#f-rated

[newsandmediarepublic]

Shextreme Film Tour: a celebration of women in adventure

Shextreme Film Tour: a celebration of women in adventure

The Shextreme Film Tour is bringing highlights of the Shextreme Film Festival to the South West, calling into Cornwall and Devon.

(more…)

View On WordPress

[newsandmediarepublic]

Transition Town Totnes Film Festival is Visioning The Future with a focus on F-Rated films

Transition Town Totnes Film Festival is Visioning The Future with a focus on F-Rated films

https://vimeo.com/283199104

As 2018 marks the centenary of some women getting the vote in the UK, The Transition Town Totnes Film Fest is celebrating the achievements and struggles of women.

F-Rated

Over half the festival’s films have the F-Rating, a classification for any film directed, written or with significant women on screen in their own right.

F-Rating was created in 2014 by Holly…

View On WordPress

[newsandmediarepublic]

Influencing the future of film | Plymouth Arts Centre helps Reclaim the Frame

Influencing the future of film | Plymouth Arts Centre helps Reclaim the Frame

‘4 films in 5 cities over 6 months,’ says the blurb for Reclaim the Frame, a new project for film watchers to influence which films are actually watched. And one of those five cities just happens to be Plymouth, courtesy of Plymouth Arts Centre.

(more…)

View On WordPress

[fuckyeahfeministcinema]

There’s a wild history of F-rated cinema on show this weekend, from a debut feature by British writer-director Corinna McFarlane to the story – equally inspiring and infuriating – of one of Britain’s great female filmmakers, Antonia Bird, via documentaries about the hearts of our relationships and our communities.

To the cinema, first, for McFarlane’s The Silent Storm, based on the story of her Scottish ancestors. It’s an openly feminist, triple F-rated entry, with a stunning turn from Andrea Riseborough as an intelligent, impassioned woman stifled by strait-laced religious traditions. In fact, it’s quadruple F-rated, with female producer Nicky Bentham (on the right in the group photograph; McFarlane is second left) bringing the film through production while pregnant!

Also on the big screen, another debut feature: musician Laurie Anderson’s utterly magical documentary Heart of a Dog. The Scottish landscape plays a central role in The Silent Storm, but here Anderson bends her erudite and compassionate thoughts towards her creative and companionate relationship with her rat terrier Lolabelle, and through her meditation on Lolabelle’s death, to her relationships with other lost loves of her life: her mother and her husband, Lou Reed. Anderson shot the film herself, and provides the voice-over.

Antonia Bird made her films personal by other means: often a director for hire, she always brought her political intelligence, her dramatic sense of framing, and her incredible rapport with her actors (Kate Hardie says more about that here). You can get a taste of Bird’s work – and of the person she was – in Susan Kemp’s excellent documentary, which premiered at the BFI last week. Antonia Bird: From EastEnders to Hollywood is on BBC4 at 9pm on Sunday, and then on the iPlayer.

It’s followed by a screening of Bird’s TV drama Care, about a survivor (Steven Mackintosh) of sexual abuse in the foster system. It’s one of the most powerful dramas of the century so far, and of continuing, stark relevance given that 100 cases of child abuse are being reported every month to the Goddard inquiry.

And for crucial contemporary campaigning cinema, you can see Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s immersive, participatory documentary about social housing and the people who live there, Estate, A Reverie, on Curzon Home Cinema. Zimmerman recently screened her previous feature documentary Taskafa, about an extraordinary dog in Istanbul, as part of Anderson’s dog-themed season in London.

And that poster quote from John Berger is a teaser trailer in itself... for Tilda Swinton’s first feature as director: a documentary about the great writer and thinker, which will close Sheffield Doc/Fest in June.

[fuckyeahfeministcinema]

It’s back! Your F-rated weekend round up, kicking off with Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s triple F-rated Oscar nominee Mustang. If you’re in or near London on Saturday 14th May, you can catch F-Rating founder Holly Tarquini talking about the film at a special screening at the Genesis Cinema on Mile End Road, alongside members of Reel Good Film Club, WOC Film Club, gal-dem, Another Gaze and Feminist Fightback. An unmissable look at an unmissable film.

