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The Japan Society's Film showcase is offering a rare chance to catch up with some impossible-to-find Naomi Kawase films: Suzaku (Canada + US) and Vision (US only).

We also recommend the Indigenous Sci-Fi Night Raiders, which is now on VOD in Canada, US, and UK.

Finally, we recommended these last week, but we reallllly think you should have yourself a mini Céline Sciamma film festival. Her latest, Petite Maman, is now in UK cinemas and will be out in North America in early 2022.

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A Céline Sciamma mini film festival

Céline Sciamma Fest

Céline Sciamma's new film, Petite Maman, is one of the very best films to premiere in 2021. It won't be rolling out widely in cinemas until 2022 (though watch this space for every early virtual screening we can find!), but that makes this a perfect time to catch up with her earlier films you've missed, or rewatch them again.

Fortunately, most of Sciamma's films are streaming right now (except for the ever-elusive Water Lilies) so here's a look at where you can watch them.

As you make your way through Sciamma's work, there's no better viewing companion than our ebook on her work — the first full-length study of Sciamma's work ever published — Portraits of resistance: The cinema of Céline Sciamma.

In the book, we explore how, in Céline Sciamma’s films, social outcasts take centre stage. Their gaze is centred as they learn to be themselves through interacting with nature (much of Tomboy takes place outside; the ocean is the backdrop to the story in Portrait), inhabiting women’s spaces (the changing rooms in Water Lilies; hotel rooms and bedrooms in Girlhood), and making connections with people who understand and accept them (the best friends in Water Lilies; Laure’s/Mickäel’s relationship with their younger sister in Tomboy; Girlhood’s girl gang; the romance between painter and subject in Portrait). Yet even these safe spaces cannot hold forever against the weight of societal prejudices and injustices.

Portraits of resistance, contains interviews with Céline Sciamma, Portrait of a Lady on Fire actresses Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel, as well as Sciamma’s sound editor. On top of that, essays from EIC Alex Heeney, Executive Editor Orla Smith, Associate Editor Brett Pardy, and writers Lena Wilson, Ben Flanagan, and Angelo Muredda will delve into what makes Sciamma’s films so special. Read entire chapters on Water Lilies (2007), Tomboy (2011), and Girlhood (2014), plus several essays on Portrait, focusing on its exploration of the gaze of the two central lovers.

Praise for Portraits of resistance:

"Portraits of Resistance covers enormous ground, reading Sciamma's work as queer cinema, women's cinema, European cinema, looking at the both the stories and the aesthetics, and how Sciamma has already created distinct and unique films with a singular voice. Not only is it a great introduction for any who want to learn more about the filmmaker, it will be a cornerstone for any future Sciamma scholarship." - Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Screen Anarchy

"Fascinated by the ways in which women across continents and centuries create spaces of intimacy, Céline Sciamma stands as one of contemporary film's most necessary directors. Alex Heeney and Orla Smith have assembled a collection that does justice to the range of Sciamma's interests, talents, and achievements. Erudite and casual, Portraits of Resistance will force readers into an essential task: running back to watch every Sciamma film to see what they missed.” - Alfred Soto, Film Critic

Get your copy of Portraits of resistance

Portrait of a Lady on Fire - BBC iPlayer UK; Kanopy/Crave+ Canada; Kanopy/Hulu US; Stan AU... and many more worldwide

Here's an excerpt from my review:

Céline Sciamma’s gorgeous, heart-wrenching Portrait of a Lady on Fire screened on the first day of TIFF, and it became the gold standard by which I evaluated all other films. Watching The Burnt Orange Heresy, I kept thinking, not only how could you cast Elizabeth Debicki, who played Virginia Woolf just last year, as a muse, but in the year of Portrait of a Lady on Fire!? Why should I accept the sexism of Martin Eden, where every female character was an accessory, just because it’s from an early 1900s text, when Portrait of a Lady on Fire, set in the 1700s, gave me three complex women?

Sure, the brute force sound design of Sound of Metal was immersive, despite literally spelling out what it was doing for the audience with subtitles. But how could I be impressed with that when Sciamma’s Portrait almost invisibly used the crashing of waves to ratchet up tension; she also choreographed the rhythm of every step and breath her actors took, crucial to creating the film’s emotional maelstrom, and yet essentially imperceptible.

