Somersault
Women’s Work: Essential Films by Female Filmmakers
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1h 46m
Directed by Cate Shortland | 106 mins | 2004
Shortland’s visually arresting debut feature, a standout at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival recently restored in 4K, follows 16-year-old Heidi (Abbie Cornish), in flight from a catastrophic fall out with her mother, as she posts up in the frigid Australian ski resort town of Jindabyne, there becoming enamored of a tight-lipped townie played with beguiling reticence by a pre-"Avatar" Sam Worthington. A film of disarming intimacy and unusual emotional perceptivity.
Up Next in Women’s Work: Essential Films by Female Filmmakers
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Lore
Directed by Cate Shortland | 109 mins | 2012
Cate Shortland followed her moody and startling feature debut, "Somersault" (2004), with another bruising story of a teen girl expelled from home—in this case, by history in the making. Abandoned by her high-level Nazi parents in the wake of Hitler’s d... -
Everyone Else
Directed by Maren Ade | 123 mins | 2009
Years before the crossover success of "Toni Erdmann", Maren Ade established herself as an uncommonly intelligent and bracingly honest voice in modern cinema with "Everyone Else", which earned the Berlin Film Festival's Silver Bear prize. Her second film beg... -
Sworn Virgin
Directed by Laura Bispuri | 88 mins | 2015
This adaptation of Elvira Dones’s acclaimed novel fully mines the psychological dimensions of the “sworn virgin”—Albanian women who follow an obscure law whereby, upon taking a vow of virginity, they may escape imposed domestic life and live as a man. Ma...
