Maria Schneider, 1983

Manal Issa, 2024

In Beirut on September 22, 2024, just hours before bombing escalated throughout the country, the Lebanese French actress Manal Issa considers the role of the actor during the unfolding global conflict.

A Woman, a Part

An exhausted, workaholic actress, Anna Baskin, 44, abruptly extricates herself from a successful but mind-numbing TV role, returning to her past life in New York to reinvent herself.

30/30 Vision: Three Decades of Strand Releasing

Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones.

Shulie

Elisabeth Subrin’s masterful film is a shot-by-shot reenactment of an unreleased 1967 documentary portrait of SAIC student Shulamith Firestone, who, a few years later, would become a central figure in the rise of radical feminism. Through its meticulous staging, the film expresses in Subrin’s words, “the residues of the past,” and the resonance of issues around gender and class today. (Gene Siskel Film Center)

The Fancy

The Fancy is a speculative, experimental work that explores the life of Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), evoked by the published catalogues of and about her photographs. Structural in form, the video radically reorganizes information from the catalogues in order to pose questions about biographical form, history and fantasy, female subjectivity, and issues of authorship and intellectual property.

For Maria

Elisabeth’s short for 30/30 Vision is a tribute to the French actress Maria Schneider.

Sweet Ruin

An unproduced screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni provides the basis for this existential tale of a gun-obsessed journalist, starring Gaby Hoffmann in roles originally intended for Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider.

The Listening Tapes

In three reenactments of a controversial 1983 television interview, actors Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval play late French actress Maria Schneider. “The Listening Takes” is a prescient confrontation with the patriarchal structure of the film industry. [Overview Courtesy of Participant Inc.]

Law of Desire

The story of Trelita, a Chicana sex worker with an abusive boss and a dead boyfriend (who she may or may not have murdered). It is the second episode made in the Clit-o-matic: The Adventures Of White Trash Girl! series about female superhero White Trash Girl. It has been referred to as part #3 in an ongoing series.