DEEP DIVE: Women in Film Pt. 1 (Women Disrupting Power)

This is a “watch at home, discuss in-person” event, the first in a two-part series exploring how women have challenged power—on screen and behind the camera—through defiance, survival, and radical imagination.

For this discussion, we turn to three films where rebellion takes sharply different forms. In Double Indemnity, the femme fatale navigates the shadows of noir, using desire as a weapon within a man's world. Born in Flames catapults us into a post-revolutionary future where feminist collectives fight ongoing oppression through pirate radio and street-level resistance. And The Keeping Room reframes the Western as a brutal, intimate story of female survival during wartime. Taken together, these films offer a cross-section of cinematic defiance—where women don't just push back, they disrupt the structures that seek to contain them.

We will meet to discuss our thoughts on Tuesday, July 22, at Edgewater Public Market. We will be seated at a picnic table outside near the main entrance. Please try to watch all three before attending—but if you can only watch one or two, you are still welcome!

Here is the list of films with instructions on how to find them.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944, Billy Wilder)
Double Indemnity begins with a confession and spirals into one of cinema's most iconic acts of collusion and betrayal. A smooth-talking insurance agent is drawn into a murder plot by a housewife whose charm masks calculation, and whose desire for escape comes at a deadly cost. Billy Wilder's noir landmark simmers with tension and fatalism, but its real power lies in Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson—a femme fatale who seduces not just men, but the very structures meant to contain her. Beneath the hard-boiled surface, the film lays bare the gendered performance of power, where control is wielded through allure, and rebellion hides behind a smile.

• Rent on YouTube
• Rent on Prime Video

BORN IN FLAMES (1983, Lizzie Borden)
Ten years after a peaceful socialist revolution, the streets of New York are still restless. In Born in Flames, Lizzie Borden reimagines a fractured future where feminist resistance simmers beneath the promises of equality—and finally erupts. Told through a kaleidoscope of pirate radio broadcasts, street interviews, and guerrilla action, the film rejects traditional narrative to capture something more urgent: a movement. With its grainy realism and documentary edge, it exposes how power adapts to preserve itself, and how rebellion must constantly reinvent its voice. Here, disruption isn't a metaphor—it's a manifesto, where women seize the means not just of production, but of communication, protest, and political imagination.

• View on Criterion

THE KEEPING ROOM (2014, Daniel Barber)
As the Civil War draws to a close, three women—two sisters and a formerly enslaved woman—are left to defend their isolated Southern home against a pair of violent Union deserters. The Keeping Room strips the Western down to its brutal essentials, replacing frontier mythology with raw survival and simmering rage. What begins as a siege story becomes something more elemental: a reckoning with violence, vulnerability, and the roles women are forced to play in times of collapse. With quiet intensity and sudden brutality, the film reclaims a male-dominated genre as a space for female power—where endurance becomes resistance, and survival itself becomes a radical act.

• View on Kanopy
• View on Tubi
• Buy for $2.99 on Prime