A lot of critics have been keen to call out/look at Mustang’s lassitude, its sleepy scenes of girls trapped in their uncle’s house, beating the heat and the oppression in bikinis. But for me, it’s a girl’s own adventure with outstanding performances from the young, mostly non-professional actors who play the five sisters. Mustang is a cracking action film in cunning disguise, a taut psychological thriller that explodes into guns-and-car chase pace at the close.

Ergüven is also about to explode: the project she was working on before meeting Mustang screenwriter (and director in her own right) Alice Winocour is being shopped around at Cannes. Kings will be her English-language debut, telling a family story against the backdrop of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, according to Women & Hollywood.

More explosions in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, based on the memoir by photojournalist Kim Barker, about working in Afghanistan. So while the film is written and directed by men, it’s all about Barker’s book, Barker’s experience – and Tina Fey playing Kim, with Margot Robbie as her colleague Tanya. Look out for A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night’s Sheila Vand as the only non-white female character. Female war reporters have become a bit of a thing – it’s a war movie! but with a white woman! who has moral dilemmas!. Think Juliette Binoche in 1000 Times Good Night or Catherine Keener in War Story. The casting of Fey and Robbie clearly signals WTF’s ironic intentions (if you didn’t catch them from the title), and the film satirises some of the genre clichés satisfyingly while also focusing on the everyday nitty-gritty.

Closer to home, Susannah White’s John le Carré adaptation Our Kind of Traitor follows hot on the heels of Susanne Bier’s TV series The Night Manager. Naomie Harris plays the only non-dead, non-raped female character, Gail: a lawyer with a blistering grasp of language and consequences. She gets the line of the film when she tells her husband Perry, “Everything has consequences. You fuck one of your students. You run errands for a Russian mobster. Same thing.” Weirdly, running errands for a mobster turns out to be just what their marriage needs... While screenwriter Hossein Amini updates and alters the novel, he’s missing the brilliance of Bier and screenwriter David Farr’s twist: EVERY story EVER is improved by turning one or more of the male characters into a role for Olivia Colman.

If you’re quick, you can catch another tense and cleverly directed film by a British female filmmaker, Kicks by Lindy Heymann. It’s on the iPlayer til tomorrow (14 May). A dark story of female friendship, it’s the perfect preparation for the forthcoming The Violators, the first film by thriller novelist Helen Walsh...

For a final walk on the wild side, one of the true mustangs of American music is now on Curzon Home Cinema (which also has Mustang): Janis: Little Girl Blue, a moving and enlightening documentary by Amy Berg is currently only £4 to view. You’ve got nothing left to lose!

[fuckyeahfeministcinema]

HERE'S TO THE FUTURE! from Gina Telaroli on Vimeo, free to view 9-22 November.

It’s a feature-length film about filmmaking, a sort of inside-out portrait of low/no budget work where you watch the director interact with crew and performers, get up close to the script and see all those off-camera moments on camera. Like 30 Rock meets This is Not a Film. And you can support the filmmaker directly with a PayPal donation.

[fuckyeahfeministcinema]

And we’re back. Has Suffragette’s success led to an explosion of F-rated films on your screens? The answer: a resounding sort of, same as, but hey. I count eight female-helmed big screen releases in the UK before the end of the year, as well as some big star vehicles for female performers such as Carol, Grandma and Sisters. And yes, they are as resoundingly, boringly, embarrassingly, eye-rollingly white and Euro-American as the Hollywood Reporter actresses’ round table. Which, of course, features Kate Winslet, star of this week’s top F-rated release, The Dressmaker. A return to the big screen for Jocelyn Moorhouse (How to Make an American Quilt), it’s really a paean to one actress: JUDY DAVIS. She’s been all over Australian TV but it’s beyond time she had a role as great as this, as Winslet’s raddled, no-boundaried mother. And while The Dressmaker is a charming afternoon out of the rain, looking at the astonishing colours in every frame, it’s mainly sent me back to watch Davis in her break-out role in Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career.

