Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Female directors that did not get their Oscars

This selection is not about the content, but about the authors. While our inspirational movie list is growing longer and longer, there are only few among them who have been directed or written by women (or transpersons for that matter). Yes, not all women-directed movies are good or feminist. Yes, there are feministing movies made by men. Yes, directorship is not the only position from which women can influence the movies. You have screenwriters, writers whose work is adapted to movies, women whose lives are adapted to movies, but...

This article came out after the 2014 Oscars nominations were announced, offering a list of women who - while movies they had directed were nominated to Best Picture - were not nominated for the Best Director award.
The chonological order for those cases is the following: 

1986 - Children of a Lesser God by Randa Haines
1991 - The Prince of Tides by Barbra Streisand
2007 -  Little Miss Sunshine by Valerie Faris (co-director with Jonathan Dayton)
2008 - Slumdog Millionaire for which the award was given to Danny Boyle but not to his co-director in India Loveleen Tandan
2009 - An Education by Lone Scherfig
2010 - The Kids are All Right by Lisa Cholodenko
2010 - Winter's Bone by Debra Granik
2013 - Zero Dark Thirty by Kathryn Bigelow
2014 - Selma by Ava DuVernay

Only four women have actually earned nominations for Best Director in the history of the ceremony:

1976 - Lina Wertmüller for Seven Beauties
1993 - Jane Campion for The Piano
2003 - Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation
2009 - Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker

Bigelow is the only woman to win the award. They have been giving these things out since 1929.

Lesson learnt? Keep your eyes peeled for movies directed by women, because the big award machines won't give that to you. Here are few additional suggestions from the movies that we have covered. And here's a longer list on imdb.com to keep you entertained.

+ An elegant rant on the particular uglyness of the 2014 nominations.

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Wadjda (2012)

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Wadjda (2012, Haifaa Al-Mansour) is exactly what you expect when watching a well made movie telling you tales about cultures very different from the one you live in: gives you a general picture of a society while stating very clearly that it's by no means completely homogeneous. Very well. And when such a movie come from the first ever Saudi-Arabian female movie director, your feminist obligation is to go and watch!

The premise is very simple and compelling: What happens when a girl that's already struggling with quite restrictive cultural norms of her society gets a strong urge to trespass even more? Or, in other words, what happens when Wadjda, a young Saudi-Arabian girl, wants a bicycle?

So get the movie, gather all the children (and not so children) you care about and watch Wadjda with them. And if you live in a context different of that of Wadjda be prepared to answer many questions. Why is everybody against her having a bicycle? Why are all the women covering themselves in black when leaving their own spaces? Why are girls not to be friends with boys? Why can men have several wives (and abandon their wives if they are unable to give them male children)? Why are girls followed very closely by their teachers to make sure they behave in a certain way? Why girls suspected of a lesbian relationship publicly shamed? And so on... Most importantly, what is likely to happen with Wadjda when she gets older? What kind of life is she likely to lead?

It may also help to ask those questions to yourself too. Just to realize what are the things that you most likely take for granted in life.

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: I'ts Complicated (2009)

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This is one to relax and take it easy, pros and cons will follow... I bring you It's Complicated (2009, Nancy Meyers). It may be actually aimed to your mom (or even grandmom) by the studio bosses, but what do they know about feminist movies? Clue: not much. So here I am, doing their work...

+ Nancy is a female writer and director that has made it big big big in Hollywood. With romantic comedies mostly, that's true, some ore feminist than others but still very big. I have a special weakness for female directors, what can I do?

+ Romantic comedy about people in their 50s or 60s... having romantic affairs and sex, apart from active professional and otherwise social lives. No as daring as Harold and Maude (1971) - hey, this is the big Hollywood Christmas fun movie for women (I'm sure that's how the marketers categorize this movie) after all - but still very valid image of people having fun and enjoying their sexualities.

+ Despite quite obvious love triangle, the ending is - spoiler! - not as you would expect. Neither life or movie ends with a happily ever after i.e. girls gets the boy she wants most. Life is not that easy. And the heroine is pretty OK as she is.

+ Meryl Streep. Who else? I'm deeply and passionately in love with her work, and this is a very nice fun bit.

- Jane, the central heroine, in this movie is a somewhat very softened example of a woman of career. Se has a cake shop that she does not spend her days in. Her hobby after a working day is to cook abundantly and extravagantly to her children, ex-husband, architect, whomever... her life story implies studying the fine art of French cooking abroad but with little consequences apart from croissants (think about Julia Child but much more demure).

- The families depicted live in a fantasy land of material abundance and their worries are pastries and house refurbishment into something even more amazing, etc. No worries about business, salaries, college funds for all the kids, etc. A Christmas fantasy movie indeed.

To conclude: watch this with your mom, aunties, grandmother... gonna be fun!

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Frida (2002)

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There are many reasons to be obsessed with Frida Khalo. Her paintings, her life story, her activism, her style, her resilience... Frida (2002, Julie Taymor) offers a taste for all of it. It's a high-budget Hollywood interpretation, of course, and bound to be an interpretation after what's known about her life and what can be seen in her paintings through the prism of the director and many other people. And through the Frida Kahlo myth too, of course.

