Lady Film Directors

There are so few ladies directing feature films that I feel an obligation to watch in homage to my sister’s future career as a filmmaker.  Of late, there have been Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, Kathyrn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, and now it seems Jane Campion has a wonderful film to be released in mid-September (the 18th, I believe) called Bright Star which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

BRIGHT STAR, WOULD I WERE STEDFAST

By John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon in death.

1819

(courtesy of http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/BrightStar.html)

Click here for an interview with the director, Jane Campion was on WNYC’S Leonard Lopate show on September 15, 2009.

Tags: Across the Universe, Bright Star, Cannes Film Festival, feminism, Jane Campion, Julie Taymor, Kathyrn Bigelow, Leonard Leopate, The Hurt Locker, WNYC, women, Women Directors