MVFF44 (Bronze/Silver)

“Not take a look, there’s no tears in her eyes. Like a bird, you know she would fly.” These wonderfully diverse stories from female filmmakers demonstrate how certain impulses—to grow, change, want—are indeed universal. A young woman finds her agency slipping away when it comes to an arranged marriage in Suzannah Mirghani’s beautiful Al-Sit (Sudan/Qatar 2020, 20 min). Internal anxiety about creating a family forces a woman to question her own personal history in Ashley Paige Brim’s The Goldfish (US 2021, 17 min). A meditation on her daughter and the elusiveness of memory grounds Lynne Sachs’s lovely Maya at 24 (US 2021, 4 min). Holiday tensions between father and daughter loom over efforts to reconcile the past in Suzanne Lenz and Tom Bean's Christmas Eve Eve or: The Things I Can’t Remember (US 2020, 14 min). And an ad hoc therapy “session” allows a teenage girl to process a host of epiphanies about herself and her high school in C. Fraser Press’s enchanting Too Many Buddhas (US 2021, 14 min). Perceptive, beautiful, and engaging stories that you won’t want to miss.