I often wonder whether my wife and I ever would have met had she not founded the site, Cinema Femme. It connected directly with a passion I had developed simply by interviewing so many filmmakers, and learning of the inequities endured by anyone who wasn’t a straight white male. Though Rebecca and I had multiple mutual friends, I hadn’t hung out with most of them outside of press screenings. It wasn’t until 2019 that I began pushing myself toward having more of a personal life, and that is when I was asked last second to be a guest on a late night radio show. I would’ve passed on it had I not been informed that the other guest would be the founder of a site devoted to elevating the work of female filmmakers. The rest, of course, is history.

I’ve been a contributor to Cinema Femme ever since Rebecca and I began dating. And though my writing for Indie Outlook and RogerEbert.com remains on an indefinite hold as I go about completing long-in-the-works projects, there were twelve people over the past twelve months that I simply could not pass up speaking with for Cinema Femme. Click on each bolded name, and you will be directed to the full conversation…

“I read all the Letterboxd reviews for my film, and occasionally, I’ll see one that moves me deeply. There are men who have written, ‘I felt like a teenage girl for the first time,’ and, ‘I realized that I have not reflected on my privilege,’ and, ‘I need to be thinking about my mom and the women in my life differently.’ Cinema can give you that experience, and that’s what I want to do through my work. You leave it open-ended so audiences can bring themselves to it. All I want is for the film to leave a residue, a perfume of sorts, that makes you reflect.”—Shuchi Talati, director of “Girls Will Be Girls”

“Throughout the show, [Pamela Adlon] was always very focused on capturing what felt real. It’s very easy for a show, especially family shows, to use the kids as furniture. There are children glimpsed back there simply to remind you that this is a family, and they are just required to say a funny line before popping off. ‘Better Things’ was very centered around the realness of what an actual family household looks like, and I always refer to it as the show that will show the things that most other shows won’t think would need to be shown. And people should see it! It’s happening in the viewers’ own homes, so why not show it in this one?”—Olivia Edward, star of “Better Things”

“What motivates me to write these books is the fact that I want to learn as much as I can about the work itself. And Dean [Hurley] said, ‘This book will be nothing without Lori Eschler,’ so I just started hunting for her. I had never heard of Lori Eschler before, and I’m a big ‘Twin Peaks’ fan. My favorite part of ‘Twin Peaks’ is the music, and the most important person in terms of its creation is Lori. The fact I didn’t know about her says a lot about how her work has been hidden all of these years.”—Scott Ryan, author of Always Music in the Air: The Sounds of Twin Peaks

“What I loved about the way Shuchi orchestrated intimate scenes is how she made them very much in sync with how awkward and vulnerable we are in these moments. When you kiss someone for the first time, you may be afraid to open your eyes because the person will appear too close, as if you are looking at them through a fisheye lens. It’s those kind of awkward moments that she has captured so well, and they set a new benchmark for Indian cinema in how they portray intimacy as it is, without any music. They aren’t there simply to tantalize the audience.”—Preeti Panigrahi, star of “Girls Will Be Girls”

“Her character is pansexual, but she never defines herself as such. She just is, and has no need for labels or any desire to provoke people. She loves men, she loves women, she loves trees and animals. ‘The Art of Joy’ is about how achieving your desire and joy is the augmentation of your potential. Spinoza, the great philosopher, talks about how being able to feel joy causes one to feel more potently. I thought the book’s stratifications of symbols were extremely interesting.”—Valeria Golino, director of “The Art of Joy” 

“I personally am not interested in the ‘nature versus nurture’ question of, ‘Was it the chicken or the egg?’ Of course, we as a society are obsessed with that, but I think it is important to challenge ourselves to stop placing complex people into archetypal roles, especially in the national dramas that we’ve watched unfold time and time again. In order to understand our complicity in these events, it is important to see them through a different lens. I suppose I chose the mother’s perspective in a bid to sort of humanize a character that we prefer to misunderstand.”—Maia Scalia, director of “His Mother” 

“There is a really particular experience of that kind of sexual trauma, which is that somebody has decided what your body is going to do without your permission. Realizing that someone could do, would do and did that to you is a very devastating thing. In creating this film as a director and actor, it enabled me to direct myself, which in some ways, is me deciding where my body goes at all times. If someone has an idea about where my body goes, I get to decide whether it goes there, so there’s something very powerful, in a meta way, about that experience. Also, when you’re in a scene with someone, the way to stay present is to let go, and to cede control. Collaborating is about ceding the idea of control and just trying to be as truthful as possible while letting yourself be present and free from control.”—Eva Victor, director and star of “Sorry, Baby” 

