The Mighty Mission of the Future of Film is Female; Plus: KiKi Layne on Making Music in "Dandelion"
On the small boosts of confidence that push things forward from Caryn Coleman's innovative organization based around shorts to a conversation with Catherine Breillat ("Last Summer")
Caryn Coleman and Maggie Mackay both seemed to be a bit surprised at how emotional they were on Tuesday night before a screening of shorts put together by The Future of Film is Female at Vidiots! In Los Angeles. This is a regular event in New York where Coleman has been meticulously building a trojan horse for female filmmakers, starting out of a programmer at the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn where simply to give a screen to promising filmmakers has been a big deal, especially when those in the audience might get to know each other and help on each other’s next films. But The Future of Film is Female has transcended its roots as merely a showcase for female and nonbinary filmmakers, with Coleman now devoting herself full-time to the effort and actively helping to finance the kinds of shorts that would - and do - play at the showcases and expanding the footprint of the organization to the west, where she has set up screenings in Portland (at the rejuvenated PAMCut Tomorrow Theater) and in Los Angeles.
There have been a few FOFIF screenings in Los Angeles, but Coleman hadn’t attended and hadn’t been back to the city where she was ran an art gallery in her years before programming, though she would insist on calling it her favorite of all the places she’s lived — and if it hadn’t been for Mackay’s introduction, you might not have known the role she played in bringing Vidiots!, now a thriving cultural hub, back to life, even without stepping foot in the theater. As Mackay would say, nearly tearing up, it was late-night conversations and e-mails during the pandemic after the two had met at Art House Convergence in 2019 that helped give Mackay the confidence to keep going after her best laid plans to open the theater in 2020 were upended by the pandemic. Then again, that’s how Coleman works, giving people the confidence to do much bigger things with even the slightest bit of encouragement and as a wave of filmmakers whose first works played FOFIF now have features and the FOFIF programs are starting to take root beyond New York, it was a pleasure to connect with her this week about her triumphant return to L.A. and all that she’s been able to achieve one T-shirt sale at a time.
It’s been heartening these last couple weeks to see how far a small bit of encouragement can go. I wouldn’t have ever expected the formidable Catherine Breillat would go quietly into the night, but having settled comfortably in Portugal after her last film “Abuse of Weakness” a decade ago with little left to prove, there were no plans to return to a set until she received an e-mail from the producer Said Ben Said, who she did not know, asking if she’d consider a remake of May el-Toukhy’s 2019 drama “Queen of Hearts,” well aware of her sensitive touch with tales of all-consuming affairs. Breillat changes little dialogue from the original in “Last Summer,” which could be one of the best films of her career and certainly one of the finest of this year, but her mastery of shot composition — which she went into great detail on in an interview with us — and her ability to have every frame exude the same intensity of emotion that she was able to conjure on set makes the torrid tale of a lawyer (Lea Drucker) who becomes entangled in an inappropriate relationship with her teenage stepson (Samuel Kircher) undeniably hers and likewise, irresistible. The film is now in theaters across the country and spurring on a full-on retrospective in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque starting later this month.
We also spoke to Frauke Finsterwalder, who was more eager to get back on set than Breillat after 10 years away and starting a family, but she was given the nudge by Sandra Huller, who wanted to work with her again after the two collaborated on her debut “Finsterworld,” and as Huller built up her own legend in films such as “Toni Erdmann” and “Anatomy of a Fall,” Finsterwalder decided to take on another with “Sisi and I,” a sly, subversive take on the Austrian Empress who gained worldwide notoriety as an idealized princess in 1950s films. Neither the director nor Huller wanted to have her play Sisi, but rather her observant lady-in-waiting who observes what true power is when after being crowned Queen of Hungary, Sisi enjoys a life away from her husband on the Greek island of Corfu and surrounds herself with other women. The film will inevitably be compared to Marie Kreutzer’s recent Sisi historical corrective “Corsage,” starring a fierce Vicky Krieps, but they are complimentary of another one another as they both reveal myth making to be a force that once made to marginalize can be quite freeing in the right hands.
