Madeline’s Madeline

2018, 93 minutes, Digital
USA

Language: English

Director: Josephine Decker

Cast: Molly Parker, Miranda July, and Helena Howard

Distributor: Oscilloscope

Free screening! RSVP here.

Madeline (newcomer Helena Howard) has become an integral part of a prestigious physical theater troupe. When the workshop’s ambitious director (Molly Parker) pushes the teenager to weave her rich interior world and troubled history with her mother (Miranda July) into their collective art, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. The resulting battle between imagination and appropriation rips out of the rehearsal space and through all three women’s lives.

Writer/director Josephine Decker has long been an independent filmmaker to admire, utilizing a welcome expressionistic approach that imbues her subjects with a vibrant sense of urgency. Anchored by a virtuoso performance from newcomer Helena Howard, whose powerful screen presence commands attention, Decker’s film displays a rare sensitivity for capturing the messy struggles of discovering a sense of one’s self that defies easy narrative categorization.

Part of the series CONTEMPORARY WOMEN FILMMAKERS and MAKING CINEMA MATTER IN BALTIMORE.

Join director Josephine Decker for a FREE masterclass Sunday May 5, 10am-1pm, at the Parkway.

MAKING CINEMA MATTER IN BALTIMORE is a FREE artist-led workshop and screening series featuring distinguished visiting filmmakers who connect their films and filmmaking to social, creative, or cultural issues in Baltimore. This project is presented in partnership with Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Johns Hopkins University, Maryland Film Festival/Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway Theatre, and the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Josephine Decker

Josephine Decker is part of Time Warner's 150 incubator, Sundance Institute's New Frontier Lab, and one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. Decker was said to be ushering in a “new grammar of narrative” by The New Yorker. Her first two narrative features were listed #2 and #10 on The New Yorker’s Top Ten List of 2014 and played about a hundred festivals around the world. Decker helped to produce documentaries for A&E and Discovery before moving into indie film with her feature documentary BI THE WAY. Her third narrative feature, starring Molly Parker and Miranda July, had its World Premiere at Sundance 2018 and its International Premiere at the Berlinale Forum 2018. Interested in melding unconventional movement and narrative, she loves to teach and work through collaboration with existing communities. In her work, she has collaborated closely with the New York City Department of Sanitation, the East European Folklife Center, Pig Iron Theatre Company, the Center for Employment Opportunities, which supports men and women recently released from prison, and New York City after school programs.