Cornell Cinema continues its ongoing series on abortion and bodily autonomy, On Demand, Without Apology, this week with a visit from Chicago-based filmmaker Lori Felker and her program Intrusions and Interruptions.
We will screen a few of Felker’s shorts that deal with motherhood and miscarriage, including her diaristic Spontaneous, about the spontaneous abortion she experienced while attending a film festival in support of another film in the program Discontinuity. Felker’s deeply thoughtful work is injected with a fantastic sense of humor, best observed in her short Not You, about a new mother who takes advantage of her Midwestern neighbor to get a little break. We’ll be complementing this program with work from other artists who resonate with Felker’s own lived experience. Please do join us!
The series continues further on Thursday and Saturday with Eliza Hittman’s Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always, a film whose theatrical release was cancelled by COVID lockdowns in March 2020 but which truly needs to be seen in a theatre.
Cinematographer Hélène Louvart’s exquisite cinematography can be found not just in Hittman’s devastating portrait of contemporary restrictions on abortion access, but also in another film screening this week: Murina. Winner of the Camera d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, Murina centers on the life of 17-year-old Julija, who spends her days diving for eels off the Croatian coast with her overbearing father Ante. And then a rich, handsome friend of the family comes to stay for a few days, dangling an offer to buy their land…
Also screening this week is contemporary artist Martine Syms’ debut feature The African Desperate. This one is a wild ride, folks! It follows roughly 24 hours in the life of Palace, a newly-minted MFA grad from an upstate New York art school as she moves from her micro-aggressive final crit to the wild, hazy k-hole that is the end of the year party Palace would desperately like to avoid, notwithstanding her previous agreement to DJ. Despite a long history of films satirizing art school life, this is the only film that really nails it.
And how can we not show the adorable Marcel the Shell With Shoes On? We have two screenings of this heart-warmer, happening Saturday and Sunday. Bring your seashell-sized tissues!
One final bit of housekeeping: due to an adjusted travel schedule for filmmaker Marcela Arteaga, we have to reschedule our Oct 4 screening of The Guardian of Memory for Tuesday, October 18 at 4:30pm. The screening is free, and we’re excited to share that Arteaga will be joined on stage for a post-screening panel discussion featuring panelists Cecelia Lawless (Romance Studies), Debra Ann Castillo (Latina/o Studies), Carolyn Fornof (Romance Studies), and Stephen Yale-Loehr (Law).
