Jane Campion
The Piano made her the first woman to win the Palme d'Or. From Sweetie to The Power of the Dog, Campion films desire and cruelty tangled together, mostly through women the frame refuses to simplify.
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An Angel at My Table
Based on the autobiographical work of New Zealand writer Janet Frame, this production depicts the author at various stage of her life. Afflicted with mental and emotional issues, Frame grows up in an impoverished family and experiences numerous tragedies while still in her youth, including the deaths of two of her siblings.
Defining films
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Both excavate female interiority with unflinching intimacy, passion and pain inseparable, domesticity as battleground.
Shared obsession with characters destroyed by their own desires, cinema of psychological entrapment and inevitable tragedy.
Both use extreme close-ups and bodily proximity to expose the violence hidden within intimate relationships.
Anglo-Pacific auteurs who channel female trauma through fractured narrative and sensory precision, cinema as psychological descent.
In their own words
I looked at really beautiful romantic films, like Jane Campion's The Piano. I wanted to bring the romance, the intensity, the feeling of first love and angst.
