The Womxn’s Film Festival, organized by Bridget Braley ’18 as a part of her senior thesis project, was held this weekend and showcased a series of films with the aim of celebrating womxn directors and womxn narratives in the industry. Funded with the Smallen and Kirkland Endowment Funds, three films were shown across three days, including
Appropriate Behavior
directed by Desiree Akhavan and Dee Rees’
Pariah
.
On the last day of the festival, director Lauren Wolkstein visited the Hill to present
The Strange Ones
, her feature film co-directed with Christopher Radcliff, released in 2017.
The Strange Ones
follows two brothers played by actors Alex Pettyfer and James Freedson-Jackson. The film is a puzzling tale, as the brothers’ supposedly simple vacation eventually reveals dark and complex secrets about their lives before the trip. An adaptation of a previous short film of the same title, the feature film won a Special Jury Recognition at the 2017 South by Southwest Film Festival.
Wolkstein is a New York City-based filmmaker who received her Masters of Fine Arts in film directing from Columbia University but is currently an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. She was recognized as one of
Filmmaker Magazine
’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2013.
Her short film,
Social Butterfly,
won a Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 South by Southwest Festival; the film was shown to Hamilton audience members this weekend.
Prior to the showing of the film, Braley welcomed the crowd with an explanation of her project and her inspiration for organizing the festival. “We’re in a time where womxn are getting more and more opportunities to direct films but we’re still not where we’re need to be,” she commented. She cited a notable statistic from a study by the University of California-Annenberg that stated between 2007 to 2016, of the 900 most popular films, 4.1% of them were directed by womxn, meaning there were about less than 40 unique womxn directors in the list. As a result, the Womxn Film’s Festival sought to recognize more womxn directors and celebrate their success in film.
With an eerie and ominous air surrounding the film,
The Strange Ones
began with the two brothers communicating tensely with one another from the beginning. Information about their relationship is revealed gradually as the film goes on, making audience members continuously wonder: Where are they going? What are they doing? How long are they leaving for? Will they ever go back to their homes? Where are their homes?
By the end,
The Strange Ones
reveals a great amount about the lives of their characters through beautifully depicted scenes (most of which are in the woods) and memories of the past. There is a quietness to most of the scenes as well, contributing to the film’s mysterious but exciting mood.
Even with all the information that is revealed, however,
The Strange Ones
is still a psychological suspense film and audience members are left with one important question on their minds: what really happened?
“The whole core of the movie was not knowing who people are,” Wolkstein stated in response to a question about the film’s ominous mood and specifically how the “strange” in the title came about. “The relationship between the two brothers is one of the core questions — questions that strangers that they meet have about them and questions they have about themselves.”
Considering the success of womxn directors like Wolkstein, with unique works of their own, the Womxn’s Film Festival was a great way to celebrate womxn in the film industry.
Recognizing womxn’s works through events like a film festival highlights their skill and importance — and hopefully, their importance will continue to be recognized even more in the future.
