Next up in our Black Actress Canon series for Black History and Women’s History Month is the striking, commanding Karidja Touré in Girlhood (2014). At the center of Céline Sciamma’s coming-of-ager is Touré, who reflects and refracts the experiences of her always-evolving Marieme like a diamond held up to the light, illuminating the ways in which identity can be at once a prison and an escape.
Here’s why you need to catch up with this luminous acting debut.
(Source: TribecaFilm.com)
This LGBT Pride Month, we’re spotlighting some of the remarkable Tribeca selections about LGBT subjects from festivals past. Join us and discover a future favorite you may have yet to see!
Today’s selection is Marianne Amelinckx‘s Dive, a charming and smartly-composed film that sweetly captures the moment in queer adolescence in which one can stay in place or bravely take the plunge. Featuring electric, charismatic performances from its young stars, this idiosyncratic short treasure received a Special Jury Mention in this year’s Student Visionary Award competition.
The death of unarmed Black teenager Mike Brown at the hands of police is the sociopolitical background of this coming-of-age documentary about 17-year old Daje Shelton. She wants what countless Hollywood stories tell us young women in America want: good grades, good friends, and the perfect boyfriend. Instead, she runs afoul at her high school, is expelled, and given a last chance to graduate by attending an alternative program at the Innovative Concept Academy. Over the next two years, Daje struggles with typical teen growing pains, falling in love and fighting with mom, but also must increasingly combat the institutional and social roadblocks that keep black teens like her from succeeding in America. Through this intimate, cinematic tale of one teen’s true story, For Akheem offers nuance to her story, while taking full account of a fraught sociopolitical landscape.
See For Akheem at Tribeca 2017.
(Source: tribecafilm.com)
“You make movies to repair yourself from life. Your movie is always a mix of what you’ve been through, what you’re living, what you’re afraid to live and what you desire to live. In that way, for me the question of resilience and repairing and what you take back home from a movie into your own life is really important to me. I don’t think I would be able to have a desperate ending to any movie I make. I’m just not able to do that. It’s first for myself and then out of a responsibility to my movie and to the audience. It’s again the question of humanism.”
Katell Quillévéré has been making potent, profound cinema for more than a decade now. It’s time you get to know her, via this interview with John Guerin.
(Source: filmcomment.com)
“All-powerful New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis recently spurred a great deal of buzz across the web by positing the ‘DuVernay Test,’ an intriguing and race-conscious new initiative named after writer-director Ava DuVernay and styled after the female-focused Bechdel test that seeks to combat inferior cinematic depictions of people of color.”
Read: 5 WOMAN-DIRECTED FILMS THAT PASS THE DUVERNAY AND BECHDEL TESTS
We’ve reached the 2015 halfway mark!
Okay, a bit past halfway. So let’s take a moment to remember the remarkable array of female performances that have already graced our screens so far this year.
Dakota Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey), Julianne Moore (Maps to the Stars), Kristen Stewart (Clouds of Sils Maria), Karidja Touré (Girlhood), Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road), and six more acting goddesses complete our list of the 11 best female performances of the year so-far. Find out the rest here.
#TodayonTribeca: GIRLHOOD cracks open the myth of French womanhood. Read our interview with director, Céline Sciamma.
https://tribecafilm.com/stories/girlhood-director-celine-sciamma-talks-paris-frien