Setting Portrait of a Lady on Fire in the 1700s allowed Sciamma to create a heightened romance, what she referred to at TIFF as “cinema plus plus”: the costumes had to be carefully chosen because everyone wore the same thing throughout, the setting became all the more important and romantic, and the stakes for the romance were higher, too. Like Call Me by Your Name before it, Portrait is the story of a queer romance bound to a particular place and time — that it has an expiration date makes it no less intense or important.

Read the full review.

Girlhood - Criterion Channel in Canada + US, Kanopy/Showtime US, BFI Player UK, VOD AU

Here's an excerpt from my intro to my interview with Sciamma about the film:

Set in the Paris suburbs, the film follows a young black woman, Marieme (Karidja Touré), with a large family and an abusive brother. The world seems to be against her: her grades aren’t high enough to allow her to pursue the academic track she wanted; her home is a pressure cooker; and every decision she makes to empower herself has unintended, painful consequences. We follow her as she becomes a part of a group of rebellious girls, the Bande des Filles of the French title, where she finds support and her voice. It’s a wholly moving and touching story that’s a useful reminder that growing up is different for girls.

Read the full interview.

Tomboy - Mubi UK/Ireland/Austria/Germany, Tubi Canada, VOD AU, Kanopy US (and VOD on Microsoft)

Here's an excerpt from Lena Wilson's essay on Tomboy in the book:

The opening shot of Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy (2011) is a dreamy, sunlit view of the back of a child’s head. Next, sunshine filtering through green treetops, the child’s relaxed fingers stretching up to the light. Finally, a closeup on her pensive, androgynous face, eyes closed and short hair tousled by the wind as she enjoys a top-down car ride with her father. The day is silent and still but for the sounds of tires on pavement and birds singing. Her father, holding protectively to her leg, asks if she is okay. She says yes, and the film title flashes: first with the letters in blue, then in red, then with those colours alternating. That gendered colour-coding should be obvious to anyone who’s ever attended a baby shower, and Tomboy’s protagonist, Laure (Zoé Héran), lives most comfortably in that jumbly in-between. Tomboy seeks not to depict a female child easily recognizable as “girl,” nor a female child easily recognizable as “boy” — but rather, a female-bodied child recognizable as either.

Tomboy takes place in the summer before Laure begins to attend a new school — a fairytale space, an opportunity to reinvent oneself free of pre-existing expectations. Sciamma aligns this freedom with nature and the outdoors, conjuring a space where Laure can slip free of the strictures of gender itself. When Laure is able to exist just as she is — as a gender non-conforming child — she is most often enjoying nature, as in the film’s opening sequence. A shift that will bring Laure outdoors and closer to boyhood than ever before occurs early on in the film, when Laure meets Lisa (Jeanne Disson), a girl her age in her new building, and decides to introduce herself with a boy’s name: Mickäel. This leads to a pre-teen summer romance with Lisa, the only girl in the group. But is Laure really attracted to Lisa, or just to the way Lisa sees her as Mickäel? Is Laure not a “her” at all? Is Mickäel Laure’s true self? Or is Laure, as the title suggests, a tomboy – a boyish young girl? Is Laure a budding lesbian? Transgender person? Just a boy? Just a girl? Sciamma has said she’s not interested in answering these questions.Laure herself is not equipped to answer them. Different viewers may interpret Laure’s gender differently, too.

To read the full essay, get the book here.

Get your copy of Portraits of resistance

Rare chance to see Naomi Kawase films at the Japan Society's Flash Forward Series - until Dec 23 in Canada + US

Earlier this year, we went deep on the career of the great Naomi Kawase on the podcast, on the occasion of the release of her most recent (and IMO best) film, True Mothers (easily one of the year's top 10 films). We didn't talk about Suzaku though, a landmark film in her career as her debut feature, because it was entirely impossible to see it! Fortunately, the Japan Society's Flash Forward Series is offering a rare, limited time chance to stream both Suzaku (Canada +US) and Vision (US only) this month. Do not miss.

To listen to our in-depth discussion of Kawase's work, look for Episode 85: The Films of Naomi Kawase, featuring True Mothers, in your personal Premium Seventh Row podcast feed.