Jennifer Lawrence is on that round-table too, and stars in this week’s biggest F-rated release. Adapted from Suzanne Collins’ novels and featuring a diverse range of roles for women, The Hunger Games franchise has satisfied event movie-lovers who want a little more than macho posturing and white A-listers. Patina Miller as rebel commander Paylor is a particular stand-out in this fourth instalment, delivering a key speech with conviction and surviving to the end. J-Law is, however, the centre of almost every frame, and rules. She takes on Julianne Moore and wins, a rare feat. She shoots, she scores. If only Hollywood were as ready for takedown as Panem’s ruthless dictatorship...

BFI Player has another outstanding lead performance from a woman torn between two male lovers in a predominantly male world: Lucie Borleteau’s Fidelio, Alice’s Journey is all about Ariane Labed’s sensuous intelligence as Alice, a shipboard engineer with a man on shore and a man on board.  

Also focused on an epic journey is this week’s alt. F-rated big screen release, by documentary-maker Alison Rose - in Star*Men, she takes a road trip with four influential astronomers that may be physically crossing the American Southwest but roams through outer space. With no Brian Cox hair, just lots of quiet brilliance, this is a tribute to obsession and passion, and a portrait of masculinity. If you’re in a doc mood, two more recent films in the same vein are now up on Curzon Home Cinema: Cosima Spencer’s horse racing Palio and Jeanie Finlay’s music biz Orion: The Man Who Would Be King. 

And finally: the 6th UK Portuguese Film Festival has a focus on women in film (which festival hasn’t this year? Oh yes, Cannes. #heelsgate), including a filmmaker roundtable on Saturday. Come on Hollywood, time to catch up with Portugal.

[fuckyeahfeministcinema]

***BANNER F-RATED WEEK*** Not one but TWO female-helmed UK releases today, and two absolutely brilliant independent films at that: 52 Tuesdays (Sophie Hyde) [more from me here] and The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller) both put teenage female sensibilities and sexualities, and mother-daughter relations, at the centre of their dramas, and both show worlds never before seen on film. See both! Twice! Take everyone you know – especially teenage viewers, as Bel Powley, lead in Diary, tweeted.

Tilda Cobham-Hervey, the co-lead in 52 Tuesdays, has been active online as well, curating the film’s My 52 Tuesdays web project, which has seen thousands of people worldwide opening their hearts to the camera, as Billie (Cobham-Hervey) persuades her schoolfriends Jasmin and Josh to do. Meanwhile, Billie’s mum James (Del Herbert-Jane) is chronicling his transition direct to-camera. Shot every Tuesday for a year, mirroring the characters’ regular weekly meet-up, the film is a unique chronicle of time and transition. As well as being a piercingly affecting, timeless family story, 52 Tuesdays is the most brilliant depiction of how we live now (in the wealthy Western world at least), shaping ourselves online and through global communities. 

If 52 is heart-opening, then Diary is eye-opening: set in 1976s, it swaps Billie’s digital camera for Minnie’s analogue tape recorder, into which she breathlessly and confidently confesses the unfolding of her relationship with her mother’s boyfriend Monroe. Her mother, Charlotte, had kids young, hasn’t really grown up, and is living it up in counter-cultural, anything-goes San Francisco, looking for a best friend in her daughter. Like 52 Tuesdays’ James, Charlotte is a share-everything mother, and the film explores the ups and downs of this for her daughter. 70s San Francisco – with its alt comix stores, Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings, and Quaaludes parties – is present in all its wooden stack-heeled, brown and orange glory, feeding Minnie’s incipient artwork (her hand drawn illustrations flow into diegetic space as animation). 

Not least because James also visits San Francisco – where the 21st century trans community is partially a legacy of 70s sexual freedom – the films are a perfect pair: both of them respect adolescent autonomy, recognise the special bond between daughter and mother in all its complexity, and are exhilarating F-rated viewing. Visually, narratively, intellectually, emotionally, they are hard evidence that female filmmakers are creating the most inventive, impressive independent cinema, whatever the dismal results at the top of the box office, as MDSC reported this week.

If you’re not near screens where these two instant classics are playing, then a) you can organise a 52 Tuesdays screening near you via ourscreen and b) you can catch more family drama in Helen Hunt’s Then She Found Me on iPlayer, and more teenage desire in Monika Treut’s Of Girls and Horses on BFIPlayer.