“I had friends who worked at LA Weekly and had a copy of the pilot. I got to watch it right around the time that I was called to work on the show, so I knew what the music would be like. I had seen all of David [Lynch]’s films, and got ‘Eraserhead’ to screen for the MSU film department in Montana. I grew up in Montana, which was David and my initial connection. He had grown up in Missoula and we think that our grandfathers knew each other because they were both politicians. In the first interview, we got into a discussion about how deep Swan Lake is. There was a train that went across the ice in the winter and fell into the water. Nobody had ever found it, and David and I were both really into how scary it was that the lake didn’t seem to have a bottom.”—Lori Eschler, music editor for “Twin Peaks”

“Her ability to be able to give this inanimate object emotion and its own character is so nice because we should be communicating with nature. We should be taking care of the earth in the way that indigenous people were, especially now. Nature can’t speak for itself, so who is going to? It’s just strange that today, we’ve evolved to think that nature is something that we can profit off of. It’s so weird.”—Claire Coulson-Ollivier, grand-niece of Catherine Coulson, who played the Log Lady on “Twin Peaks”

“When people learn that Jess has died, they often go, ‘I don’t want to watch a sad movie.’ It may sound weird, but I don’t find our movie sad because Jess was never sad. Her bravery continues to inspire me whenever difficult things come up. I think about her resilience, her joy, and her spirit, and it makes me much stronger. I have carried her with me and I will do that for the rest of my life. To reduce her story to being sad is too reductive. It’s not who she was, what her spirit is or even what she continues to do through us.”—Emily Sheskin, director of “JessZilla”

“I’m just so appreciative that he believed in me. He had faith in me, trusted me to the nth degree and really believed in what I could do. I have tried living up to that expectation by always attempting to do what I felt he wanted done. That’s what I’m doing now, obviously, in managing his estate, but even during a shoot, as a producer, I learned that to work with somebody like this, his vision is what’s really important and my job is to make that vision happen. My job is not to curtail that or take away from it or make it mine. I just tried to make his vision a reality, and because of his faith in me, I had to give him that same level of respect and faith. He really is my favorite person.”—Sabrina S. Sutherland, executive producer of “Twin Peaks: The Return” and longtime collaborator of David Lynch

“What I love so much about the pacing and the nature of Durga [Chew Bose]’s filmmaking is it allows everyone to project a fantasy of their own onto the piece. It is sort of interpretive, and I think it leaves room for people to involve themselves and their imaginations while bringing their experiences to the film. I am really excited to create something that is not only unusual, but isn’t being created a lot right now. Yes, we are referencing a lot of the classics. There are obvious references to French New Wave directors like Éric Rohmer, and even in the production and costume design, it is very timeless and nostalgic. Having a film like this be made in a time like today, where attention spans are increasingly lowered and there’s a constant stream of dopamine being consumed, it sort of disrupts that, and that’s really exciting to me.”—Lily McInerny, star of “Bonjour Tristesse”

In addition to these interviews, the site also published my capsule reviews of Natalie Erika James’ “Apartment 7A,” Megan Park’s “My Old Ass” and Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” (which I reviewed at length in the Winter 2025 issue of Cinema Femme’s print magazine. Upon learning that Jim Henson’s beloved final work, “Muppet*Vision 3D” was scheduled to permanently close last month, I made my first ever trip to Walt Disney World and couldn’t resist blogging about my adventures there at Indie Outlook. When my favorite living director, David Lynch, died this past January, I penned a tribute to him through tears, while sharing links to my conversations with several of his key collaborators. And as per annual tradition, I published my picks for the best films of last year and what I felt should’ve been nominated in all of the major awards season categories. 

In the Cinema Femme archives, you can find my conversations with Marilyn Agrelo on “Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street”; Virginia Alonso-Luis and Bridget Francis Harris on “Places of Worship”; Chloe Baldwin on “What You Like”; Gracija Filipović on “Murina”; Joanna Gleason on “The Grotto” (and “Into the Woods”); Alli Haapasalo, Eleonoora Kauhanen, Linnea Leino and Aamu Milonoff on “Girl Picture”; Eva Husson and Odessa Young on “Mothering Sunday”; Ksenia Ivanova on “Jack and Anna”; Keith Kupferer, Tara Mallen, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson on “Ghostlight”; Afrin Khanom and Angelos Rallis on “Mighty Afrin: in the time of floods”; Elvira Lind on “The Letter Room”; Wendy McColm on “Fuzzy Head”; Emily Robinson on “Virgin Territory” (and “Eighth Grade”); Haroula Rose on “Once Upon a River”; Gaysorn Thavat on “The Justice of Bunny King”; Rebecca Harrell Tickell on “Regenerate Ojai” (and “Prancer”); Brooke Westphal on “Young People”; and Iliana Zabeth on “House of Pleasures.”

The seventh installment of the Cinema Femme Short Film Festival runs from Thursday, July 17th, through Monday, July 21st, at Chicago’s historic Music Box Theatre, with opening and closing night being held—for the first time ever—in its glorious 1929 auditorium. For tickets and showtimes, click here.