171. Cannes 2025: Navigating the festival beyond the Competition
Release Date: 05/13/2025
187. Sound of Falling + Interview with Mascha Schilinski
Seventh Row Podcast
Sound of Falling, the second feature by German writer-director Mascha Schilinski, follows women across four generations of the same farming family. Gothic and ambitious, it explores memory, intergenrational trauma, and what it's like to live inside a woman's body — while still showing moments of joy and connection. Through its form, the film offers the audience a catharsis that the characters don't have access to. So on today’s episode, host Alex Heeney digs into why the film won her over…and then talks to Schilinski about developing the film's Schilinski talks about how the film...
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186. Heated Rivalry: the queer Canadian hockey romance taking the internet by storm
Seventh Row Podcast
The best directed TV show of 2025 is a queer hockey romance from Canada called Heated Rivalry. And like the rest of the internet, host Alex Heeney has become quite a fan. But she's been thinking a lot about what makes it good and what has made it popular, and how those two things definitely intersect, but the Venn diagram isn’t just a circle. So on today’s episode, Alex talks about why she, too, was very excited for the cottage, why the show is hitting in this cultural moment, what still felt lacking — and how all of that sent her to rewatch Looking, a very different kind of...
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185. Chloé Zhao's Hamnet with Angelo Muredda
Seventh Row Podcast
Early screenings of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet had critics weeping in the aisles Host Alex Heeney left it dry-eyed — and so did her guest, Angelo Muredda. We’re Shakespeare fans, long-time film critics, and not exactly immune to a good cry — so in this episode, we try to figure out why the film didn’t land. We dig into what works in the film (a short list) and what doesn’t (a longer one), where the adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel went awry, and whether having read a synopsis of Hamlet on Wikipedia might actually impede your enjoyment of the film. 👉 Related Episodes
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184. What Happens When You Apply ‘Yes, And’ to Film Discussions
Seventh Row Podcast
What if the most powerful insights about a film don’t come from watching it alone — but from talking it through with curious people who notice what you missed, and help you turn half-formed thoughts into something deeper? In this episode, I share why I built The Long Take — A space for deep, layered, perspective-shifting conversations about film — and how a spirit of collaboration, attention, and trust can transform how we see movies…and ourselves We kick off Nov 2 with a zero-prep welcome session. 👉
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183. The Choral (TIFF 2025) with Ralph Fiennes: When queer characters don't make a queer film
Seventh Row Podcast
How can a film with a queer protagonist, written by a queer playwright, and directed by a queer man… not be a queer film? That’s the tricky question I'm tackling with The Choral, the WWI period drama that just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). In this episode: my Ralph Fiennes/Nicholas Hytner fangirling, why the film works as a crowd-pleaser but flattens queerness and other marginalized identities, and the bigger questions it raises about reclaiming — or sanitizing — queer history. 🎟 Plus, a sneak peek at Living Out Loud, my FREE three-day summit on queer...
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182. Couture (with Angelina Jolie) and Alice Winocour's traumatized bodies (TIFF 2025)
Seventh Row Podcast
Alice Winocour's Couture is a backstage film about the fashion world — less about the clothes than the bodies who wear them, shape them, and photograph them. It's a film about the ways that commerce and fashion (and medicine) shape and damage women's bodies. As a Winocour fan and researcher since 2015, Alex Heeney connects Couture to Winocour's explorations of traumatized bodies, outsiders, and backstage stories throughout her body of work. 🎟 If you want to explore a film together in conversation — not just listen in — join me for Living Out Loud, my free Queer and...
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181. Between Dreams and Hope and queer survival (TIFF 2025)
Seventh Row Podcast
At TIFF, Alex dives into Iranian filmmaker Farnoosh Samadi's Between Dreams and Hope, a powerful film about a trans man in Iran navigating the dehumanizing maze of gender-affirming care — and connects it to two others, from Canada and France, that reveal how patriarchy, money, and bureaucracy shape queer and trans survival. These aren’t straight reviews so much as reflections on how films spark curiosity, uncover hidden systems, and resist erasure. ✨ Don’t miss it! This October, join me for Living Out Loud — a FREE three-day live online summit all about queer and trans stories and...
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180. Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value (TIFF 2025)
Seventh Row Podcast
Joachim Trier’s new film, Sentimental Value, is already a buzzy hit. Alex Heeney has been thinking and writing about Trier’s films for more than a decade, and this one sharpened her sense of what she values in his work. In this episode out of TIFF, she look at the film's portrait of a complicated family and the role of the family home in telling that story. ✨If you enjoyed the episode, The Deep Focus: Oslo, August 31st is where you can explore the opening of Oslo, August 31st, trace its echoes through that film, and then see how Trier evolves those ideas in Sentimental Value. 👉Spots...
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179. What if we told stories about women beyond their love lives?
Seventh Row Podcast
What happens when a story that once felt modern… suddenly doesn’t? And what does that tell us about the limits — and possibilities — of the stories we tell about women? In this solo episode, Seventh Row Editor-in-Chief Alex Heeney tracks a shift in perspective — hers, and maybe yours too. 📍 How a 2021 film reopened an old question 📍 Why Far from the Madding Crowd (2015) once felt strikingly modern — and what I see in it now 📍 And what this tells us about how our expectations for stories about women have changed — fast Along the way, I dig into: How the marriage plot...
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178. What happened when Hazel trusted my film curation
Seventh Row Podcast
What happens when you watch a film — not just to be entertained — but to reflect, notice, and share? In this episode, Alex Heeney (curator of Reel Ruminators) sits down with Hazel Shaw, a UK member of the community, to uncover what really makes this unique movie-of-the-month space so rewarding — and how it sparks discoveries you might not expect. Together, they talk about: What happens when you watch films that aren't suggested by an algorithm Why gathering with film lovers from around the world can change the way you see a film Why some of the most surprising film conversations...
info_outlineThe 2025 Cannes Film Festival kicks off today...and the question on everyone's mind is: what will be the great movies?
Mostly, people look to the Cannes Competition (the films that compete for the Palme d'Or) to find the best films. But it's a lesser-known fact that many amazing films screen in the festival's sidebars.
And many of the best films in cinema history have screened in the festival's sidebars. In fact, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, which was named the greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll did not screen in competition! It screened in the Directors' Fortnight.
So on today's episode, Alex peels back the curtain on how all the different parts of the Cannes Film Festival work together. And she talks about the amazing films you've heard of (and some you probably haven't) that have screened outside the festival's competition. And she talks about some of the films she's excited for this year.
Finally, Alex talks about some of the films she's excited for in this year's competition, and how they were already making fantastic films years ago that were hiding out in the festival's sidebars.
- Become a Seventh Row Insider to stay updated on the best films at Cannes this year and in past years that you might not otherwise stumble upon
- Interested in picking up Seventh Row's ebooks on Lynne Ramsay, Joachim Trier, Joanna Hogg, Debra Granik, or Céline Sciamma? They're available exclusively on Seventh Row. Peruse our ebooks here
- Listen to the Women at Cannes Podcast Season
- Listen to the Women at Cannes episode on Kelly Reichardt