Madeline's Madeline

Director: Josephine Decker

2018 / 93min / DCP

Helena Howard, in her first film role, is captivating as Madeline, a young member of a theater troupe whose director (Molly Howard) urges Madeline to bring aspects of her private inner life—as well as her rocky history with her mother (Miranda July)—into the group’s communal process. Created in an experimental and collaborative style that mirrors that of the troupe in the film, Decker’s film fairly pulses with the thrill of liberated filmmaking. “A seductive, disturbing, exasperating movie… Conventional distinctions don’t necessarily apply. Between fantasy and reality, certainly, but also between authenticity and artifice, theater and therapy, art and life.”—The New York Times