Week 10/2026

Three consecutive days, three women directors, three simple and effective cinematic devices. In Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, the lives of three women intersect in small-town America. In Agnes Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, we follow the day of a young woman as she waits for her cancer test results. And in Payal Kapadia’s hybrid feature A Night of Knowing Nothing, letters connect the intimate life of lovers to the body politic.

Jacques Rancière points out that there’s a fourth character who complicates the triangle in Certain Women: the ranch hand called Jamie, played by Lily Gladstone. “In a way, I would say that she is really the character who stands out, because she is not simply a sociological character. Nor is she here to show loneliness or desperation. She is a character who is perfectly adapted to her routine but who, at a certain moment, deviates from her normal life.”

Also in Cléo de 5 à 7, the everyday is transformed into drama because of the film’s real-time structure. Adrian Martin describes the progression of Cléo’s day and the unfolding narrative: “Her journey may be simple and straightforward on the geographic level – into cabs, through parks, stopping off at cafés and studios – but on the emotional level, it gets deeper as it goes, accumulating reminders of mortality.”

Andrea Picard described A Night of Knowing Nothing as “a fever dream of impossible love tied to a broader reflection on contemporary India. Structured around letters from an unseen protagonist, L, directed to her estranged lover, K, Kapadia’s film is at once grand and contained, weaving fragments of a romance and moments of domestic life with handheld documentary footage captured around the country over several years.”