Directed By Women: Birth/Rebirth (2023)

IFC Films

“Birth/Rebirth” is what I like to call an odd little film. The kind you probably shouldn’t watch while you eat.

It benefits from multiple viewings, and a sense of trust that the medical professionals know what they’re doing. Because in writer/director Laura Moss’s dark meditation on motherhood and Frankenstein, they’re clearly interested in the science of it all. If you were actually skilled and twisted enough to successfully reanimate a human corpse, what exactly would it involve?

The short answer is in some ways what you would expect: a whole lot of gruesome. And it takes all types to make it happen. The duo who bring it about, and who eventually become a twisted, odd couple co-parenting unit, are the kind of polar opposites who are brought together by their mutual interest in the undead six-year-old girl who comes to (re)define their lives.

Celie Morales (Judy Reyes) is the warmly empathetic embodiment of motherhood. Her daughter, the soon to be deceased Lila (A.J. Lister), conceived, we later discover, via IVF, is the sort of adorable moppet who will respond to her mother’s distracted state by telling her a secret: “I’m not getting enough attention.”

It’s so effortlessly sweet that getting invested in mother and daughter is one of the easier demands “Birth/Rebirth” makes, and it’s especially crucial once things really get going and the movie reveals what Celie is willing to do in the name of motherly love. 

The other half of what is to come is naturally a very deliberate contrast. A pathologist at the same hospital where Celie works as a nurse, Rose Casper (Marin Ireland) is the source of much of the film’s dark humor and its spirit. She’s the one who’s been interested in reanimating corpses since second grade, with tales of cutting off starfish legs and similar, disastrous experiments on the class hamster.

As an adult, Rose is far more comfortable around the dead bodies she’s made her life’s work, coldly dismissive of colleagues and the guy she masturbates in the bathroom to get the necessary materials for her process. She’s so socially inept in fact that she doesn’t predict that someone is bound to come looking for Lila after she tragically passes and Rose makes off with her deceased body for her obsessive quest in treating death as if it were a scientific obstacle to surmount.

To be fair, she could hardly anticipate that Celie would know to go straight to the hospital basement and track down Rose at her coldly efficient apartment to claim her daughter’s body, only to discover exactly what Rose has been up to. Like the busy single mother she is, Celie doesn’t waste time condemning, going straight into mom and nurse mode, eventually moving in with Rose in order to aid her and track Lila’s progress.

The work that they do involves the aforementioned gruesomeness of motherhood that we tend to not want to acknowledge, from the routine checkups like amniocentesis, which involve a very long needle being inserted into a pregnant woman’s belly, and the everyday efforts that involve keeping Lila reanimated.

Much like old age, motherhood ain’t for sissies. In their efforts to keep it going, Rose and Celie begin to take on each other’s characteristics, with Celie isolating herself from her well-meaning friends and Rose becoming warmer to a degree that her startled coworker asks her if she’s okay when he sees her smiling. 

It’s hardly the expected route to take, with cinema’s long tradition of creepy kids in horror that shows no signs of slowing down, from “The Bad Seed” to “Pet Sematary” to “Sinister” to more recently, “Hereditary.” But “Birth/Rebirth” keeps it real, in a manner of speaking, with the revived Lila exhibiting more of the limited motor skills and speech patterns that would be expected from such a grisly turn of events.

It’s refreshing in a way to see a movie that never forgets that in the best of circumstances, birth (at least from what I can gather from my own childfree by choice status) is a “disgusting and beautiful process.” Not to mention a bold choice to make those responsible for bringing the unnatural state of affairs into the world as the potential monsters. After all, much like the “Frankenstein” story that serves as the inspiration for this dark and twisted tale, the so-called monster didn’t ask to be created, and is not the real source of the horror to follow.

It’s us. It’s always us.

52 Films By Women: Compensation (1999)

Screenshot

By Andrea Thompson

“Compensation” is the kind of boldly independent experimental film that makes me rage and moan at the long and productive career of an artist that wasn’t. You’d think I would somehow find better ways at coping with this, but one of the most bittersweet experiences I have as a writer is to watch and appreciate a beautiful film like this...and to know that the director wasn’t given much opportunity afterwards.

