Tuesday 10 November 2020

What to watch? The ''Great 20s Film list'' in COVID-19 times - 1) Winter's Bone

 Hello everyone! Thank you all for your personal messages asking us to get back onto Red Curtain Cinema. It is humbling and beautiful to see that after all these years, we still get messages of support around our blog. Even if we wished to write every single day, it has been definitely difficult - we do work besides watching films-  but here we are now! 

 As the world is still stuck with COVID-19 and we are being asked to stay at home, films are more important than ever. Not only can they be incredible vehicles to take us to far away lands and magical worlds but they can reveal brutal social realities and help us understand better the world we are living in. 

The power of Cinema lies in creating these emotional connections with characters - fictitious or not - going through a journey at a certain time and quite often, acting as mirrors of ourselves. Sometimes we feel so related to the characters that they could be representing us or a fantasy of what we want to be or achieve. Cinema is an emotional journey and certainly a powerful one. 

With that in mind, in honour of this pitiful and awful 2020, we pulled together a list of fantastic films worth watching while at home - ''The Great 20s Film List''. This is the first one on our list and it is brilliant:

          I) WINTER'S BONE (2010) by Debra Granik

This was the film that brought Jennifer Lawrence under the Hollywood spotlight with this gripping independent feature brilliantly directed by Debra Granik. She portrays a fatherless young woman living in low-income rural Missouri with caring responsibilities over her two young siblings. As her family faces eviction, she needs to find her father who was released from prison to find a solution to their dramatic situation. 

Not only we haven't heard of this film before but we were also surprised that this film doesn't appear in many 'Best Films of the 2010s' list. Filmed with natural light and quite a raw photography in most daylight scenes, it is a brutal testimony of the reality of many low-income families in rural America. With a documentary touch, Debra Granik takes us to Ree's (a fantastic Jennifer Lawrence) tough reality but whose inner strenght and determination for a better future for her family brings light into so much darkness. 

As it is quite difficult finding mainstream films directed by Women artists,  this one is a must on your list. We need to put great Women directors as Debra Granik under the spotlight as they deserve recognition as other great male directors. Interestingly, most of the lead characters in this film are women and they are the ones who keep chaotic homes in order. They are the ones who decide who their junkie or criminal husbands should speak to, they take care of the children, they take care of their rural gardens and animals. They are the ones who are the key to Ree's final resolution. A brilliant film!  


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