On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome back an old friend: Writer-director Sophy Romvari, who first visited the show in 2018 and now returns to mark the theatrical release of her quietly devastating debut feature, Blue Heron, which has been enjoying an incredible run on the festival circuit, racking up prizes since its world premiere at Locarno last summer.

It’s a masterful picture, translating the ache of personal loss into universal drama, and I’m so glad it’s being embraced by critics and audiences … and, of course, it gives me an excuse to bring Sophy back onto the show, this time talking about Martha Coolidge’s Not a Pretty Picture, the 1975 hybrid documentary examining her teenage sexual assault that still plays like a hand grenade half a century later, with the director restaging her own trauma with a small group of actors — one of whom is an assault survivor herself — and keeping the camera rolling as they discuss their feelings about the work. It was unprecedented at the time … and really, it still is. But Not a Pretty Picture influenced generations of women to confront their own trauma, and Sophy has a lot to say about that. I’m so glad we got to do this.

Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you think about how rotten it is that we’re still talking about every single cultural issue Coolidge raised here.

And then you can get caught up on your Shiny Things! Last week I reviewed Criterion’s splendid 4K release of Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, and paid subscribers also got Friday’s What’s Worth Watching, an all-pals-all-the-time package featuring my reviews of Blue Heron, Chandler Levack‘s Mile End Kicks and BenDavid Grabinksi‘s Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. All good people, all good movies. That’s nice.

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