
Jimmie Michaels
Self
A truly major work, I Don’t Know observes the relationship between a lesbian and a transgender person who prefers to be identified somewhere in between male and female, in an expression of personal ambiguity suggested by the film’s title. This nonfiction film – an unusual,…

Self
Self
Self
Self

Year after year, just after the monsoon season has finished, thousands of families travel to a bleak desert in Gujerat, India, where they will stay for an endless eight months and extract salt from the earth, using the same painstaking, manual techniques as generations before them. Director Farida Pacha spent a season with one of these families, observing the very particular rhythms of their lives.

Ruth, a housewife in a suburb of Jerusalem, divided into two parts, appears as pliable as Play-Doh. While she should be taking care of her ten-year-old daughter and the household, her routine is falling apart and she is falling further into depression. Israel is just before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967. The historical events echo in the lives of the characters only from a great distance. The female characters within the family wage a more important battle for their own identity. The director intentionally chose the parallel stories of three female protagonists: ten-year-old Michal who is just starting to acknowledge her sexuality, a single university student and Ruth, a trapped housewife.