189. Berlinale: a Sámi musical, a queer Black South African film, and an 1800s queer period drama
Release Date: 03/17/2026
194. Tender Loving Care: Mike Leigh’s wonderful film about what care can and can’t do
Seventh Row Podcast
Mike Leigh’s Tender Loving Care is a film about kind and empathetic people being kind and empathetic. And how rare is that? In this episode, Alex Heeney asks what tender loving care actually looks like in the film — between friends, family members, and social workers and the people they care for — and what that care can and can’t do. Alex digs into the scenes and filmmaking choices that illuminate those relationships, including the film’s use of domestic spaces, what Leigh keeps offscreen, Jacqueline Durran’s costumes, recurring scenes of singing, and the opening and closing shots...
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193. TIFF: Why Stuffed, the taxidermy romance starring Jodie Comer and Harry Melling, needed to be a musical
Seventh Row Podcast
What happens when a lonely taxidermist looking for her first human subject meets a lonely man willing to volunteer for the job? Apparently, you get a musical romance. In this episode, I’m talking about Theo Rhys’s Stuffed, starring Jodie Comer as taxidermist Araminta and Harry Melling as Bernie, which had its world premiere at TIFF. The songs themselves may not be particularly memorable, but Stuffed does something I’m always hoping a movie musical will do: it actually has a reason to be a musical. I dig into how the film uses song to connect Araminta and Bernie before they’ve even met,...
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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
info_outlineSome 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 women’s lives — from colonial land politics to the legacy of apartheid to the class and racial hierarchies of the 19th century.
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I only open a few a year, and they're limited enrollment, so this is the best way to ensure you get first dibs on a spot.