It’s not that director Zeinabu irene Davis hasn’t done other things, both before and since. But they’ve been few and far between, and she has not been granted the creative opportunities she clearly earned. Seriously, how many more times must I mourn? 

And this one feels more personal than most. The 1999 black and white film “Compensation” isn’t just a love letter to love, it’s an ode to Chicago, the city I reside in and one Davis clearly has a great affection for. It’s not just that the entire plot takes place there, it occurs during two different time periods, at the beginning and end of the twentieth century.

Both are seen through the eyes of two very different couples, and primarily follow two Black Deaf women, Malindy Brown and Malaika Brown, who find love with a hearing man, Arthur Jones and Nico Jones, respectively. Played by the same set of actors, Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks, both find their romances in danger thanks to the diseases of the day, tuberculosis and AIDS.

For this unique love story, Davis doesn’t just make fun, creative considerations for the Deaf community with her use of Silent Era title cards and vintage photos, both of ordinary people and activists, she portrays her non-hearing characters with a sensitivity rarely seen. We see this community through the eyes of the people within it, not by how they’re perceived by those who can hear, which, as “Compensation” reminds us, isn’t always positive. If we may dislike that some of Malaika’s friends disapprove of her dating a hearing person, we mostly understand why they do, even as Nico treats her with loving kindness and respect.

There’s less understanding and time spent in the past, which fills a bit like filler as time goes on, since the objections more revolve around Arthur, a recent arrival from the South as part of the Great Migration, being beneath the more educated Malindy. So it’s hardly surprising that Malaika and Nico steal the show while giving us a fun view of Chicago and Black culture with humor and a great sense of the city’s rhythms, while also flipping the switch on a whole lot of romantic tropes.

Screenshot

Contrary to the usual way of suffering, saintly women catching TB, it’s the hardworking Arthur in the past who catches the very non-romanticized disease, while, unlike the most cinematic portrayals of AIDS, it’s Malaika who is HIV positive. It’s rare enough to see films address women living with HIV, but it’s even rarer to see a Black woman do so, let alone a Black Deaf woman who is seen as a complex character rather than a suffering one-dimensional caricature who’s in need of saving. 

That these women can’t always surmount the obstacles to their love is heartbreaking, but the most remarkable thing about “Compensation” is how love is always worth the risk, even if it may include a devastating fallout. 

Compensation is streaming on The Criterion Channel.

52 Films By Women: Born in Flames (1983)

Kanopy

By Andrea Thompson

Since everyone seems to be in a revolutionary kind of mood, it seemed like a good time to check out “Born in Flames,” which is another of those films that remained unseen despite the enthusiastic reaction from so many in the feminist community. So I finally decided it was time to correct my lack of knowledge, and...wow.

“Born in Flames” is a deeply radical film, and it will remain so for probably the entirety of history. Many films are being rediscovered and lauded for being ahead of their time, but “Born in Flames” doesn’t just acknowledge, or more accurately, tackle head on what we’re only beginning to approach today, but it takes on genuinely radical actions to deal with them. In fact, some would be justified in calling said actions terrorism, and the discomfort around them remains in today’s environment, although some of that is due to to circumstances out of writer-director Lizzie Borden’s (gotta love the name) control. After 2001, there was going to be more discomfort than usual seeing a bomb go off on top of the World Trade Center building, even if it was designed to take out media messaging, not people.

The result isn’t so much indie filmmaking as guerrilla filmmaking, and the only reason this movie was probably allowed to exist in the first place is that it takes place ten years after the United States underwent a peaceful revolution that’s become known as the War of Liberation, and became a socialist democracy. The problem is that the environment seems all too familiar: a society that vaunts the progress it’s made even as it remains in the throes of high unemployment, and institutional as well as everyday sexism, racism, and classism.

The resulting vision of New York City is hard to pin down to a genre, let alone define. Filmed over a period of five years, and depending on which article you read, on a budget of about $40,000 or $70,000, “Born in Flames” seems part documentary since actual protests as well as staged ones were used, as well as futurist, sci-fi, vérité, queer, and of course, deeply feminist.

