Female Film Critics 24/375
Filmmaker Sasie Sealy’s Lucky Grandma is a darkly comedic drama and unexpectedly poignant action/thriller romp through the intrigued-filled world of an elderly Chinese nainai whose assertive risk-all Atlantic City gambling habit lands her in the middle of a violent gang war in NYC’s Chinatown.
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The Grizzlies travels to the Inuit Kugluktuk for an inspirational story. Director Miranda de Pencier establishes historical context through 1920s and 30s sixteen millimeter footage shot by her grandfather in the Canadian Arctic. Now, in the twenty-first century, this area has the highest suicide rate in North America. And flying into remote Kugluktuk to complete community service requirements is recent university graduate Russ Sheppard.
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Radium Girls, the story of young women who painted watch faces with glowing radium-infused paint, fits with Marjane Satrapi’s Radioactive, a sterling effort about Marie Curie. These stories must be told even today because a Geiger counter, waved over the grave of a radium girl, clicks for 1,000 years.
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Based on true events during the late 1920s, this docudrama focuses on two teenage Cavallo sisters employed at the American Radium Factory in Orange, New Jersey, painting numbers on the popular, glow-in-the-dark watch faces, earning one-penny each. The superb production design reflects prodigious research, reflecting the period through archival newsreel footage and period costumes.
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Right now, as ever, we urgently need an amusing, upbeat, charming film. Welcome, then, to The Mole Agent, director Maite Alberdi’s spy story in which eighty-three-year-old Sergio infiltrates a Chilean nursing home. His mission, should he choose to accept it, is to assess the quality of care or neglect, an investigation prompted by a concerned daughter of her resident mother.
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An elderly Chilean man, Sergio, spots a want ad in a newspaper that requires applicants to be a male retiree between the ages of 80 and 90 as a 007-like theme plays in the background. They need to be “independent, discrete and competent with technology.” Hence, that is the way Maite Alberdi’s hybrid doc/secret-agent thriller The Mole Agent kicks off.
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Director Maite Alberdi’s creative, captivating new film The Mole Agent feels like a rather slow narrative feature, in which not enough happens, until you remember it’s a documentary. Alberdi’s hybridization of staid drama and cinema vérité makes for poignant, intense viewing. The film will stay with you longterm, both as a bit of melancholia and as a cautionary tale to show compassion and attention to our aging loved ones.
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The Grizzlies is based on the inspiring true story of a group of students in a small, struggling Arctic town and centers around the experiences of a recently graduated White teacher, Russ, working his first job as a high school history teacher in the isolated Inuit town of Kuluktuk, where the hardships of life far exceed its joys. In this inspiring tale, Russ and the students are transformed by the power of sport and hope. Canadian filmmaker Miranda de Pencier is an award-winning actress, producer and director. The Grizzlies, which premiered at TIFF and won the DGC Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement, is her feature film directorial debut.
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African Violet, a winsome femme-helmed domestic drama Iran that reveals an intimate view of family life from a woman’s perspective. Exquisitely envisioned to convey complex relationships with subtle looks rather than words, the film’s fundamental kindness is revelatory and utterly compelling.
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The Iranian domestic drama African Violet, directed and co-written Mona Zandi Haghighi, is an elevated soap opera of sorts that revolves around an unusual three-way relationship. At its center is Shokoo (Fatemeh Motamed-Aria), a strong-featured yet still attractive middle-aged woman who is happily wed for a second time to the virile Reza (Saeed Aghakhani).
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