Tickets and VIP passes on sale NOW for the 2025 Cinema Femme Short Film Festival in Chicago from July 17 - 21!
Tickets and VIP passes on sale NOW for the 2025 Cinema Femme Short Film Festival in Chicago from July 17 - 21!
24 min read
by Matt Fagerholm
April 29, 2026
It’s a special kind of thrill when the greatness of an emerging filmmaker’s work hits you like a thunderbolt. That’s precisely what happened to me upon discovering the sublimely nuanced
7 min read
by Emily Jacobson
March 20, 2026
About a year ago, I sat down for what was probably my sixth movie of the day at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. My eyes were burning, my brain was
9 min read
by Rebecca Martin
March 8, 2026
For me, movies and meaning are inseparable; I process my daily life through this art form. The cinema is not just entertainment—it’s a vital lens through which I understand the
9 min read
by Rebecca Martin
December 23, 2025
I often think about a particular scene from the second series of “Fleabag” as the year draws to a close. Kristin Scott Thomas’s character, Belinda, is at a bar with
13 min read
by Matt Fagerholm
November 17, 2025
As I sat in my favorite movie palace, the Music Box Theatre, waiting for my wife—Cinema Femme founder Rebecca Martin—to arrive for that evening’s eagerly awaited Chicago International Film Festival
14 min read
by Matt Fagerholm
November 4, 2025
I went into David Michôd’s biopic “Christy” knowing nothing about its titular boxer. I knew I would be interviewing the film’s real-life subject, Christy Salters Martin, the following morning, and
7 min read
by Rebecca Martin
October 31, 2025
Italian filmmaker Carolina Cavalli has quickly emerged as one of the most original voices in contemporary cinema. Born in Milan, Cavalli made her feature debut with “Amanda” (2022), which premiered
14 min read
by Matt Fagerholm
October 25, 2025
With the 61st Chicago International Film Festival nearly in the rearview mirror, there are so many memories from the past several days that I know I will be cherishing for
10 min read
by Rebecca Martin
October 20, 2025
Mary Bronstein is a writer/director based in New York City, known for her raw style, auteurist approach, and unflinching focus on stories about complicated women. Her best-known work, the cult-classic
10 min read
by Rebecca Martin
October 18, 2025
In 2018, filmmaker Emily Mkrtichian began work on what she envisioned as a quiet, contemplative documentary—a portrait of women in Artsakh, the ethnically Armenian region nestled in the South Caucasus,
6 min read
by Matt Fagerholm
October 8, 2025
“I remember John Candy’s presence much more clearly than that of John Hughes,” Gaby Hoffmann told me during our interview in 2012, after I asked her about her memories of
11 min read
by Matt Fagerholm
September 30, 2025
“If you can’t play with the language, you are not reinventing the language.” This is what Argentine director Gaspar Noé told me when I interviewed him fifteen years ago about