Why Film Festivals Matter: A Focus on Women at the Middleburg Film Festival

Alexandria, VA – This year, 2024, may be known as the Year of the Woman, at least for film lovers, if not in its entirety. What is more exemplary than a film festival founded and hosted by stellar businesswoman Sheila Johnson, who has opened her expansive tony resort to celebrate the film arts for four days every October since 2013?

Middleburg Film Festival (MFF) Executive Director Susan Koch is a veteran award-winning filmmaker who has spearheaded curatorial excellence, making Middleburg a premier cinematic showcase destination. Film festivals have become established meccas for independent and studio-backed filmmakers, sparking Oscar buzz among their projects and meeting festival nomination qualifications.

Since its founding, the MFF has been a prestigious venue for filmmakers vying for the Golden Statuette. Thus far, 104 films have been screened at Middleburg that have garnered 346 Oscar nominations, with 38 earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. 2024 will be no exception, with a slew of probable contenders for multiple nominations come awards season.

In feature and documentary filmmaking, Netflix recognized the impactful narrative of the feminine. It offered four provocative HERstories to the festival. The Piano Lesson is the film adaptation of the August Wilson play that was last staged on Broadway in 2022 by Samuel L. Jackson’s wife, LaTanya Richardson Jackson. Sam Jackson costars with some of the recent Broadway cast: John David Washington, Ray Fisher, and Michael Potts. Danielle Deadwyler plays the pivotal role of Berniece. The film adaptation is an eloquent transformation that retells the Tony Award-winning stage version based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama.

Full of stirring African American cultural archetypes and transitive West African diasporal motifs, the cinematic narrative exceeds the limitations of the two-story Broadway set production. Both the production and the storyline are a family affair, directed and written by Malcolm Washington in his feature debut and produced by his father, Denzel. Danielle Deadwyler was presented with the Breakthrough Actor Award at the MFF for her impeccable performance as Berniece Charles, sister to combative and impetuous John David Washington’s Boy Willie, who is determined to sell the family legacy – the piano.

Two Netflix films scoring Oscar buzz this year of the woman are Emilia Pérez and Maria. The Spanish-language Emilia Pérez, directed by Jacques Audiard and scored by composer/songwriters Clément Ducol and Camille Galmais, who received the MFF Music for Film Award, won the Jury Prize and the female ensemble Best Actress award at Cannes. The film was received with sustained, enthusiastic applause in a standing ovation second to only Kevin Costner’s Horizon in duration.

Zoe Saldaña received the Spotlight Actor Award and was hailed for her performance as Rita Moro Castro. Saldaña is the only actor in history who has starred in three all-time top-grossing films (Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Avengers: Endgame) and four films reaching the two-billion-dollar hallmark. But a dynamo new presence stars alongside Saldaña – major kudos for Karla Sofia Gascón’s trans-Mexican drug lord Emilia and Selena Gomez as her dejected wife Jessi and Adriana Paz as Emilia’s lover.

In Maria, Angelina Jolie’s mind-blowing, transformative personification of the quintessential opera diva Maria Callas – La Callas- struggling to mismanage her drug-dependent declining years in Paris with mixed moments of clarity and delusion, dignity and disgrace, is the performance of a lifetime and the year. Cinematographer Ed Lachlan, who received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Cinematography at the MFF (and who studied painting in college), filmed a masterpiece with expressive brushstrokes of sumptuous color and voluptuous excess, shrouding Jolie and Callas in waning illumination – a love sonnet of corporal light and shadow.

Be sure to catch R.J. Cutler’s incisive yet somehow plaintive portrait of a woman scorned, Netflix’s Martha – the unabashed documentary about the OG branding queen Martha Stewart. Cutler, known for getting his subjects to dish, divulged to Variety’s Maureen Orth the joy of cooking – and filming-  with Martha. The film is a shockingly intimate and compassionate reveal of a living legend. Cutler also did the recent documentary Elton John: Never Too Late and his personal fave, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry.

Don’t miss Conclave already out in theaters. The narrative story detailing the many Machiavellian machinations involved in the process of voting in the next Pope may well be the picture of the year. Its all-star leads, Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow and an almost all-male cast (save the illuminating performance by Isabella Rossellini as Sister Agnes) proves to be as powerful as the Vatican itself. Rossellini accepted the Agnès Varda Trailblazing Film Artist Award at the MFF, participating in a post-Conclave Q & A with Director Edward Berger.

The distinct advantage of film festivaling is the attraction of new audiences in an intimate but communally shared experience. Q&As with actors, directors, editors, composers, cinematographers, critics and a variety of panelists expose the audience to the seminal process of the film arts. Filmmakers benefit from exchanging ideas and emotions with the audiences that can be best achieved through the film festival-going theatrical experience.

Diversity, inclusion, and representation have always prevailed at the Middleburg Film Festival. This year’s Women in Film Luncheon was held at the Salamander Resort outside Harriman’s restaurant on a spectacular mid-October Friday afternoon. Sandhya Suri, director and screenwriter for Santosh, the story of a desperate young widow who inherits her husband’s position as a police officer in the badlands of India, attended with her young daughter. Suri’s compelling drama about the desolation of the human condition and India’s inherent social immobility is gathering Oscar momentum as she travels from festivals in the Hamptons to Telluride to Middleburg.

Celebrating female filmmakers and actors has proved to be the spotlight of the 2024 MFF. From Saoirse Ronan in Blitz to Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch, starring Academy Award nominee Amy Adams, to Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl featuring the erstwhile Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson, along with 2023 Oscar Best Supporting Actress winner and scream-queen, scene-stealing Jamie Lee Curtis—at the 2024 Middleburg Film Festival, women get the job done!

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