Lina Rodriguez

“Wanda, I mean obviously not just because it's about a woman trying to find her place, but also like I guess I'm always attracted to women who subvert their fate, but also wanderers. So Wanda will be in my yes pile for sure.”

“I mean I think Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven is such a magnetic, tragic, but also moving character to watch. Movies where women are struggling with their monstrous sides is something that I find really inspiring. So we have Wanda and Gene Tierney hanging out.”

“Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I mean not only the performances in this film, but just the visual grammar. Like I don't know that many people who have used reverse shot, like shot-reverse-shot, in a way that it's like, sure, it's spatial and maybe it's geographical, it's supposed to be about like this person is here, this person is here, but in the context of the desire and connection and bond between these two women, looking at how a woman looks at another woman and then coming back. So that the shot-reverse-shot in this, I was just so like, it really struck me. Like the women singing around the fire as like witches. I consider myself a witch, so I think the celebrating of witchery and women coming together to celebrate each other and to see each other and to desire each other, it's a yeah, it's a yes.”

“I mean I love all of Fassbinder's films and we have a bunch of them, but Eight Hours Don't Make a Day kind of like marks his melodrama, but it was like a soap opera and he has like this softness that is a little bit different from some of his other films. Yet it has this, I don't know, like critical and very awake perspective on German society as a whole. It's a tender film, but I think in like, in tenderness, actually in English that word tender means when you've been hurt. So when you go to a doctor someone says like, oh is that still tender? And that to me means kind of living in pain, which maybe sounds a little bit harsh, and I do feel like Eight Hours Don't Make a Day is a film that reminds us of the tenderness of like everyday life because it is about living, but it's also about accepting that we're living with this pain.”

“Oh, Flowers of Shanghai. That'll be, and I did see Exotica and I don't want to leave Atom Egoyan. I mean it's funny that I actually picked them together without meaning to, but just Hou Hsiao-hsien's just like the glow and the sort of like lingering, sort of like delirious camera work, but just like how he gets us close to these two characters and this sort of like impossible love.”

“And speaking of impossible love, just Atom's Exotica. I mean Atom is a filmmaker who both in his cinema, but in his personality, is someone who I find just really inspiring, and just I think the interest, his interest in damaged souls, something that I found really inspiring. This is a beautiful artwork for this.”

“Bo Widerberg's, I'm probably mispronouncing it, a Swedish filmmaker. The only film here that I've seen is Raven's End, and it's about this man who's trying to be a writer and he lives in a working-class setting. So I'm looking forward to the other films that he made because I think there is harshness, but a softness, like there's a sort of like a humanist approach and a way to look at things poetically, but also looking at things sort of straight up, like directly. So.”