Partners in Crime 

Welcome to a special episode of the Incluvie Movie Highlights. This summer we held the Incluvie Short Film Festival. The film festival discovers and brings to light some outstanding short films starring main characters from diverse backgrounds, who are often overlooked in Hollywood. The filmmakers and actors from the 3 winning films came in and talked about their process and what it was like to make the film.

If you mix religious rituals with dark mythology, the result will be effective, and the story powerful in 90% of the cases. That is exactly what happens at the beginning of The Vigil.

Kat Wahlen’s The Whiteboard tells, or rather shows, a delightful love story between two young women who meet in detention.

I write for a diversity-focused film review blog, so I’ll be honest: I really wanted to like Pretty Lethal. Starring Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Avantika, and Millicent Simmonds, Amazon Prime’s new thriller seemed like it would be a girl power movie about dancers with a horror action twist. Sort of a Suspiria for teens. But with shallow and unlikeable characters, a confusing plot, an overreliance on violence, and cringey dialogue, any fun the movie started out with was quickly lost. What was left was a faint echo of greater horror movies about dancers made before. 

The venn diagram of pop feminism and white-centered feminism is a circle. Acknowledging that is not a crime nor a diminishing of 'Barbie', Director Gerwig, or feminism in general.

In Saudi Arabia, a little girl (Wadjda) is told she can't have a bike because she's a girl. Wadjda struggles to obtain a bicycle to race her friend, Abdullah, due to the gender inequality and cultural norms of Saudi Arabia.