Nearly all the main characters are women, many are Black, most are lesbians, and its vision of just how one should fight back against a system which aims to dehumanize and demean are deeply complex. Some women have chosen to fight back via two different pirate radio stations as they broadcast various messages of anger against government actions, while one, Adelaide Norris (Jean Satterfield) has chosen more direct action by becoming a leader in the Women’s Army, which confronts everyday instances of sexism such as street harassment by leading groups of women on bicycles to fight back against the men who brutalize women on the street.

Adelaide is also the one pushing for more direct, violent action against a state that is cutting programs for women, holding them responsible for the hostility and outright assaults they experience, and trying to drive them back into the home by prioritizing male needs and creating new programs such as paying women for housework. But the women, which include Kathryn Bigelow as one of a trio of white feminist editors of a socialist newspaper, remain divided in their oppression. What finally does unite them is Adelaide’s arrest and death under suspicious circumstances while in police custody.

Moma.org

What follows is a kind of feminist wish fulfillment, where women who traditionally divided by race, class, and sexuality band together against their oppressors. Sisterhood becomes powerful, as does their anger, which practically leaps from every frame as “Born in Flames” as it gives a rousing call to action for all women to unite. It’s no accident that the film was rediscovered in 2016, just as Trump was elected and women took the streets and to voice their rage once again. It’s a number that’s loomed large in the history of this film, given the station for one of the pirate radio stations is actually 2016.

In the midst of an election that threatens to keep Trump in power, “Born in Flames” might become disturbingly relevant in a way no one could have foreseen. In just a few months, how largely this film will loom in our culture might be revealed even further. 

52 Films By Women: Represent (2020)

Music Box Films

By Andrea Thompson

“Represent” is an exception among the many political documentaries, which have become quite prolific recently. At their best, they tend to reveal unsettling truths, but not much food for thought, at least for the most part. There are exceptions of course, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. Our politics, which tended to comprise various shades of gray, haven’t so much polarized the way everyone believes. Rather, they’ve been stripped to reveal what we’ve become, and how we could deteriorate into something far worse if things continue to unravel.

But “Represent” doesn’t just show the common ground that exists between the various aspiring Midwestern politicians it follows, all of them women, it got me to do something I didn’t think was possible in our current climate: sympathize with a Republican running for office. The documentary could never have made me vote for her even if I could have, but I challenge the most ardent Democrat not to feel some compassion for Julie Cho, who decides to run for state representative in Evanston, a liberal suburb of Chicago.

Cho is certainly the most complex of the three women director Hillary Bachelder follows for her feature debut. Cho is in many ways the ultimate American success story - an immigrant who fled an oppressive country, in her case North Korea, and saw the best of America in the small town she and her family ended up in. Distrust of any state or national authority was already a given for Cho, who soon found herself drawn to the Republican party of the 80s, which advocated for small government.

It’s not that Bryn Bird and Myya Jones are less fascinating, they’re just on more predictable paths as Democrats. Bird is a farmer and happily married white mother of two small children who runs for township trustee in her small rural town of Granville, Ohio, and Jones is a 22-year-old Black woman who’s freshly graduated and decides to run for mayor of Detroit, then state representative when her mayoral bid fails.

Bachelder doesn’t need to do much to convey just how much gender plays into all three campaigns, or how much more Jones has to shoulder as a Black woman, a demographic which is the backbone of the Democratic voting block, but doesn’t seem to get much support once they decide to put themselves front and center. 

Not that Cho or Bird have it easy. Cho, who makes gerrymandering and the effect it has on suppressing minority votes the central issue of her platform, doesn’t just encounter open scorn, and even threats of violence when she goes out campaigning, but a complete lack of support from her own party. They become so bent on silencing her they pressure her to drop out, and in one case a top official outright hangs up on her during a phone call. There’s also numerous other macro and microaggressions, including some casual racism at a Republican luncheon.

Bird has her own issues. Her area is heavily Republican and never had a progressive candidate representing them. The trustee board also consists of a very entrenched old boys network who constantly undermine the only (also Republican) woman in the room, whom Bird is angling to replace. So Bird has an uphill fight of her own, even if she does manage to convince quite a few others to get involved in political campaigning for the first time.

