movie program one

Eve (Gabriela Cartol) is the chambermaid of the 16th floor of the luxurious Hotel Presidente in Mexico City. The job requires her to be deferential to guests and to take on endless shifts of folding laundry, scrubbing toilets, and hoovering floors. Although Eve’s working life is contained within the hotel’s hallways, she is resilient, quietly testing the limits of her assigned role. She powers through the daily tasks and ventures into ambiguous relations with colleagues, determined to iron out problems.

Introverted teen Iona and her eccentric misfit mum Lyn move to a working class suburban town, hoping for a fresh start. While Iona struggles to fit in with a cadre of high school mean girls, Lyn is bullied by the town's surly adults. As the abuse escalates, mother and daughter are torn between fantasies of escape, and feeble attempts to confront their tormentors. British writer-director Deborah Haywood's cracked coming-of-age fable is surely one of the most disturbing films ever made about adolescence. Pin Cushion is a dark fairy tale, spiked with moments of grace and grotesquerie.

17-year-old Milla and her boyfriend Leo live on the margins of French society in a small seaside town. They squat in abandoned buildings, playing house with a handful of scavenged belongings. Through a series of unexpected events, this simple arrangement is disrupted and transformed. Valérie Massadian's moving observational drama traces Milla's journey from dislocation to domesticity, finding poetry in the mundane moments of everyday life.