What Goddesses Watch

Irish LGBTQ+ film festival curator, audio journalist, artist, poet, DJ and actor Caoimhe Lavelle joins film critic Soma Ghosh to discuss Taste of Mango and All We Imagine As Light, two films set in India, Sri Lanka, and British Suburbia, about female friendship, sex, male violence and love.

Comedian, journalist and poet Suchandrika Chakrabarti joins Soma Ghosh to explore why we like seeing women in space and at the edge-of-the-world in film and TV. We're watching Rebecca 'Dune' Fergusson anad Harriet Walter in the new Season 2 of Apple TV's Silo, extraordinary Swedish film Aniara - with its tender, existential queer love story - and the maternal side of the Alien films. Catch Suchandrika's live comedy show here: https://www.pleasance.co.uk/event/suchandrika-chakrabarti-doomscrolling

Writer, TED talker and Professor, Pragya Agarwal joins Soma Ghosh to talk about the "beautiful, sublime, heart-rending" Ama Gloria by Marie Amouchekeli and Apple's Presumed Innocent, directed by Anne Sewitsky and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ruth Negga and Renate Reinsve. We discuss alternative mothering, the healing wisdom of a child's point of view and whether a female director can rescue the screen obsession with brutalising women.

Losing your daughter to ISIS or drink: this episode, film critic Soma Ghosh takes a closer look at the big ideas in Kaouther Ben Hania's Four Daughers and Emma Westenberg's Bleeding Love, starring Ewan McGregor and his daughter Clara. Let's think about destructive co-dependencies, the relationships between daughters and their mothers and fathers, and the truths families can't tell.

How Binonche is redefining the creative and sexual appetites of women over 40 in her roles today, including Pot Au Feu (The Taste of Things) and as Coco Chanel in The New Look.

Film critic Soma Ghosh probes a problmatic vein, in TV & film, of fake feminism that glamorises female trauma and MeToo abuses, while taking us through the Monia Chokri's zinging new comedy thriller, The Babysitter. Also touching on popular TV like The Undoing, The Morning Show and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Ghosh asks, "Is it OK to joke about MeToo?"

Avant garde historical author Nell Stevens joins film critic Soma Ghosh to discuss queerness, polyamory and watery bodies in Clio Barnard's handsome adaptation of period drama The Essex Serpent, starring Claire Danes, Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Squires.

Want emotional nuance and alternative film-making in your queer screen stories? Maybe even some moral ambiguity and irony? Soma Ghosh considers what kinds of stories and cinematography queer female audiences want. She reviews two new films from the BFI LGBTQ Flare festival, uplifting rock doc Sirens & the Argentinian, sympathetically moody teenage story Camilla Comes Out Tonight (available to stream on BFI Player).

As Sciamma's Petite Maman arrives for worldwide streaming on MUBI, on which it's also your last chance to stream a gem of feminist film history, The Heiresses, with Isabelle Huppert, critic Soma Ghosh discusses two films of female friendship. Both are set in rural isolation and tinged with Gothic mystery. This 'Strange Mothers' episode queries how we construct maternal instinct and the drive behind female bonding.

As a new season of her films shows at London's BFI Southbank, we take a look at Asta Neilsen, silent film star, starting with her first film in 1910. Bizarrely largely forgetten, she was so beloved that her picture was pinned up soldiers on both sides of WW1 and called simply 'die Asta' - the Asta - across the world. Soma Ghosh explains how her revelatory acting technique inspired Garbo and Apollinaire, pushed gender norms and redefined the sexuality of women on screen. Films discussed include The Abyss and Hamlet, in which Hamlet is a genderqueer prince assigned male sexuality at birth and in love with Horatio.