Film EventsWomen Director Series - Certain WomenThursday, May 28, 2026 at 7:30 PM
Certain Women is a new film series at the Orinda Theater highlighting women directors, with shorts to precede each feature!
Selected and Introduced by your local programmers/projectionists...
Linda Izcali Scobie & Chloe Ginnever!
This month’s feature selection is the film from which we titled the series after…
CERTAIN WOMEN, (2016) Directed by Kelly Reichardt
The expanses of the American West take center stage in this intimately observed triptych from Kelly Reichardt. Adapted from three short stories by Maile Meloy and unfolding in self-contained but interlocking episodes, Certain Women navigates the subtle shifts in personal desire and social expectation that unsettle the circumscribed lives of its characters: a lawyer (Laura Dern) forced to subdue a troubled client; a wife and mother (Michelle Williams) whose plans to construct her dream home reveal fissures in her marriage; and a night-school teacher (Kristen Stewart) who forms a tenuous bond with a lonely ranch hand (Lily Gladstone), whose longing for connection delivers an unexpected jolt of emotional immediacy. With unassuming craft, Reichardt captures the rhythms of daily life in small-town Montana through these fine-grained portraits of women trapped within the landscape’s wide-open spaces.
Preceded by:
CLAY, (2008) Directed by Naomi Uman - 16mm
This film explores the idea of the consistency of land use over time. In the exact location of where the filmmaker is living and realizing this project, trypillian people lived over 5,000 year ago. A modern day, post soviet brick factory in the village uses the exact same process to make bricks that the trypillian people used to make pots.Through this same process, and the unexplained burning of the trypillian homes, we have fired clay remnants of their presence in this village in very large numbers. A renowned local archeologist talks about these people and their relationship to land, clay and black gold.
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BLUE DIARY, (1997) Directed by Jenni Olson
Through voiceover and static San Francisco landscapes, this classic 1997 short tells the melancholy story of a butch dyke pining over a one night stand with a straight girl. As the initial foray into 16mm urban landscape filmmaking by writer-director Jenni Olson, Blue Diary, establishes many of the themes that Olson would go on to explore further in her subsequent 16mm features, The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015).