Oh So Geeky

Something special happens for a director or writer when they can probe deep memories into a compelling story, and the audience who has their eyes opened to an event or perspective we haven't seen before. Both of these are at the heart of director Tracey Deer's first film Beans , setting an appropriate tone as the first film chosen to open the Athena Film Festival. Inspired by her own childhood, writer-director Tracey Deer mends the gap between a traditional coming-of-age tale against the backdrop of a historical event. In the summer of 1990, twelve year old Tekehentahkhwa's (Kiawentiio) adolescence unfolds with complicated friendships, standing up to oppression, and family dynamics against the backdrop of the Oka Crisis - a 78 day standoff of Mohawk people protecting their sacred burial grounds from overturning into a golf course by the White Quebec population. Through Beans, the audience is taken through the familiar territory of adolescence as well as the terrifyingl...

We don’t often learn of the opportunities and difficulties juvenile actors face until headlines show it or history becomes etched in memoirs. A rare chance to star in their own show or become a heartthrob leaves so many kids who love entertain discovering the risks and the realities of the industry before they're prepared to live in front of the spotlight. K id 90 , directed by Soleil Moon Free, brings us closer to taking a look behind-the-scenes and a generation of stars who learned to navigate the pitfalls of fame. As a teenager in the 90s, actress and director Soleil Moon Frye carried around a video camera everywhere she went and saved diaries, journals, and voice mail messages. After locking away the footage for almost 20 years, she revisits her childhood as a teenage star and presents an unprecedented time capsule of growing up in Hollywood and New York City. From her early days of starting out as Punky Brewster to nabbing smaller roles in B-horror movies, Frye shows us lif...

For the past eleven years, the Athena Film Festival has been the premiere festival to amplify women's leadership through film as well as provide in-depth conversations with industry experts. The festival works in conjunction with Barnard College's Athena Center for Leadership and Women and Hollywood to shift the cultural conversation of stories told of women. In celebration of March as Women's History Month, I'm excited to cover the event virtually. In the upcoming weeks,  I'll be providing reviews of a wide variety of shorts to documentaries and feature film screenings, which includes: Beans , directed by Tracey Deer. A twelve-year-old Mohawk Girl torn between innocent childhood and reckless adolescence as she grapples with her experiences of community, activism, and racism during the Indigenous uprising of 1990 known as The Oka Crisis. Mama Gloria - an intimate portrait of a trailblazing 73-year-old black transgender woman who transitioned before Stonewall, starte...

Wandering Through the Shelves hosts  Thursday Movie Picks . It's a weekly series where bloggers post and share various movie picks every Thursday.  The rules are simple: based on the theme of the week pick three to five movies and tell us why you picked them. For further details and the schedule visit the series main page  here . This week is  TMP Television Edition:  Romance Tropes / TMP Television Edition: Love Triangles .

Wandering Through the Shelves hosts  Thursday Movie Picks . It's a weekly series where bloggers post and share various movie picks every Thursday.  The rules are simple: based on the theme of the week pick three to five movies and tell us why you picked them. For further details and the schedule visit the series main page  here . This week is  TMP Television Edition:  Romance Tropes Edition: Forbidden Love.

In 2015, the Los Angeles' Women in Film started a challenge to watch one film by a female director every week for a year. I've seen this floating around social media and movie blogs for a while, and always meant to join in. For 2021, I finally decided to try it out this year as one of my resolutions. Every week I thought it'd be fun to do a quick round-up of the film(s) I've watched for the challenge. The films I chose for the challenge are on letterboxd - if you want to see the slate so far - but I'm not going in an particular order of alphabetical or chronological. My next two films is The Love Witch (2016) and Love and Basketball (2000). I've been dealing with some health and personal stuff lately, so of course I'm falling behind posting these again. I might make this weekly catch-up into a bi-weekly routine instead to give me time to write and post my thoughts.

Romanticmovies have the power to make us believe in the power of love or at least give us high expectations for the gifts we can share on Valentine's Day to show how much they mean to us. 'Tis the season to overestimate what Cupid has in store. So I thought it'd be fun to share my favorite romantic gestures from movies...that has set some impossible standards.