Film EventsWomen Director Series - The Trouble with AngelsThursday, September 24, 2026 at 7:30 PM
Certain Women is a 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
THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELS, (1966) Directed by Ida Lupino
Shedding her good-girl persona in her first non-Disney role, Hayley Mills stars as Mary Clancy, a cigarette smoking prankster goofing her way through Catholic school. She meets her match in the Mother Superior (Rosalind Russell), who is not one to suffer fools, meting out reasonable punishment with a sly grin.
The last film directed by Ida Lupino, The Trouble with Angels is a rare film portraying an almost exclusively female world in which friendship is tantamount, and mischievous girls are not seen as needing their spirits broken.
Preceded by:
THE SECRET STORY, (1996) Directed by Janie Geiser - 16mm
The Secret Story arose as a response to several beautifully decayed toy figures from the 1930's that were given to me as a gift. These figures, and other toys, objects, and illustrations that I found from the period between the world wars, suggested a kind of unearthed hidden narrative which I have attempted to re-piece together, as if these figures were the hieroglyphics of a just-forgotten tongue. The Secret Story revolves around the central figure of the woman, and her girl-double, who look somewhat like a versions of Snow White, but also reminded me of my mother. She wanders through landscapes of rivers and floods, home and war, and memory and illness, culminating in an ecstatic walk in the forest, suggesting both the dark and cathartic trajectories of the richest fairy tales. - Janie Geiser
&
THE DIVINE MIRACLE, (1973) Directed by Diana Krumins
"An intriguing composite of what looks like animation and pageant-like live action is THE DIVINE MIRACLE, which treads a delicate line between reverence and spoof as it briefly portrays the agony, death and ascension of Christ in the vividly colored and heavily outlined style of Catholic devotional postcards, while tiny angels (consisting only of heads and wings) circle like slow mosquitoes about the central figure. Ms. Krumins tells me that no animation is involved, that the entire action was filmed in a studio, and that Christ, the angels and the background were combined in the printing. She also says it took her two years to produce it." - Edgar Daniels, Filmmakers' Newsletter