Under such circumstances, it can often be difficult to not define subjects by their worst experiences, and Bachelder avoids this by revealing some of their biggest obstacles during the latter half of “Represent,” which include Cho’s past cancer diagnosis, Bird’s mother passing away, and Jones recouting her childhood sexual abuse.

Music Box Films

The fly-on-the-wall approach doesn’t always prove to be the best, given that some of the more minute aspects of their political journeys fall through the cracks. But it just might be a fitting angle for the mostly non-flashy style of campaigning all three candidates embrace. That Myya, who has all the characteristics of a political star on the rise, doesn’t overwhelm the others with her dynamic, intensely charismatic presence that’s a natural fit for the social media she embraces (and eventually includes a viral rap video), is especially impressive, reflecting Bachelder’s commitment to give equal weight to all of her subjects.

The doc is also curiously reluctant to embrace its influences. That “Represent,” which takes place over the course of 2017-8, was partially inspired by the influx of women in politics in 2016 is evident. But as the doc points out in its opening, there have been many cases when the number of female politicians have suddenly seemed to increase. If it’s treated as a lark each time, then the timing of the film’s release, which coincides with Biden’s pick of Kamala Harris as his VP, is impeccable. Who knows? Maybe the normalization of women in office could arrive sooner than any of us would have allowed.

52 Films By Women: Wild Nights With Emily (2018)

By Andrea Thompson

“Wild Nights With Emily” is meant to evoke laughter and rage in equal measure. Rage against the forces that literally erase history, but also joy and humor for those who manage to contribute to it against all odds. It’s one of those rare films where a director’s perspective also feels like an insider’s view of an invisible, almost parallel history as seen via a great love story, one that happened to be between two women. 

In such a case, calling director Madeleine Olnek a lesbian filmmaker isn’t identity poltics or an unneeded qualifier, it’s an important distinction, since she’s exploring what is in a very real sense her own history, one which she (pretty successfully) argues has been suppressed, despite ample evidence of its existence. She makes her case so well that it’s especially irksome that I can’t help but compare “Wild Nights” to another film about the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, “A Quiet Passion,” even though it came out in 2016, a full two years prior.

Such is the case though, so might as well get the comparisons over with. “A Quiet Passion” was directed by Terence Davies (who is queer himself) and featured a marvelous performance by Cynthia Nixon as Dickinson. “Passion” doesn’t reduce the poet to a lovesick woman forever pining after a man by any means, but it does completely ignore the passionate, very sexual relationship Dickinson apparently had with her sister-in-law Susan, instead depicting Dickinson’s life as one dominated by loneliness, celibacy, and hardship. It serves as a kind of time capsule, capturing the sense of a life lived in a very specific time and place, with little to remind us of our own.

Screenshot

Screenshot

“Wild Nights” doesn’t so much counter such narratives as gleefully kick them to the curb in a fashion that ties our past into how we live now. It begins with a prim and proper narrator stating how there’s been far too much emphasis on Emily Dickinson’s (Molly Shannon) relationship with her sister-in-law Susan (Susan Ziegler)...as the two women start passionately making out, then fall to the ground, where the rest of their activities, tastefully concealed behind a couch, need no further implications. Just how do such open secrets remain undiscovered? According to Olnek, it’s because the society around them was so damn inept their affair was imaginable. 

This means the men who populate the film, including Emily’s brother Austin (Kevin Seal), who was married to Susan, don’t come off well, but their unthinkingly casual sexism isn’t just pretty damn feasible, it’s familiar. Olnek’s goal is to rewrite the image we have of Emily Dickinson, and she makes a point to thank the sources of the research she uses as her foundation. To Olnek, Emily was that neighborhood weirdo you actually wanted to meet, who gives the neighborhood kids cool treats, and opted out of social gatherings not due to timidity, but lack of interest. She saw the people she wanted to, not those deemed mandatory for the sake of conformity. And because Susan and her family lived right next door, she had easy access to the person she wished to see most.

Perhaps one of the movie’s greatest accomplishments is allowing both women to occasionally be imperfect together, as well as happy. While “Wild Nights” does depict Susan as the kind of intelligent, loving partner we all long for, it also takes pains to portray their relationship as complicated, even prone to bouts of infidelity on Emily’s part at times. But really, when your other half is a talented poet, it’s rather difficult to stay angry. Their bond is also based on equality, with each balancing out the other and providing support, which is sorely needed, given that the male establishment was reluctant to publish Emily, who here is hardworking, ambitious, and eager for publication, rather than the shy, delicate woman who was too timid to show her work to others. 

