Guest Post by Melinda Prisco
I’m incredibly lucky. Not only do I produce movies, but I get to distribute stunning world cinema on my streaming platform, Filmatique. I conceptualized Filmatique alongside my incredibly talented partners, Ursula Grisham and Lorenzo Fiuzzi. The idea came to us over the course of several years attending festivals around the world.
We would come home and tell our friends about the incredible films we had seen — and our friends had no way to watch them. These films either didn’t exist online, or, unlike the fests we had seem them at, they were organized randomly and not as part of any higher curation — certainly not with the same level of attention with which they were made.
Enter Filmatique, our own streaming platform where we curate each series with as much depth as possible. Each month we have a new theme; past series have included Norwegian Women, Teenage Wasteland, and Banned Nations.
When thinking how to highlight a series about women, we wanted to do more than just show films that were made by women. This curatorial approach struck us as reductive — women, like men, make films exploring diverse subjects and are inspired by a wide range of socio-geopolitical topics. To date, we’ve featured several incredibly talented female filmmakers, including Salomé Alexi from Georgia, Elisa Miller from Mexico, Laura Amelia Guzmán from the Dominican Republic, Eleonora Danco from Italy, and Arami Ullón from Paraguay, to name a few. Our platform’s focus is world cinema, and the films of these talented women were integrated in curated collections such as Foreign Language Oscar Submissions, New South American Cinema, and Opera Prima Italiana.
We’ve also published essays and interviews by accomplished female academics, such as Dr. Paula Halperin from SUNY Purchase, Dr. Loreta Gandolfi from Cambridge, Associate Professor Giuliana Minghelli from McGill University, and Dr. Catherine Leen from Maynooth University. Leveraging the academics’ areas of expertise, these essays evaluate films within the context of particular artistic movements or explore cultural and aesthetic aspects of collections as a whole. Two stand-out examples are Minghelli’s textured analysis in “Home is a Hard Place to Film: Eleonora Danco’s Allegorical Documentary ‘N-Capace’” and Halperin’s “Spotlight on Brazil: Four Films Looking for a Country.”
Ultimately, we thought our series about women should focus on female representation on-screen; specifically, on young female protagonists who exist in the liminal space between youth and adulthood. Oftentimes, contemporary female coming-of-age films involve clichéd narratives of sexual encounters, violence, or exploitation. We hoped to re-calibrate the compass, which is why our Young Womanhood series reflects upon the simple and subjective experiences of young women without the dramatizing lens of trauma, focusing rather on the textures of love and loss, of leaving and returning home, of negotiating one’s origins with one’s dreams.
We didn’t want to pick titles exclusively directed by women. We first looked at the film itself, and then at who directed it, which is why our final product includes three films directed by female filmmakers, and two films directed by male filmmakers. This ratio felt natural to us insofar as it demonstrates that there are male filmmakers interested in and capable of capturing young women’s stories from a compelling point of view.
Showing first features is very important to us, as is spotlighting films from regions that remain underrepresented in mainstream cinema. Young Womanhood consists of three narrative feature debuts — all from female filmmakers — the first Brazilian-Russian co-production, and Latvia’s official entry to the 90th Academy Awards. While Latvia has entered the competition nine times, it has never been nominated.
Young Womanhood’s first four films are Ana-Felicia Scutelnicu’s first feature “Anishoara,” a delicate female coming-of-age in the beautiful but vanishing world of the Moldovan countryside; Klaudia Reynicke’s “Il Nido”, in which 19-year old Cora returns to the place of her youth only to witness the community torn asunder by the unearthing of a long buried crime; “Vermelho Russo,” a hybrid fiction-documentary in which two Brazilian actresses embark on a journey to Moscow to study Stanislavski’s method; and Viesturs Kairiss’ “The Chronicles of Melanie” which portrays Stalin’s purges of the Baltic states through the real-life letters of a young female journalist.
The fifth and final film, Amanda Kernell’s “Sámi Blood,” launches today, May 3. This astonishing film considers the question of indigenous identity via the story of a young female reindeer breeder who travels to Uppsala in search of a normal Swedish life. Examining a rarely-considered chapter of Scandinavian colonialism through the eyes of a strong young woman, “Sámi Blood” is weighted in its naturalism, both in superb performances from its non-professional actresses and its treatment of the subtle forms of racism that pervade systems of indigenous oppression.
Evolving from Kernell’s 2015 Sundance-premiering short film “Stoerre Vaerie,” “Sámi Blood” is one of very few films to have been shot in the native Sámi language. With approximately 30,000 native speakers worldwide, it is a dying language.
Ursula and I first saw the film when it premiered in Venice in 2016. We followed its festival trajectory and saw it go to Göteborg, Riviera, Santa Barbara, Seattle, Thessaloniki, Tokyo, Toronto, and beyond. Nuanced, moving, and masterfully told, “Sámi Blood” heralds a formidable new female filmmaking talent. We couldn’t be happier when we finally get to show it on Filmatique — and to tell our friends where they could watch it.
Filmatique is available on Roku, Apple TV, and iOS.
Melinda Prisco is a Hungarian-Italian film producer. In addition to running Filmatique’s operations, Prisco has produced several art-house films such as “Summum Bonum,” “The Transcendents,” and “Noble Earth.” The latter marks Filmatique’s first original production. Written and directed by Ursula Grisham, co-edited by Nadia Ben Rachid, and starring Daisy Bevan in the lead of role of Emma, “Noble Earth” will make its U.S. premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival this coming June.
