Some films invite passive observation; others refuse distance altogether, demanding a more intimate kind of surrender. The selections in the April 2026 Femme Film Series—”The Chronology of Water,” “My NDA,” and “More Beautiful Perversions”—belong firmly to the latter. Each work draws the viewer into an embodied experience where sensation precedes interpretation, and meaning is not delivered so much as it is felt. Across these films, cinema becomes a porous medium, dissolving boundaries between memory and present, silence and speech, self and environment.
This same spirit carries into our short film festival, where we continue to champion work defined by artistic clarity, formal risk, and the unmistakable vision of its directors. The festival will return for its 8th edition at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, October 11–13, 2026, followed by a virtual edition October 14–18. We are currently accepting submissions—submit now at filmfreeway.com/cinemafemme.
THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER – Kristen Stewart
There are few films that lift you out of your own body and place you within another quite like this one. From its opening moments, it recalled for me the spellbinding power of Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”—specifically that unforgettable scene when women gather and sing around a fire. I remember getting goosebumps then, an ache in my chest. This film stirred that same ache.
In Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut “The Chronology of Water,” we follow Lidia (Imogen Poots) through a life shaped by water, trauma, sexual abuse, and the unpredictable currents of survival. The film isn’t simply watched; it’s felt. Bodies lead the narrative—hands, breath, skin, sound. At times you feel as if you’re drowning with her, pulled under by memory and emotion; at others, you ascend with her into moments of dizzying, euphoric release. By the final frames, you realize you’ve moved through a complete tidal cycle, and what remains is a rare sense of renewal. You exhale differently. Something inside you has shifted.
This became my number-one film of last year, (even though it didn’t have it’s theatrical release until this year)—slowly edging out “April,” another visceral, out-of-body experience. What sets this film apart is that the entire work vibrates with that same heightened sensorial presence. It never lets go.
I once read that Kristen Stewart, as an actor, avoids heavy preparation, choosing instead to feel her way through each script. As a director, she carries that intuition into every frame. You sense her navigating the film’s emotional terrain with remarkable sensitivity—leading not with logic but with pulse, instinct, and breath. It’s fearless, embodied storytelling.
I cannot wait to see what she does next.
Cinema Femme is proud to serve as the media partner for screenings of “The Chronology of Water,” playing this month at Facets. We were especially thrilled to open the series with a conversation featuring film critic and programmer Marya E. Gates. You can read our interview with Marya about her new book, ‘Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words’ (Rizzoli, 2025).
MY NDA – Juliane Dressner and Miriam Shor
“My NDA” does not begin with paperwork. It begins with rupture—with a woman whose life has already been upended, forced into silence at the very moment she should be able to speak. The film makes clear, from its opening movements, that non-disclosure agreements are not neutral documents or routine formalities. They arrive after harm, and they extend that harm, reshaping the lives of those bound by them in ways that are isolating, disorienting, and deeply personal.
Directed by Juliane Dressner and Miriam Shor, and premiering as part of the Documentary Feature Competition at SXSW, the film follows individuals who were never meant to tell their stories. Bound by agreements that forbid even acknowledging their existence, they live within a kind of enforced invisibility—where truth becomes dangerous, and silence becomes a condition of survival.
The documentary’s power lies in its closeness. We are not given distance or abstraction; instead, we sit beside its participants as they navigate the unbearable calculus of whether to speak. The film traces the experiences of figures like Ifeoma Ozoma and Ashley Kostial, alongside others who risk everything to break their silence. Through them, we witness the psychological toll of NDAs—not just as legal constraints, but as forces that infiltrate daily life, relationships, and one’s sense of self. There is hesitation in every word, a weight behind every pause. The fear is not abstract; it is immediate, lived, and constant.
At one point, an NDA is described as “a bomb strapped to you”—a chilling metaphor that captures the ever-present threat of legal and financial retaliation. The film returns to this idea not through dramatization, but through observation: conversations with lawyers, quiet moments of doubt, the visible strain of knowing that speaking out could cost everything. And yet, despite this, the participants move toward disclosure—not because it is safe, but because remaining silent feels untenable.
What makes “My NDA” so affecting is its refusal to separate the personal from the systemic. As these individuals come forward, their stories begin to ripple outward—sparking investigations, influencing legislation, and drawing attention from major journalistic institutions. But the film never loses sight of what it costs to get there. Every act of speaking is also an act of risk, and the documentary honors that reality with care and restraint.
There is a quiet compassion in how Juliane Dressner and Miriam Shor hold these stories. The camera does not push; it listens. It allows space for uncertainty, for fear, for the complicated process of reclaiming one’s voice after it has been systematically taken away. By the end, NDAs no longer feel like background legal mechanisms. They feel intimate, invasive, and disturbingly normalized.
What lingers most is not just outrage, but a deep sense of respect—for the individuals who choose to speak despite the consequences, and for the fragile, hard-won act of telling the truth when you’ve been told you cannot.
“My NDA” premiered at SXSW last month and will have its Los Angeles premiere this weekend as part of This Is Not a Fiction at the American Cinematheque.
MORE BEAUTIFUL PEVERSIONS – Pavli Serenetsky
There are films that ask you to watch, and there are films that ask you to listen—not just with your ears, but with your body. “More Beautiful Perversions” belongs firmly to the latter. It doesn’t unfold in a straight line so much as it seeps, roots, and breathes. You don’t follow it as much as you wander into it.
From its earliest moments, I felt untethered from narrative expectation and dropped into something far more tactile. Shot on 16mm and hand-processed with organic materials, the film carries a living texture—images feel grown rather than captured. Pavli Serenetsky isn’t interested in clean edges or easy meaning; instead, they construct a cinematic ecosystem where decay, desire, and transformation coexist. The woods here are not just a setting, but a collaborator—breathing, enclosing, and ultimately reshaping those who enter.
The premise—a city-rejected teen drawn into a group of radical outsiders—sounds familiar on paper, but the film resists every impulse toward convention. The “hot radicals” aren’t archetypes; they feel like fragments of a collective consciousness, drifting between identities, ideologies, and rituals. Performances from Zahara Jaime, Alli Logout, and Lila Doliner are less about dialogue and more about presence—glances linger, bodies collapse and reconnect, voices dissolve into the soundscape. It’s a film where language often fails, and something more primal takes over.
What struck me most is how the film reframes the idea of “getting lost.” In many coming-of-age stories, the woods symbolize danger or escape. Here, they become a site of surrender—of shedding the rigid constructs of identity and reentering a more porous, interconnected state of being. The eco-parable isn’t didactic; it’s experiential. You feel the soil, the rot, the intimacy of entanglement. Queerness, in this context, isn’t just thematic—it’s structural, embedded in the film’s refusal to stabilize form or meaning.
There’s a kind of quiet radicalism in how the film was made, too—its collaboration with land stewards, artists, and a network of co-directors gives it a communal pulse. You can sense that multiplicity in every frame. No single voice dominates; instead, the film feels like it’s been grown through shared intention.
By the end, I didn’t feel like I had “understood” the film in any traditional sense. But I felt altered by it. My breathing slowed. My awareness sharpened. Like something had been gently dismantled and reassembled.
Few films trust their audience enough to let them drift this far off course. Fewer still make that drift feel so necessary.
“More Beautiful Perversions” will be released through Video Store Age on April 26, 2026, with the film backed in its theatrical rollout by The Future of Film is Female. Cinema Femme also partnered with the team for a Chicago screening at Facets on April 7, 2026.
We will also be featuring an interview with Pavli Serenetsky in the coming weeks.