This is where Mabel (Amy Seimetz) the film’s villain, comes in. As “Wild Nights” tells it, she may be the one who is mostly responsible for Dickinson being published, albeit posthumously, but she accomplished it by essentially creating the image of her that we know today. She was also Austin’s mistress, and both were far less discreet about their affair than Emily and Susan, which had humiliating consequences for not only Susan, but their children. Yet Mabel is also not a one-dimensional villain. She too is ambitious, talented, and creatively stifled, longing for an outlet and constantly rejected by the smiling, condescending men around her. Publishing Emily allowed her to finally display her skills, and she was willing to work within the system to do it. She knew what would sell and what would not, as Susan’s daughter painfully discovered when she tried to correct the narrative being spun about her mother and her aunt to a mostly nonexistent audience.

But the movie also holds Mabel accountable. In Olnek’s eyes, her actions weren’t just a crime, but a kind of murder. For “Wild Nights,” this is the real tragedy, and the film refuses to wallow in Emily’s suffering by showing her decline in the days leading up to her death, saving its anger for how eager people were to rewrite her life before she was even buried. It must have been far easier to give Emily fame once she herself wasn’t around to complicate things by, say, contradicting the publishers who of course supported women’s rights and the need for their voices to be heard, but bemoan how they are “barely able to find any.” In the film’s brutal ending scene, a split-screen hammers the point home, with Mabel preparing Emily’s poetry and letters for publication by literally erasing Susan’s name from them while Susan was bathing Emily’s lifeless body for burial.

Screenshot

A bit much? Maybe, maybe not. The sound of Mabel’s erasure continues throughout the epilogue, which paints a picture of a truth that is continuing to slowly emerge over the last, oh, 100 years or so, from a time that was simultaneously more risque and constricted than most wanted to acknowledge. Even if Olnek has a few blind spots herself, managing to give Black men a few lines and a bit of a presence while not extending the same courtesy to Black women, she at least doesn’t pretend that our current time is so much better. Even if we’re finally starting to uncover the legacy of those who were never absent in the first place, their invisibility and the accompanying lies continue to endure.

2019 Film Girl Film Festival Winners Announced

The votes have been counted, and the winners of the Audience Awards for the 2019 Film Festival have been announced!

The winner for Best Film is “The Garden Left Behind.” Directed by Flavio Alves, the film follows Tina, an undocumented Mexican trans woman struggling to make a life for herself and her grandmother in New York City. More details can be found on the movie’s site here.

This year also saw the first tie, with “Grandpa’s Getaways” and “Sisters March” sharing the Audience Award for Best Short.

“Grandpa’s Getaways” tells a story of love and memory. Will has always been the hero of his own stories in spite of the fact that no one believes him. How much of it is true? And how much does it really matter? You can find more information about the film here.

“Sisters March” is a reflection on the journey between Chicago and DC, connecting voices of hope, empowerment and intersectionality during The Women's March, the largest protest in the history of the United States, as women and girls organize and rally after the inauguration of the 45th president. Focusing on intersectionality, mothers and daughters from every strata of the country reflect on the work that is to come for the women's movement and how we can mobilize for change. More details can be found here.

Thanks to everyone who voted, and to festival sponsor MKE Production Rental for providing the prize!

52 Films By Women: Outrage (1950)

IMDB

By Andrea Thompson

If you want a female director to celebrate for #Noirvember, Ida Lupino is pretty much the go to. She wasn't just the main female director working at a time when noir films were at their height, she was pretty much the only one. And while her other films such as “The Hitch-Hiker” are far more well-known, it's the underseen “Outrage” that feels as disturbingly relevant now as when it was made in 1950.

Its beginning is a common one for noir, with a woman alternately staggering and running through a lonely street at night. She's clearly been through the ringer, and we immediately wonder what she's trying to escape. A pursuer? Is this the aftermath of a terrible crime? Or is she suffering from something more existential, like the past she thought she left behind? Is she a woman on the wrong side of the law, a player who got outplayed? Did she set a plan in motion that spun out of her control?

