Woman

Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Anastasia Mikova interviewed two thousand women across fifty countries and compressed it into one film. The form is strict: faces against black, fixed frames, speaking straight to camera. Subjects run from menstruation and forced marriage to childbirth, rape, work and old age, and they are ordered by theme rather than by country, so a sentence from India lands next to one from the United States and both describe the same thing. That editing is the film's strength and its ceiling, since it makes the shared experience visible while erasing the context around it. It previewed at Venice in September 2019 and opened in cinemas on 4 March 2020, days before everything closed. Who it is for: viewers who like testimony-driven documentaries with no narrator. Who it is not for: anyone who wants data, history and analysis.