We often hear that you view a film through the lens of your own experience. For me, film has always worked the other way around too: it expands my experience and where I am in my life. The lens is only a starting place. From there, my own experience opens up.

That’s the spirit behind these four films, each directed by women and gender-expansive filmmakers: “I’ll Be Gone in June,” “Finding Your Laughter,” “Ana, en passant,” and “Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage.”

I’ll Be Gone in June

Few films place you so squarely inside someone else’s vantage point. Katharina Rivilis’s semi-autobiographical debut, which premiered at Cannes this year, is gorgeously shot, and it paints the American Southwest through an international lens. We follow Franny, a melancholy German exchange student newly arrived in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the fall of 2001. She is looking for a place to belong in a town that seems lost to time and is reeling from the grief and confusion of 9/11.

I always find myself drawn to filmmakers like Rivilis, a Germany-based director turning her own adolescence into cinema. The film draws on her time as an exchange student, and that lived experience shows in how the place is rendered. The otherworldly landscapes and the rural decay of southern New Mexico feel observed rather than staged. Her camera takes in the dust and the stillness, and the swell of renewed patriotism that settled over the country.

It hit close to home. As a teenager in 2000, I spent a semester abroad in the UK, surrounded by people from all over the world, and it changed how I saw everyone, myself included. I was looking out. Rivilis flips that: Franny is looking in, at a world that feels closed off, hemmed in by the parameters of Bush-era America. Her kinship with Elliott, a mysterious boy who shares her sense of alienation, becomes a small refuge inside that pressure.

The film is political without lecturing and timely without leaning on nostalgia. What stays with you is the restlessness and frusteration of being young inside a moment you can’t yet name, a monumental yet fleeting year of discovery.

I cannot wait to see what Rivilis does next.

Finding Your Laughter

I first heard about “Finding Your Laughter” while it was still being made, when we covered it for The Call Sheet, our partnership magazine with Camera Ambassador. I’ve followed Arlieta Hall ever since, including her community work with organizations like Mezcla Media Collective, and her humor has always struck me as honest and deeply relatable.

Directed by Hall and Brittany Aslot, the film is a joyful, moving family portrait. Arlieta is an aspiring Chicago comedian living on the South Side with her father, Milton Hall, Sr., a radio show host whose Alzheimer’s diagnosis has made his view of the world caught in a time when he served as principal and an educational administrator. Her answer to his confusion of time and space is improv. She meets him with “Yes, and…” and affirms his reality rather than correcting it. As she juggles the emotional and financial toll of caregiving, she also climbs through the ranks of Chicago improv and finds her voice and a new career. Her “bonus mom,” Charmaine, is right beside her, and the three of them smile through the tears together.

I don’t have a personal connection to Alzheimer’s, but I know what long-term caregiving looks like. My husband mother has MS, and his father is her caregiver. Watching Arlieta and Charmaine carry this without additional help is inspiring. Their love for Milton is steady and unglamorous, and it asks a lot of them.

The film breaks stigmas and makes a quiet case for taking care of family. It’s an intimate story with the power to bring people together, and it educates as it moves you. Thank you, Arlieta and Brittany, for sharing it. It’s thrilling to see the awards and attention it has earned this year.

Ana, en Passant

Some films let you travel without a plane ride, and this is one of them. Fernanda Salgado’s feature debut moves between Paris and Belo Horizonte, Brazil, through a layered, hand-built world of 2D hand-drawn animation, rotoscopy, collage, and stop-motion. It’s gorgeous, and each texture carries its own emotional weight.

Ana, a third-generation Afro-Brazilian living in Paris, is left to piece together the aftermath of her grandmother’s death. Following fragmented clues, she journeys to Brazil to reconnect with her family’s roots, and finds a woman living in her late grandmother’s apartment. Alice is a dancer, pregnant and required to stay put during her pregnancy. The two have no idea how they’re connected, but a friendship kindles anyway. Salgado uses the French chess rule “en passant” as her thematic anchor, and the film becomes a meditation on memory, heritage, colonial history, and the how exploration can expand our place and view of the world.

It reached me in two places. The first is the woman I was in my thirties. When I turned 30, I started the Chicago Film Lover Exchange, a group that gathered to discuss films, and I ran it for seven consecutive years. Rebuilding my interests through community is how I blossomed as a film lover, and I saw that same impulse in Ana, who goes looking for herself by returning to where she comes from.

The second is more immediate. I’m newly pregnant, and I couldn’t help but connect with Alice, a woman at the top of her career who has to dramatically pause to care for the new life arriving. I’m facing a new chapter of my own, and watching her sit inside that shift felt tender and real.

What I love about film is exactly this: I traveled through both women’s journeys, and I came out the other side feeling renewed and reconnected to my passions and my journey. The power of cinema!

Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage

Louise Weard’s filmmaking reminded me of a film that opened up my world this year: “By Hook or By Crook,” whose filmmakers I interviewed for its 25th anniversary. Both are raw and handmade, and both work with handheld cameras that put you right in the room, close enough to feel every uncomfortable beat.

Chapter iii is a fragment of Weard’s larger shot-on-video durational project, set in the present day. Izzy is a suicide hotline operator a decade into an unsatisfying relationship with Travis. When Travis begins to transition, takes the name Tiffany, and presents femme in public, Izzy’s frustration with a hapless, unemployed partner curdles into doubt of Tiffany’s choices. Avalon Fast and Henri Gillespie give brilliant performances, and Weard turns the trans coming-out story back on its cis-centric cinematic history.

What makes it land is how honest it is about Tiffany’s transition, and about the people around her who can’t or won’t believe her. It’s raw and real, and it shows how, as we keep evolving (and devolving) in how we define gender, we still struggle with misconceptions about how people embrace who they are. The film doesn’t look away from the painful reality of how people look at it. It’s uncomfortable, truthful, and, somehow, funny, and it with an empathetic and nuanced tone.