Today's filmmaker for Female Filmmakers is a modern powerhouse. We are going to look at the stylish and daring Iranian-English-American director Ana Lily Amirpour.
Ana Lily Amirpour hails from Kent, England originally and works in America, but she is of Persian descent. Her family left Iran during the Iranian Revolution, so English was not spoken at home. She grew up in two worlds: an immigrant Middle Eastern home and the Western worlds of modern America and England. These clashes of cultures clearly influenced her and they come up again and again in her work.
Her feature film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is what she is best known for. She pitched it as "the first Iranian vampire spaghetti western" and I think that that's accurate. It debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014 and she based it on an award-winning short film that she made two years prior.
The plot follows a silent vampire who lurks the streets of her fictional Iranian town called Bad City by skateboarding and sucking the blood of pedestrians that she meets at night. When she's not doing that, she is listening to rock music alone in her apartment. Basically, she's very cool! She specifically starts sucking the blood of men who harass women at night, so she's sort of a vampire vigilante!
Iranian-American actress Sheila Vand plays the vampire and we are thrilled that she showed off her fun-sized fun bags in this black-and-white film. She also showed her breasts in 68 Kill as well as in We the Animals.
This movie is very stylish and cool, particularly in the way that we see the vampire as our hero. It's complicated because she kills people, but she kills people whom she believes are bad - yet even those bad people have families and friends who grieve them. We come face-to-face with that in the movie, realizing that she is also perpetuating violence in her attempt to stop it. It's a complex movie considering there is hardly any dialogue!
Her next film was 2016's The Bad Batch which is a dystopian love story set in a Texan community of cannibals. Are you interested? Absolutely! Suki Waterhouse stars and shows a good amount of cleavage and a slip of her butt crack.
She has two films that we are all waiting to be released, but the pandemic has delayed them. Cliffhanger and Please Give Me You are waiting in the wings to be released. I say Please Give Me These Movies!
She's worked quite a bit in television as well. She directed episodes of Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone as well as episodes of Legion and Castle Rock, using her slightly creepy visions to contribute to these genre TV shows.
Her films all have an eerie style and they mix cultural backgrounds and genres which is what makes them so interesting. Vampires in a hijab? Cannibal lovers in Texas? Sure! Her films have dissonance and that's where we walk away with complicated feelings about whatever it is she is trying to highlight. That's very exciting to me! She's certainly one of the deeper filmmakers working today and it's cool that she does so much with so little. I can't wait to see what she does next!
