#triple f-rated

[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!