Staff Pick: Tokyo Idols
A Film by Kyoko Miyake
“Idols” have fast become a phenomenon in Japan as girl bands and pop music permeate life there. TOKYO IDOLS is a feminist critique of a cultural industry driven by an obsession with young female sexuality and internet popularity.
The Children of 209 Saint-Maur Street
A Film by Ruth Zylberman
209 rue St. Maur is a classic Parisian apartment building in the 10th arrondissement: Stone, built around a courtyard, shops on the bottom floor. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was home to some 300 working class people, about a third of them Jewish. And then came the Nazi occupation. Parents rounded up and deported. Children left on their own. Neighbors hiding Jewish kids under the blankets.
THE CHILDREN OF 209 SAINT-MAUR STREET is filmmaker Ruth Zylberman’s painstakingly researched reconstruction of life in the building before and during the Second World War.
Another Gaze
A Collection of Films by Women & Queers
The feminist film journal Another Gaze has curated a collection of their favorite films including work from well-known directors like Chantal Akerman, whose work creates portraits of memory collapse and feminized labor, and Madeline Anderson, a union member whose short documentary I Am Somebody (1970) asserts Black female liberation as integral to the midcentury civil rights movement.
They’ve also included more contemporary, autobiographical work, like Julia Query and Vicky Funari’s Live Nude Girls Unite! (2000), a comedic take on the first person documentary, and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s By the Time it Gets Dark (2017), which takes a more tormented approach to self-reflexivity.
In all, this collection attempts to disrupt the hegemony of both male, and white feminist, subjectivities.
Colette
A Film by Yannick Bellon
If you’ve watched the feature film or the new Guardian documentary on the iconic French writer, COLETTE from Yannick Bellon (who collaborated with Chris Marker on the release Remembrance of Things to Come) is a must-watch. This short documentary was made with Colette in her home in 1951 and is a true gem.