Right now, we’re gearing up an August festival swing through Blackstar in Philadelphia and Locarno in Switzerland, but closer to home in L.A., we have been excited to poke our heads in at some local festivals. The Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles is always a blast and it was truly a joy to revisit my favorite film on the circuit this year, the wildly entertaining relationship comedy “Ben and Suzanne: A Reunion in Four Parts,” and talk to director Shaun Seneviratne, who worked towards his feature debut set in his ancestral home of Sri Lanka over nearly a decade with the dedication of lead actors Anastasia Olowin and Sathya Sridharan. (Olowin would wear a dress in the film that she wore as a bridesmaid to the director’s wedding after being strangers before she was cast.)
We also recently checked out the Uninterrupted Film Festival, an sports-centered offshoot of Tribeca spearheaded by LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s production company Springhill - naturally, it became a springboard for one of their new films “A Radical Act: Renee Montgomery,” but Sandrine Orabona’s profile of the former WNBA star-turned-team owner is far better than the promotional exercise you might expect given that kind of introduction into the world, watching as Montgomery’s family instilled both basketball skills and life skills in her that always made her want to play for something bigger than herself. The film will eventually be coming to Roku, but well worth catching in a theater if it comes around your neighborhood on the festival circuit and Orabona graciously shared how she used a traditional sports doc as a guise to make a film about strides in social justice.
From The Future of Film is Female Shorts Collection
While we can’t entirely recreate all the excitement from the Future of Film is Female screening at Vidiots (some can be summoned at their Instagram), we saw a number of strong films that you can watch from the comfort of your own living room right now - from Hannah Peterson’s “Champ,” Amber Sealey’s “How Does It Start,” and Laci Dent’s “Into the Night.” (Currently offline, but well worth watching out for are Kristine Gerolaga’s “Mosquito Lady,” John e. Kilberg’s “Monster Cookie” and one of our favorites from SXSW, Jessica Barr’s “Tight.”) A standout not only for the fact it was the evening’s only nonfiction entry was Olivia Accardo’s “Finding Beast,” in which the filmmaker conducts a paranormal investigation of the house she grew up in as her parents are on the verge of moving out and they insist that the spirit of her favorite pet continues to reside within its walls.
The Last Word
“It seems like the views around what's successful are so limited, being able to own our own perspective of what success looks like for us and what things have real meaning. Are you only successful as an artist if you are selling out stadiums and arenas? Or are you successful if you're in a venue and there's 60 people there that know the lyrics to your song? Isn't that a measure of success as well? That was definitely a big part of why I wanted to do the film, but then also something that I continue to take with me moving forward as an artist,” KiKi Layne said about her latest film “Dandelion,” now playing at a theater near you as one of IFC’s widest openings in company history at nearly 500 theaters in the U.S.
It was a rare interview in which we could easy skip past explicitly asking why Layne wanted to do the film to dig in a little deeper when the Cincinnati native got the script for Nicole Riegel’s drama and wondered if Riegel had written it just for her when she could easily see herself in the story of a down-on-her-luck singer-songwriter stuck in Ohio taking care of her ailing mother when she should be on the road touring, and had been waiting for an opportunity to use the singing voice that she’s brought to stage productions but hadn’t been deployed just yet in films like “The Old Guard” and “If Beale Street Could Talk.” While “Dandelion” reveals the full range of Layne’s talent, it meticulously shows an artist coming into their own, battling uncertainty and losing faith in a process of creation that can feel redundant and unsatisfying when it leans too heavily on the approval of others rather than having the work itself be the reward. Since its debut at SXSW, the response to “Dandelion” couldn’t be too much more rapturous, but to hear Layne tell it, the experience of making it was enough to qualify as a success in her book.