192. How do you tell a story about healing from shared trauma when the characters can't talk about it?
Seventh Row Podcast
A deep dive into Bretten Hannam's At the Place of Ghosts followed by an interview with Hannam. How do you tell a story about two siblings processing a shared childhood trauma when they can't talk about what happened? In this episode, Alex Heeney explores how At the Place of Ghosts uses horror elements to make trauma visible, to connect personal memory to larger histories, and to imagine healing through relationships with family, ancestors, and the land. Alex and Bretten discuss Indigenous storytelling traditions, genre as a translation tool, their visual language, sound design, and...
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191. Why great TV asks for more than a binge
Seventh Row Podcast
Why do some shows keep rewarding us years later? And is there a way to make those rewards come sooner — without having to get older or rewatch ad infinitum? In this episode, Alex introduces The Long Arc, a new 10-week experience built around the first season of HBO's Looking. She walks through what a typical week looks like, how the live sessions work, why each participant follows a different thread through the season, and how spending time with the same show—and the same group of people—changes the way you watch. The first season of The Long Arc begins June 30. 👉 You can reach Alex...
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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...
info_outlineJoachim 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 will be limited, so make sure you’re on the waitlist here.