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Medicine for Melancholy from strike anywhere on Vimeo

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and a word about women...

My grandma used to tell my cousins: In this world, a woman must be capable of "speaking" without talking. The filmmakers below express such voice by heart.

Claire Denis

My favorite director. When people debate whether film is an art on par with music, painting, et. Al, I present them the work of Claire Denis. A French director most noted for vague narratives and an emphasis on metaphysics, Ms. Denis is unfairly labeled as a "heady" director who values philosophy at the expense of craft. Working with female cinematographer Agnes Godard, that association is grossly untrue. Producing a cinema of restrained montage paired to photography that sincerely investigates its subjects rather than festishize them, her films bring a mystical quality to the mundane and suffuse vague narratives with limitless subtext.

A scene from Vendredi Soir

Lynne Ramsay

Ms. Ramsay is the director of the feature films Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar and like Ms. Denis is a consummate craftswoman who relishes the intimate over the bombast. The first, about a Glasgow family struggling with poverty, finds Ms. Ramsay exploring the intricacies of community amongst an ensemble cast trapped in a state of confusion. The second centers on a stunted young woman who discovers her lover's dead body and a suicide note devoting his just finished novel to her. In both, Ms. Ramsay's penchant for constructing a narrative out of details—as opposed to the reverse—cultivates a completely immersive work that presents the viewer with a sense of experience few filmmakers articulate. Her trio of short films, all available on the Criterion DVD of Ratcatcher, are as exemplary as their long-form counterparts.

A scene from Ratcatcher

Lucrecia Martel

At the forefront of Argentina's cinema New Wave, Ms. Martel and her evocative soundscapes and long lens photography investigate lust, love and yearning amongst the families of her hometown in her Cannes Award winning La Nina Santa and her first film, La Cienega. Of the former, I wrote: When sexual and religious confusion converge in a fifteen year-old girl, what does it sound like? What does it feel, taste and smell like? This, to me, is the essence of Lucrecia Martel's filmmaking…taking this two dimensional craft and coming as near as is artistically possible to answering those questions in sound and image. The Holy Girl is a great, great effort. Great, great indeed.

A scene from La Nina Santa

On Deck:

Andrea Arnold

An Academy Award Winner for her short film Wasp, Ms. Arnold returned this year with Red Road, her feature film debut. A film which takes its cue from the Dardenne brothers' The Son, the movie centers on a woman's obsession with revenge after the untimely death of her husband and son. There's a fine line between what repulses us most and the seductive mash of emotions that compels us to investigate that which pains us. In this film, Ms. Arnold takes the viewer to the heart of the matter, pacing Red Road with the seasoned gravitas of a filmmaker boasting twice her experience.

The Red Road trailer

Niki Karimi

I wrote a blog about Niki Karimi's A Few Days Later after viewing it at the San Francisco Film Festival. Absolutely floored by how strong Ms. Karimi's film was, I spent days laboring over a half-page entry only to have it erased following a battery's death. Someday I'll catch the film again and the words will come back to me. Suffice it to say, her story of an Iranian graphic designer suffocated by indecision remains the best film I've seen all year.

To see a scene from A Few Days Later click HERE

Veronica Chen

Veronica Chen's Agua is a film of mixed expression. At once a formulaic sports drama and yet an aesthetic treatise on the cinematic reproduction of experience, the film vexes as it astounds, melding a contrived plot to provocative craftsmanship. Put simply, Agua boasts some of the most audacious camerawork ever put to screen. Ms. Chen takes the rigors of swimming and isolates them into telescopic frames looped on end in meditative moments of sound and motion. In her hands, base physical activity is transmuted into metaphysical poetry. The dementia of sensory exhaustion has rarely been so clearly stated.

To see a bit of Agua click HERE