R; 1h 53m
Luke and Emily don’t just live together – they also work together as analysts in the high-stakes and high-pressure world of finance, forced to abide by company policy and keep their relationship secret. When a job opens up above them, Emily is thrilled to hear whispers that it might be going to Luke. But when it ultimately ends up hers, the couple is forced into a difficult situation. With the tables turned, Luke finds it harder to support her success and the pair start to unravel. With a delicacy that more genre films aiming to tackle weightier topics could afford to emulate, Domont cooly constructs a contemporary story about how a gendered disparity in finance and power can wreck a seemingly successful relationship.Back in 1994, the corporate thriller Disclosure posited that the only thing scarier than a woman scorned was a woman scorned who was also your boss, painting a laughably dated portrait of the evils of having women climb the corporate ladder. Fair Play, while recalling many a Michael Douglas thriller from Fatal Attraction to A Perfect Murder, is a smart rebuke to such misogyny. The biggest threat here ends up being a man’s ego.(Benjamin Lee, The Guardian)
Director/Writer: Chloe Domont
Category Archives: Themes
FAIR PLAY (2023)
Foreign Parts (2010)
1h 21m
‘Foreign Parts’ portrays a hidden enclave of automobile shops and junk-yards fated for demolition in the shadow of a new baseball stadium in Queens. The film observes this vibrant community of immigrants – where wrecks, refuse, and recycling form a thriving commerce – as it struggles for daily survival and contests New York City’s development scheme.
Directors Verena Paravel & J.P. Sniadecki
R.M.N. (2022)
Unrated; 2h 5m
Romanian New Wave auteur Cristian Mungiu (“4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days”) returns to masterful form with this drama, set in the filmmaker’s homeland and focusing on Matthias (Marin Grigore), a man who returns to his small village after walking off his slaughterhouse job in Germany, only to find the townspeople roiled by the presence of foreign workers. Ann Hornaday writes: “So much fear and misplaced anger are at play in Matthias’s increasingly hysterical behavior that ‘R.M.N.’ might as well be an X-ray of contemporary America.” (PG-13, 106 minutes.)
- Where to watch: Apple TV Plus, Prime Video
Director - Writer
- Stars
Irma la Douce (1963)
When a policeman falls in love with a prostitute, he doesn’t want her to see other men, so he creates an alter-ego who will be her only customer.
- Director
- Writers
- Stars
- 2h 27m
Between Two Worlds (2021) (Ouistreham)
Based on French journalist Florence Aubenas’s bestselling non-fiction work Le Quai de Ouistreham, investigating rising precarity in French society through her experiences in the northern port city of Caen.
- Director
- Writers
- Stars
‘Between Two Worlds’ Review: Juliette Binoche Goes Undercover
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023)
An overworked and underpaid production assistant drives around Bucharest to shoot the casting for a workplace safety video commissioned by a multinational company.
- Director
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Singing for Justice
Singing for Justice tells the story of Faith Petric, a political radical, community organizer and charismatic performer who united folk music and progressive causes from the 1930s through the early 2000s. Narrated largely by Faith herself, the film weaves her musical and political journeys to showcase the central role of folk music in the transformational social movements of the 20th century.
Co-director: Estelle Freedman
ebf@stanford.edu
info@singingforjustice.com
Fight Like Hell: The Testimony of Mother Jones (2023)
Julia de Guzman
julia@jdgstudio.com
We were never supposed to know her name. She was a poor Irish immigrant who survived famine and war, fire and plague. Unable to save her husband or their four small children, she dedicated her life to saving working families everywhere. The robber barons called her “the most dangerous woman in America,” but workers called her “Mother Jones.”
Upton Sinclair said of her, “she had force, she had wit, she had the fire of indignation; she was the walking wrath of god.” Mother Jones said of herself “I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hellraiser.” Most famously, she told her followers to, “pray for the Dead and fight like hell for the living.” She educated, agitated, and organized the dispossessed and showed America what it could be.
With the gap between the rich and poor growing wider by the day, the just and democratic society Mother Jones fought for is under attack. Her hour has come again. It is time that her story and the fierce struggles of working families are brought back to life.
Drawn from her autobiography, letters, speeches, and interviews, FIGHT LIKE HELL is as bold and forceful as Mother Jones herself. Adapted from Obie Award-winning Actress Kaiulani Lee’s one-woman play “Can’t Scare Me,” FIGHT LIKE HELL was written and performed by Lee and directed by Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Ian Cheney.
A Fine Line (2017)
A film by Joanna James
The documentary A Fine Line explores why less than 7% of head chefs and restaurant owners are women, when traditionally women have always held the central role in the kitchen.
Featuring candid interviews with world-renowned chefs including World’s Best Female Chef Dominique Crenn, Emmy Award-winning TV host Lidia Bastianich, two Michelin-starred chef April Bloomfield, Iron Chef Cat Cora, World’s Best Chef Daniel Humm and many more, A Fine Line grapples with themes sparking national conversations right now, including workplace harassment, equal pay, paid parental leave and career advancement.
56 min. | SDH Captions | Scene Selection
Company Town
When the last factory in a small Rust Belt town closes its doors, an unlikely hero emerges in dutiful, quiet Allery Parkes. A career employee of the factory, the aging Allery, can’t reconcile how to live a life simply sitting at home doing nothing. Against the advice and pleas of his loving wife Lola, he forms an unlikely friendship with his charismatic neighbor Walter, in order to revive the defunct factory. As their community rallies around them – and as their former corporate bosses strategize how to implode this unexpected movement – Allery learns that he might be something he never thought possible: a leader.
Film info: Drama | 109 min | Director: Robert Jury | Country: USA | Language: English | Subtitles: Swedish
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