Rebecca Miller

“Oh, Devi is by Satyajit Ray, is just so beautiful. It's one of the greatest films I've ever seen, I will tell you. It's about the wife of a of a man who kind of becomes like a goddess and it becomes it destroys her life, but it's also, but it kind of puts you into a trance almost. It's like really one of the most powerful cinematic experiences I've ever had, and she's just incredible in it. Yeah.”

“So, The Color of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov is just like a unabashedly poetic film that's ethnography, cinema, poetry, painterly, surreal, but rooted, really rooted I think in Armenian culture. Beautiful historical film, like not historical film in the sense of being accurate maybe historically, it's mythic. It's a mythic film. And I remember seeing it when I was on tour with a with The Cherry Orchard in Soviet, what was then Soviet Georgia, and just being just being astonished by it. This was in 1986 or something. Anyway, beautiful film.”

“A Short Film About Killing, I don't know how to describe it exactly, but it puts you into the occasion of sin along with the person in the movie. It's like a pure film, but very disturbing. There are two films, the two most disturbing, it's one of the more disturbing films I've seen, A Short Film About Killing and Salo, which I was, and by Pasolini, and then the other one was Repulsion, which I couldn't talk for like 24 hours after I saw them in college.”

“Also, you know what's also great, who made most wonderful movies of that kind was Miloš Forman. Loves of a Blonde by Miloš Forman is an absolutely wonderful, wonderful movie. Tonally it's just so wonderfully free and specific, and very much about a female character, which I loved, and it's really about romance, you know, and it's classic New Wave cinema as well, but there is something about the Middle European slightly depressive humor that I just find so appealing. It's like you can just feel the sadness in the humor.”

“So, Children of Paradise by Marcel Carné, Les Enfants du Paradis, oh my god, this is I think maybe my favorite movie ever. It's poetic realism as it, but it's also so deeply human, and the woman, Arletty, who play who plays the sort of, who's loved by several different men, is such a wonderfully sad, knowing, wise, sexy, liberated creature. And yet you completely believe that you're in 18th century France, which is really hard to do. I mean, I and I feel like unlike most period films, it doesn't come with its own time. I mean, like you really feel like you, somehow they managed to transport you into the into the period. And it's like funny and sort of wistful, and also the crowd scenes are incredible. The beautifully, beautifully orchestrated crowd scenes, and costumes, and the textures, and the patina of all of the design is really extraordinary. There's something about that that I find very compelling. But the character of the mime is so wonderful, and it's a sort of, it's almost also a philosophy of life in this film, you know, a kind of forgiving.”