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Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold – nf

Joan Didion is an accomplished writer who for the past 50 years has written novels, essays and screenplays including many pieces for Vogue and Vanity Fair Magazine. She has lived and written about the literary scene in New York in the 1950s and ‘60s as well as about her home State of California in the 1980s and 1990s. She has partied with Janis Joplin and has hung out with Jim Morrison.

This documentary film is made by Ms Didion’s nephew, Griffin Dunne, who is a well-known actor, director and producer. It is co-produced by his wife Anna Dunne and Mary Recine. The film was narrated by a somewhat frail elderly Ms. Didion who seems as sharp as ever. It begins when she must have been a toddler and her mother gave her a book and a pencil and told her to record her thoughts and feelings. She still has that book and of course has filled that book and many others. There are wonderful film clips and photos from past decades which reflect the times as well as the personal remembrances of Ms. Didion. This includes images and the words of her husband, John Gregory Dunne who was also a writer. During their long marriage, which included one dearly beloved daughter whom they adopted shortly after her birth, they always would read and edit each other’s writings even if they didn’t fully agree about everything.

We were captured by this review of this woman’s life and also how it reflected her perspective through Ms. Didion’s words and thoughts along with images of the time. (2019)

 Screened at 2018 San Francisco Film Festival

Unknown opening date in USA

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Scary Mother

This foreign film made in Estonia with subtitles of course, follows Manana(Nato Murvanidze), a married mother with three children who has just written a novel. The book, while purported to be fiction, examines her unflattering feelings about her husband(Dimitri Tatishvili) and children as well as her extreme sexual fantasies. She goes on to develop a dependent relationship with a local stationery store owner who essentially tries to be her book agent and major supporter of her writing. The story becomes more bizarre as we meet her father who has taken on the role of a translator for the book. The book she is writing and her own life become more complicated and entwined as does the film. First time director Anna Urushadze has taken on a very difficult and complicated story, which draws in the viewer but may be too much to digest (2018).