Sundance 2026: Finding Barbara Hammer—A Late Awakening to Queer Experimentation
Barbara Hammer once said, “If we’re experimenting with our lives and the way we’re going to live, our film and our art should also be experimental. It breaks tradition, and makes you think in a broader way. It’s the way I experience the world.” I’ve been carrying that quote with me lately, especially as I […]
Elizabeth Rakhilkina’s horror short “New Flesh for the Old Ceremony” captures queer women onscreen in a fresh way
Watching “New Flesh for the Old Ceremony”, the Audience Award-winner for narrative shorts at this year’s Reeling Film Festival, I was pleasantly surprised that it opened with a passionate love scene. Usually that is something that is thrown in towards the middle of a romance story, but you knew this one is going to be […]
Introducing “Rough River Lake”, a film by Mary Tilden
For Pride month Cinema Femme is excited to elevate Mary Tilden’s short film “Rough River Lake”. Read more about the film below, and please donate to support! Details below are shared from the filmmaker, Mary Tilden (“Cool for Five Seconds”). For more info, and to donate, visit https://www.fullspectrumfeatures.com/rough-river-lake Rough River Lake A film by Mary […]
Kristin Peterson subverts the family holiday comedy with “Ringolevio”
It was a pleasure to interview Kristin Peterson about her debut “Ringolevio”, a film that touches on the truths of what it is like to meet your significant others family for the first time, and how you act within that environment. There are hints of the tropes from family holiday comedies like “The Family Stone”, […]
The Male Gaze in Arab Cinema: Youssef Chahine between Voyeuristic Pleasure and Male Exhibitionism
Introduction In her infamous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, written decades ago, Laura Mulvey concluded that to absolve traditional, classical filmmaking of its masculinity and misogyny, one should annihilate voyeurism as one of the basic pleasures to be extracted from the narrative cinema. Mulvey’s essay saw the light in the 1970s and was met […]