Jennifer Merin

1 week ago | awfj.org | Jennifer Merin

0 Flares 0 Flares × Anchored by star Kathleen Chalfant’s brave, unflinching performance, writer/director Sarah Friedland’s poignant drama Familiar Touch offers a tender but frank look at the realities of aging and memory loss in today’s world. Moments of joy and confident competence mingle with others that are full of pain, confusion, and regret as the story follows Chalfant’s character, Ruth, into assisted living — and, it becomes quite clear, the final phase of her life.

1 week ago | awfj.org | Jennifer Merin

0 Flares 0 Flares × Familiar Touch is a profoundly poignant narrative about Ruth, an octogenarian women who is moving from her own home, a lovely and beloved house where she can no longer take care of herself, into an assisted living facility, where she must adjust to and accept an entirely new way of life for the rest of her life. Ruth’s son is loyal and attentive but very busy and he feels that he has no choice other than to provide for his mother in this way.

2 weeks ago | awfj.org | Jennifer Merin

0 Flares 0 Flares × Anyone who still thinks that women are too emotionally unstable to be effective leaders needs to do two things, stat: Take a look at the messy, high-drama bromance break-up currently dominating the news cycle and sit down to watch Prime Minister, Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe’s intimate, insightful documentary about former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern. If that combo doesn’t leave you desperate to have a kind, competent woman in charge, nothing will.

3 weeks ago | awfj.org | Jennifer Merin

0 Flares 0 Flares × Tradition goes head to head with progress — or at least inevitable change — in Norwegian writer/director Sara Margrethe Oskal’s intimate debut feature The Tundra Within Me. As it follows a feminist artist (Risten Anine Kvernmo Gaup) who returns to her remote far-north Sami homeland with her young son after many years in the city, the film examines the ways in which dearly held cultural traditions can be both empowering and stifling.

4 weeks ago | awfj.org | Jennifer Merin

0 Flares 0 Flares × Norwegian writer/director Sara Margrethe Oskal’s debut feature, The Tundra Within Me, is a tender love story set in Sápmi, the Northern Scandinavia region occupied by the Sámi (aka Lapps), an indigenous people who’ve struggled for centuries to sustain their cultural independence and traditional way of life as reindeer herders.