last 18 months). You can watch the film here on YouTube.
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Some great suggestions here. Thanks for writing it!