BAM/PFA is proud to present a new series, Filmmakers and Critics, which brings top contemporary cinema directors onstage together with some of the nation's most interesting writers and academics. Our series debut showcases one of the brightest new voices in American cinema, Kelly Reichardt, whose films, such as Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and the upcoming Meek's Cutoff, have brought a new kind of social realism to American screens, and earned her praise as “an indispensable American filmmaker” (New York Times). Her films are not set in the prototypical Hollywood world of big cities and powerful circles, but rather the forgotten, slightly frayed corners of the “rest” of the United States, of shopping mall parking lots, dead-end train tracks, and one-story homes with peeling paint. Rich with an acute sense of American regions and landscape, moving from the rundown, sun-bleached beaches of rural Florida (River of Grass) to the gray, desperate towns of the Pacific Northwest (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy), her films spotlight the cinematically ignored, little-seen, but ever-growing American underclass, rootless individuals who have either been shut out of the American dream, or who just prefer to ignore it completely and seek out their own path. “There was a time when this kind of character would seem heroic,” Reichardt told Artforum, “but nowadays there doesn't seem to be too much support for any kind of truly alternative lifestyle.”
Joining Kelly Reichardt on stage will be the acclaimed writer and professor B. Ruby Rich, author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement and a key critic and cultural theorist since the mid-1970s. A longtime contributor to The Guardian (UK), sf360.org, Sight and Sound, and many other journals, she is Professor and Chair of the Community Studies Department and Social Documentation (SocDoc) Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.