Suzaku (1997) - Canada + US until Dec 23

Here's Orla on the film:

You don’t want to miss this rare opportunity to watch Naomi Kawase’s first fiction feature, which is also one of her best films. Suzaku feels a bit like an early draft of Kawase’s Still the Water (my favourite film of hers). Both are melancholy family portraits set in a remote Japanese village, and both depict characters processing grief and navigating love. And like all Kawase films, Suzaku is an aurally soothing film that spends time on the images and sounds of nature, from rolling mountains to trees whistling in the wind.

Suzaku is also a very sad film, as relaxing as it can be to watch. The film begins with the central family — a mother, father, grandmother, very young daughter, and the father’s preteen nephew — living a seemingly idyllic life together, and awaiting the construction of a new railway that will connect their village to the city. Then, Kawase abruptly cuts forward fifteen years, when it’s announced that, after over a decade of planning and financial investment, plans for the railway have been scrapped at the last minute. With it goes the father’s hope that he would get work on the railway. The film is a bleak portrait of dashed hopes. It’s attentive to the beauty of village life (the serenity of nature, the generosity of the people) and its downfalls (disconnection from an increasingly city-centric country, limited economic prospects). It seems as though, every day, more people are leaving the village for a different life; it’s not so idyllic anymore.

While dramatic things do happen in Suzaku, Kawase underplays it all. It’s quiet, beautiful, and melancholy.

Click here for tickets.

Vision - US only (+VOD in France)

This Naomi Kawase film starring Juliette Binoche is gorgeous looking... and pretty impossible to find with English subtitles. On our Kawase podcast, Brett Pardy and I discussed how much we loved the forests in the film, though it's been a few years since we last saw it so it's hard to offer more specifics. See it while you can!

Here's the film description from the program guide:

A fabled herb powerful enough to cure all sufferings of the human spirit draws a French journalist (Juliette Binoche) to the fog-enshrouded forests of Nara Prefecture. During her search within the lush landscape she meets several keepers of the forest: Tomo, and his blind senior Aki, who has begun sensing unusual shifts in the environment. As the herb’s once-in-a-millennium return approaches, Aki suddenly disappears—leaving Jeanne and Tomo to navigate increasing disturbances in their surroundings. Vision, true to its title, shines for Kawase’s powerful haptic visuality, as well as the modes of extralinguistic communication it affords her quietly focused characters in the film’s moving contemplation of human existence.

Click here for tickets.

Now in Virtual Cinemas/VOD

Night Raiders - VOD in Canada/US/UK

This Indigenous sci-fi film is a smart allegory for exploring the trauma of residential "schools" in so-called Canada, especially the toll they took on parents. It also stars actress-writer-director and Seventh Row favourite Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, who appeared on our Lockdown Film School last year.

Here's an excerpt from the intro to my interview with writer-director Danis Goulet:

The logline for Cree filmmaker Danis Goulet’s sci-fi feature debut, Night Raiders, sounds eerily familiar: “In a post-apocalyptic future, children are considered state property. Separated from their parents, they are trained in boarding schools to fight for the regime.” Is it sci-fi or the history of how Canada has treated Indigenous People? To paraphrase Mi’kmaw filmmaker Jeff Barnaby, the apocalypse already happened for Indigenous People.

While Barnaby’s genre-crossing Rhymes for Young Ghouls looked at the horrors of residential schools — the schools that Indigenous children in Canada were sent to after being torn from their parents — from the perspective of a teenager determined to avoid going to one, Goulet uses sci-fi to look at this from the perspective of a mother forced to give up her child. In Night Raiders, Goulet crafts a poverty-stricken world of the near-future where surveillance drones are everywhere, a militaristic police force is under constant patrol, and nowhere is safe. Here, all children — not just Indigenous children — are permanently separated from their parents and sent to “academies,” that look like prisons, for schooling that seems synonymous with military training. That also means that the multicultural, multi-racial ‘student’ body looks like the film’s audience, which makes the school pledge, “One nation, one language,” particularly creepy. Ironically, the absolutely horrifying “academies” still seem almost paradisal compared to Canada’s residential schools.

Read the interview.

Happy watching!

Best,

Alex Heeney, Editor-in-Chief

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Naomi Kawase films, Night Raiders, and more to watch this weekend