Nevertheless there are certain aspects of her life that are very clear.

• The use of personal, painful, often gendered experiences in creative expression, working through and with them (very similarly as Sylvia Plath, by the way). 
• The courage to embrace her roots and go beyond them at the same time. Her way of both painting and dress is clearly based on Mexican imagery, but then she takes it a step farther and makes it her very own.
• The wish to follow her desires, to act upon them. While this is not supposed to be always easy, there's no doubt that Frida's journey was an authentic one.  

Etc, etc... the internets are full of people - including us, of course - swooning over Frida's work and icon that the popular culture has turned her. Go, read some! But, whatever you read, keep in mind that, as somebody on tumblr said:

"Frida Kahlo was a disabled politically active woman of color who deliberately fucked with gender roles and don’t you ever forget it."

P.S. For the dessert, here's the story on her dresses: 1, 2.

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Julie & Julia (2009)

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Looking for a lift-me-up? This is the right one. Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia (2009) is all you need if you're into cooking, blogging and inspirational role models.

In one movie you get the always amazing Meryl Streep being Julia Child and fighting with French cooks in 1950's Paris + an office clerk blogging away. We have to admit that the Julia Child part is much more delicious than the contemporary one, although both are based in real people finding their creative exit in cooking (making food can be liberating if that's your choice and resonates with your most authentic self, no doubt).

Can't help but love the way how her passion for food (not fat shaming to be found in her approach to munching!), her wish to do something instead of being an idle wife, her relationship with her husband are depicted... You end up believing and enjoying! Bon appétit!

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: Girls (2012-)

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This goes in the same way as Sex and the City (1998-2004). While you would like to hate it and tell everybody how shallow and untrue it is, you find yourself glued to the monitor. And being thankful that each episode is just about 20 min.

Again, this is mostly a story of how not to. And how we all do stupid things. And we all are somewhat anxious at times. While Girls (2012-) caused various storms in the US media bla-bla (well, see here where the series is compared with a 1925 hipster essay on emancipation and cliche formation, here, and here; and that's just one magazine that prides itself on going deep into pop phenomena), take it for what it is.
A story on being structurally privileged - go, google the whole thing about Girls lack of racial diversity, like this - and still very insecure. On being confused and very weird. Very weird.

Again and again, and it's impossible to repeat it too much, this is not role-model show. There are no such, btw. Watch it as an anthropological study on some girls in some place. I doesn't have to be representative. It doesn't have to be healthy. But it may take some stigma off from being weird, having mental health issues, dealing with your own body, being entangled in relationships that you know are no good, etc. The usual stuff.

The obvious bonus is that the creator of the series is a girl (Lena Dunham was born in 1986), so we can just relax and listen to her stuff. As an anthropology piece, we said.
Just to realize that the problem is not only the perfection, the girls that Courtney Martin describes as

"We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans. We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving… We pride ourselves on getting as little sleep as possible and thrive on self-deprivation. We drink coffee, a lot of it. We are on birth control, Prozac, and multivitamins… We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers… We are the daughters of the feminists who said, “You can be anything,” and we heard, “You have to be everything." (from this book)

We also have the other end of the messiness and anxiety spectrum. Plus all the shades in between.

Friday is the (Inspirational) Movie Night: 17 Filles (2011)

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Well, this is a controversial and complex one. The outline may seem bizarre and basis of an absurd comedy, once you are presented with an introduction that "when Camille accidentally becomes pregnant, 16 of her friends and classmates decide to follow suit, throwing their town and school into chaos...", nevertheless, 17 Filles (2011, Delphine Coulin & Muriel Coulin) brings the conversation on teen pregnancy beyond what you have seen before.

This is not Juno (2007) with it's ups and downs being still framed in complete security and parental support, the pregnancy being a result of boredom. These French girls - and the movie is based on a somewhat true story that happened in Gloucester, Massachusets in 2008 - use sex/pregnancy as one of the ways to gain agency and control over their lives. The fantasy that rises from one unplanned pregnancy leads to a vision of independence and communal life based on shared maternity away from the parental control and not-promising-at-all future of their town.

While, of course, there's a lot of content to challenge - the instrumentalization of sex ignoring the dimension of pleasure, the absence of parents or their male peers sex partners, the reckless driving, smoking and drinking while pregnant, and the outlandish view that a life with a baby would be somehow easier - it comes back to haunt you exactly on how it questions the narrative of teen pregnancy that we are used to.
You watch the girls while they look for things in their lives: to do, to be, to strive towards... in a confusing, rather lonely world where suddenly something so basic and so contrarian to everything they have been warned about as pregnancy (with no sentimental strings attached to the biological fathers) suddenly seems like a good idea that would get them out of the slump of adolescence and make them adults.

Just to keep in mind that teen pregnancies do not come just from not knowing the biological consequences of sex. It is a much more complex conundrum of things that we should be working with... So, enjoy!

BTW, at the moment there is somebody on YouTube that has uploaded the entire movie, so you may take advantage while it lasts...