Movie Review: The Denver Women + Film Festival Offers the Best Films Made by Women

Denver Film holds their biggest festival, the Denver Film Festival, every year in November, but they hold a series of smaller, specialized festivals throughout the year. Last year, I had the pleasure of attending their LGBTQ+ festival, Cinema Q, and have been trying to make it to as many events as I can ever since.  (I admittedly missed the Dragon Boat Festival for personal reasons unrelated to the festival. This past week was their Women + Film Festival which featured some of the best films out there by and about women.

In addition to all the great documentaries and features, there was a yoga class, panels on sexism and reproductive rights, and a women’s business marketplace. I can always count on these festivals for some truly amazing upcoming films and some great activities and some complimentary vegan food (although the vegan options were lacking this year, which is unusual for Denver Film). Here’s the round up of the films I caught at this festival.

Every Little Thing (94/100)

This documentary from filmmaker Sally Aitken follows Terry Masear, a woman living in Hollywood who rehabilitates injured hummingbirds back to health. I was skeptical when the festival scheduled a film about hummingbirds as the opening night film and fully expected it to be a snooze fest. Much to my surprise, this documentary was outstanding, and turned out to be exactly the film that my little vegan heart needed. There were a lot of stories about the birds, but the most emotionally endearing was definitely Cactus, the little hummingbird who collided with a cactus and who became Masear’s biggest underdog story. Don’t judge the book by the cover on this one; this is a much more interesting documentary than its description suggests.

Chuck Chuck Baby (92/100)

In this Welsh romantic comedy/jukebox musical, Helen (Louise Brealey) works in a chicken factory while living with her ex-husband Gary (Celyn Jones) and taking care of Gary’s dying mother Gwen (Sorcha Cusack) when Helen’s high school crush, Joanne (Annabel Scholey) returns home and a romance blooms between the two women. But Joanne is still wrestling with her own demons, which drives a wedge between the couple. Will the two of them be able to reconcile their relationship?

One of my favorite parts of this is that it’s a jukebox musical, but practically an amateur one. Characters sing along with songs on the radio or on record players, but never with professional singing voices. They sound like average people trying to sing along with music, missing lyrics and singing off-key. And somehow, that made the movie more realistic and more emotional. It was a beautiful, queer love story with the perfect ending and a lot of great humor.

Black Box Diaries (97/100)

In 2015, Japanese journalist Shiori Itō says she was raped by a more prominent journalist named Noriyuki Yamaguchi, who was also the personal biographer of then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. When she tried to pursue justice, she ran into one roadblock after another, as Japan’s outdated, century-old rape laws were so weak that even a lack of consent was not enough to bring a rape charge without evidence of extreme violence. When Itō’s attempt to bring criminal charges against her attacker fails, she launches a daring civil suit with dire consequences for her, even putting her life in danger as she fights for justice in a landmark case that brought the #MeToo movement to Japan and changed the country’s laws forever.

Itō’s journey is a harrowing and difficult one to watch, especially when her lawyers warned her that her life may be in danger due to her case if Shinzo Abe was re-elected, which he was. Somehow, Itō pulls off an absolute miracle in getting justice for herself and all Japanese women, and now Japan’s rape laws define rape as “nonconsensual sexual intercourse,” as it should. It’s likely to be a triggering film for sexual assault victims, which the film acknowledges at the beginning by giving you instructions on how to calm yourself if the film becomes too much. If you think this is a film you can handle, I highly recommend it.

Chosen Family (89/100)

In the directorial debut of actress Heather Graham, Ann (Graham), is a yoga teacher in her 40s in Rhode Island whose dating history has been less than stellar. To add to her stresses are her hardline Christian father (Michael Gross), her oblivious and selfish mother (Julie Halston), and her drug-addicted, emotionally immature sister Clio (Julia Stiles). When Ann is set-up with her friend’s contractor, Steve (John Brotherton) she thinks she might have finally found the perfect man for her. But when Steve’s bratty daughter Lilly ends up hating Ann and having severe behavioral issues, Ann learns an important lesson about the downfalls of people pleasing.

I went to this movie because Heather Graham is one of those great actors from the 90s who seemed to just disappear. I loved her in Scrubs and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and always wanted to see her become a bigger star. Similarly, Julia Stiles is one of those actors who was big in the 90s and seems to have faded from the spotlight. Both of them deserved more fame than they got, and both of them prove it in this film. I was surprised to find that the film took place in my home state of Rhode Island, which was strange as Graham is from Wisconsin. But unlike some things that take place in the Ocean State, like Dumb and Dumber and the television series Providence, Chosen Family genuinely looks like Rhode Island.

A lot of times with rom-coms like these, I root for the couple to end up together, but this was a film where ending the movie on Ann and Steve living happily ever after would have undermined the emotional journey that her character was on. Graham was very smart to avoid that simple, happy ending in favor of what the character and the film really needed at the end, and I’m sure she had a lot of pressure to do otherwise.

Let the Canary Sing (90/100)

This documentary about the life and career of pop singer Cyndi Lauper goes from her childhood in New York being raised by a single mother, to the early days of singing in her band Blue Angel, to her early success as a solo artist, to the ups and downs of her later career including her writing for Broadway and her advocacy for LGBTQ+ people.  I love music documentaries, and this one taught me a lot about an artist that I actually knew very little about. I wasn’t aware of how much of an advocate for queer people Lauper has been her whole life, and that she even put a transgender woman in her music video for “She Bop” back in 1984. It’s a beautiful and in-depth documentary that made me want to listen to even more from Lauper.

The Queen of My Dreams (84/100)

In this Canadian film from director Fawzia Mirza expanding on her short film from 2012, Azra (Amrit Kaur) is a Pakistani lesbian in 1999 who has had a somewhat strained relationship with her mother, Mariam (Nimra Bucha), since coming out. But when Azra’s father Hassan (Hamza Haq) suddenly dies, Azra must uproot her life to travel to Pakistan for her father’s funeral. Along the way, she goes through a journey in her dreams through a Bollywood-inspired version of her mother’s young life and sees the ways in which she and her mother are not that different.

I was happy to see Amrit Kaur in something else, as I absolutely adore her in The Sex Lives of College Girls. The film became a powerful statement about generational conflict and cultural norms based on both sexuality and gender. My only issue with this movie was the ending, as I felt there was still at least one conversation that still needed to be had between Mariam and Azra that never happened. Instead, there was this silent understanding that the two women come to at the end, but there was clearly more that should have been said to complete that emotional journey. But, as a graduate of film school, I was happy to see such a beautiful tribute to Bollywood, especially one that isn’t nearly as long as an actual Bollywood film because those get to be excessively long.

If Denver Film keeps up with their schedule from last year, then we can look forward to the Cinema Q Film Festival coming up next in August. Check out all of Denver Film’s programming at their website.

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