Turns out it's something simultaneously far simpler and complex. Ann Walton (Mala Powers) isn't a noir dame who walked into a bar with a plan and eye for her next mark. She's a happy, ordinary young woman with a loving fiance, Jim (Robert Clarke) a supportive, close-knit family, and a steady job with coworkers she likes and gets along with. Even the guy who serves food at the counter and frequently gives her attention she doesn't want doesn't disturb her. What “Outrage” does as it follows Ann's struggles is offer up a critique for something the film didn't have the words for, and were prevented from even naming, what we now call rape culture.

Screenshot

Because that creepy counter guy that Ann barely notices follows her home one night when she's working late and rapes her. Not that the movie is allowed to say it, instead using using the word assault or attack to describe the horrifying sequence where Ann's unnamed rapist follows her throughout the dark, deserted streets as she desperately tries to call for help from various sources while attempting to evade him. When she collapses from running, the final tragic accident is a car horn which covers her implied screams, as well as a man who hears the horn but unable to see what is happening from his angle.

When Ann returns home disheveled, “Outrage” chooses empathy rather than revenge, as not only Ann but her family grapples with the aftermath of her attack. In “Lucky,” the memoir of her own rape, author Alice Sebold wrote how she learned that, “no one – females included – knew what to do with a rape victim,” and even Ann's loving parents are unsure of what to say to their daughter.

Nor does their community. How everyone learns of Ann's rape is left unsaid, but it's made very clear that they do. The students in Ann's father's class and the other teachers stare at him. More disturbing is how men try to be well-meaning and kind, patting her comfortingly, but the women mostly keep their distance as they stare and whisper. No wonder that when Ann attempts to go back to work, small noises quickly overwhelm her. After such silence, even the softest sounds are deafening to her, and the film doesn't so much as portray her mindset but embed us in it as we share Ann's pain and deterioration.

IMDB

The situation with her fiance also doesn't help. Jim still wants to marry Ann, but only on his terms. When he says he wants to tie the knot the upcoming weekend, she stares at him with a repulsion and horror modern audiences may not be able to fully grasp. Marriage didn't just mean sex, it meant a husband could legally demand it anytime he wished, marital rape not yet being illegal. When Ann refuses, Jim shakes her and tells her to shut up. She responds, “I don't want to get married, ever. I don't want you to touch me. Everything's dirty, filthy and dirty.” Shortly thereafter, she runs away from home and finds herself on an orange picking farm.

In “Outrage,” it isn't only Ann's rapist who feels he has a right to her body. Every man in the film is entitled is his own way, even the saintly Rev. Bruce Ferguson (Tod Andrews), who takes Ann in and helps her get work as a bookkeeper on the farm. But when's Ann's past rears its ugly head, he only takes her side up to a point. At a dance, a man comes up and keeps following Ann, touching her, and insisting after she repeatedly says no. It brings up memories of her trauma, so Ann hits him with a wrench, severely injuring him. But since he has a reputation as a good guy, he's given a pass for his creepy behavior and it's Ann who is blamed. Bruce never even asks if the man made her uncomfortable, even if he's eventually able to understand and empathize with her actions.

As Ann awaits judgment, she murmurs, “Maybe I am crazy. Sometimes I feel as if the whole world is upside down.” Even if “Outrage” can't quite fully grasp what exactly makes her world seem so backwards, it can hardly be faulted for failing to realize something we're still struggling to understand today. At least the film urges reform rather than punishment, not just for Ann, but for the man who raped her, who was caught and revealed to have spent half his life in reform schools and prisons without being identified or treated as a “sick individual.” Through Bruce, “Outrage” ends up advocating not just for compassion, but for more hospitals and clinics rather than prisons.

IMDB

As a result, Ann is not charged, but rather ordered to undergo outpatient treatment rather than sentenced to imprisonment or institutionalization. At Bruce's encouragement, she eventually stops running and goes back to the life she left behind. As she departs, “Outrage” optimistically imagines a happy future for Ann, one that is not defined by the trauma she endured. Even if it seems a bit too bright of an ending, it's one that's well-earned, and more than other movies seem to expect from women who have similar experiences.