The new canon on the best love stories: friendships. All featuring the best on screen female friendships.
“Female friendship has been the bedrock of women’s lives for as long as there have been women." - Rebecca Traister
Lawrence Lau, 2000, Hong Kong, 90 min
Friends Forever: Female Friendship Canon
In the godforsaken satellite city of Tuen Mun. 13-year-old Cookie suspects she's pregnant. Lately things have not been going her way. Her mother left; her father ignores her; her best friend is in reform school; and her boyfriend Is off selling bootleg VCDs in bustling Mong Kok. Flanked by her ride-or-dies Banana, Sissy, and Bean Curd, she journeys into town to find an abortionist.
Director Lawrence Lau updates his 1988 debut Gangs—a shocking account of underage Triads— with an all-girls cast surviving on the lowest rungs of gang-life after the bosses have long gone legit.. Swimming in turn-of-century malaise, this Category Ill youth drama offers a slice of urban grime as our quartet, who can only rely on themselves, navigate drug abuse, bad boyfriends and library books way past their due dates.
Cheryl Dunye, 1996, USA, 83 min
Friends Forever: Female Friendship Canon & Homecoming & Drag of Genre
Dunye stars as Cheryl, a video-store clerk and aspiring director whose interest in forgotten Black actresses leads her to investigate an obscure 1930s performer known as the Watermelon Woman, whose story proves to have surprising resonances with Cheryl’s own life as she navigates a new relationship with a white girlfriend (Guinevere Turner). Balancing breezy romantic comedy with a serious inquiry into the history of Black and queer women in Hollywood, The Watermelon Woman slyly rewrites long-standing constructions of race and sexuality on-screen, introducing an important voice in American cinema.
Antonio Giménez Rico, 1983, Spain, 96 min
Friends Forever: Female Friendship Canon
One of the best trans films you’ve likely never heard of, Antonio Giménez-Rico’s landmark 1983 documentary Dressed in Blue (Vestida de Azul) explores the lives and loves of a group of six transgender women living in Madrid in the years following Spain’s transition to democracy. But more than that, it’s a loving portrait of a culture finally emerging from the shadows after being hidden for far too long. Antonio's portrait of these women gave them the freedom to portray their own stories with their own friends & family, but in a stylized scripted narrative framework with gorgeous cinematography by Teo Escamilla