177. 45 Years (dir. Andrew Haigh) with Lindsay Pugh (10th anniversary)
Release Date: 06/27/2025
190. Oslo, August 31st: Beginning and Ending (Deep Focus preview)
Seventh Row Podcast
Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31st starts with a sequence that doesn't advance the plot — and yet shifts how you watch the entire film — and ends with a sequence with almost no dialogue but a lot happens. They're sequences I've returned to again and again over 14 years to figure out how they work — and keep discovering something new that shifts how I see the film. In this episode, Joachim Trier talks about the problem the opening was trying to solve, Eskil Vogt talks about the challenges of writing the ending, and I talk about the pleasures of digging into them. This month, I'll be...
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189. Berlinale: a Sámi musical, a queer Black South African film, and an 1800s queer period drama
Seventh Row Podcast
Some of the best, most boundary-pushing cinema at the Berlinale is quietly tucked away in the sidebars where most of the press never look. In today's episode, I’m looking at three films that feel like a step forward for women’s stories: Arrú: A Sámi musical from Norway Black Burns Fast: A queer South African coming-of-age story directed by a Black woman The Education of Jane Cumming: A Scottish period drama based on the first documented legal case involving accusations of lesbians in the UK Taken together, these show how filmmakers are finding new ways to dramatize the systems shaping...
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188. My Berlinale talk: Why the first conversation about a film shouldn't be the last
Seventh Row Podcast
This episode was originally recorded for a panel at the Berlinale Film Festival called . I was invited to speak about the online film programs I've been building for thinking and talking about film — where we don't just share opinions about a film and move on. Instead, we're looking for something new: what does this film offer that I didn't notice the first time? Because you don't need to wait for a major life change to see a film differently. Sometimes, all you need is a new question, a new lens, or the chance to look again with other curious people. In this episode, I walk through some of...
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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...
info_outlineTen years on, 45 Years hasn’t lost an ounce of its emotional weight. In fact, it might just cut deeper.
On this episode, host and Seventh Row Editor-in-Chief Alex Heeney is joined by Lindsay Pugh (Woman in Revolt) to revisit Andrew Haigh’s masterpiece about a childless couple celebrating their 45 the wedding anniversary in the same week that a traumatic secret from the past comes to light.
We talk about:
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What makes this story hit differently as we have aged
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Why the film’s focus on emotional repression, delayed gratification, and public performance feels so radical
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How Haigh’s queer lens shapes his portrayal of a straight relationship
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What gets added (and deepened) in the move from short story to screenplay
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Why Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay deliver two of the most nuanced, unforgettable performances of the century
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How Haigh’s blocking — the way actors move through space and interact physically — works hand-in-hand with the dialogue to show us what’s shifting beneath the surface, like tension, avoidance, closeness, or control
Whether you’re watching for the first time or the fifteenth, 45 Years is a film that evolves with you — and we unpack why.
Links Mentioned:
🎟️ Reel Ruminators: http://seventh-row.com/reelruminators
🎥 Guide to One of the Best Films of 2024: seventh-row.com/guide
🪩 Find Lindsay Pugh at Woman in Revolt
📚 Book on Andrew Haigh's film Lean on Pete
💡Read Alex's interview with Andrew Haigh (2021) – audio excerpted in the episode
🎧 Andrew Haigh films/TV on the Seventh Row Podcast
Referenced Episodes:
Ep 155 Halina Reijn's Babygirl with Lindsay Pugh
Ep. 163 Joan Micklin Silver's Chilly Scenes of Winter and Crossing Delancey feat. Lindsay Pugh
Ep. 117 The North Water (dir. Andrew Haigh)
Ep. 110 Weekend (dir. Andrew Haigh) and End of the Century: Brief Encounters
Ep. 94 HBO's Looking
Ep. 7 Andrew Haigh's Lean on Pete