NEW ON CURZON 12
In the coming-of-age film, critical acclaim and diversity have gone hand in hand recently, with films like Lady Bird, Moonlight and Call Me By Your Name expanding the repertoire of rites of passage screen stories. As champions of the female perspective in cinema, we at Birds’ Eye View have curated a season for Curzon on Demand that puts girls and young women in the centre of the frame. While the focus typically remains on the bittersweet transition from childhood to adulthood, many of these films inject the genre with a much welcomed richness and relevancy (and in the case of Vagabond, tragedy) by exploring familiar themes from less familiar perspectives.
This list spotlights a number of stand-out films about female rites of passage that have made coming-of-age such a fruitful genre for representations of the female experience – one example is the Georgian film ‘In Bloom’ which closed our last festival in 2014, and takes Jean-Luc Godard’s provocation ‘all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun’ and creates something vivid and original. All these films are directed by women and include a film (Vagabond) by Agnès Varda, the celebrated Renaissance woman and godmother of the French New Wave. Varda’s extraordinary, idiosyncratic and extensive body of work has long been an inspiration for a generation of female filmmakers committed to breaking down gender boundaries and to harnessing the power of the female gaze as cinema’s ‘seeing-feeling’ lens.