Jennifer Reeder, film still from “A Million Miles Away”
LOS ANGELES — As a woman who was once a teenage girl, I have a certain fondness for any filmic or visual art that harkens back to that time of intense, unbridled feelings, awkward physical changes, and sexual desires running wild ’n free. Now that I am far from my adolescent days, I have more emotional tools for dealing with the world — but that teen girl is always with me, full of her witchy vibes, “psychic” moments, intense creativity, and gender-defying fantasies. It is with this fondness for the teen girl memory that I arrived at Redcat in downtown Los Angeles for a screening of writer and director Jennifer Reeder’s three films about adolescent girls, including her two more recent “Blood Below the Skin” and “A Million Miles Away,” and an older short, “Seven Songs About Thunder.”
“Blood Below the Skin” follows the intersecting lives of three teenage girls from different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds. Joni (Morgan S. Reesh) is a princess-like blonde-hair blue-eyed girl who is dating Clint (Luke Clohisy), the brother of Darby (Kelsey Ashby-Middleton), a high school student whose mother Jennifer (Jennifer Estlin) is mentally ill. Mom is too fed up to make Joni’s dress for the prom, so Darby does it. While they work on the dress, Joni and Darby discuss how far they’ve gone sexually with boys, egging each other on to see who is the “sluttiest.”
read the full story here: http://hyperallergic.com/278840/a-filmmaker-probes-the-magic-and-madness-of-female-adolescence/
