Inspiration & Comps
A kinetic visual environment narrates the destructive results of fame, mass tourism and hubris.
Landmark feminist road movie explores freedom and autonomy of two working class women boxed in by dead-end marriages and sexist society.
Almodovar’s generosity of spirit and his playful sensuality. Mixes animation w/ live action.
Luminous black and white saga told from the point of view of Cleo, an indigenous housemaid in Mexico City abandoned by men and patriarchal society. Never holds back on political repression, CIA-trained vigilantes brutalize students, bourgeois light-skinned Mexicans take land and extract from locals. Sublime technical and empathy beats. Final ocean scene a modern-day Pietà.
A multiracial sisterhood comedy of working-class girls in a Hooter bar. They mess up, party and mostly support each other through the humiliations and indignities and low wages of life. They dream big and love big.
A formally audacious documentary film told by the haunting voices of looted artifacts from Dahomey (Benin). The colonial French government displaced thousands of relics from their ancestral homeland. Their pilgrimage home is an unforgettable cry of collective grief.
A cutting satire about disparity between upper and lower classes. With a cutting twist on typical class warfare stories. The conflict and tension between two working-class families. The film’s central metaphor offers a commentary on how unaware the rich are of the struggles of those below them.
Black and white masterpiece. New Yorker calls it “The Unbearable Intimacy of ‘Moonlight.’” The textured life of a poor Black boy seekiing human connectdion and self-discovery - and finding it with moving images that will sear your heart.
Quotes
“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
“This is the place from which I’ve always written – perched on the knife’s edge of terror and hope.” Angels in America.
“I believe movies are the best way to teach us about being human, to express our dreams, fears, joys and sorrows.”
“During the [singing] contest, we watched the tavern morph into a church. A holy thing happened there.” “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.” Comments on Turgenev’s The Singers.
“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
“Give audiences what they want, just not how they want it.”
“Imagine you had power to hold [audiences] in a paralysis long enough to telepathically implant a message. An argument about how to live that would unfold in your captive’s mind as if they thought of it themselves. That’s a movie.”
“Audiences must suffer...I do want to shake the spectator, scratch something inside, but in a beneficial way.”