Hello, my name's Justin the Cluitt, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club. And today, we're going to be talking about

Joan Micklin Silver. Well, she is a pioneering female filmmaker, a highly important

independent filmmaker. And she's probably best known to lay

moviegoers as the director of a little movie called Crossing Delancey. Why do I know the name of that

movie? Like, it wasn't a mega hit, was it? No, and I don't know, whenever I'm in New York and I'm on

Delancey Street, every single time I think of Crossing Delancey. And I don't know how that,

that knowledge penetrated my skull, but, but there it is. There's got to be like a sitcom or

something like that that made a joke about it. And that's why every one of our generation remembers

it so vividly. Anyway, Joan Micklin-Silver passed away on New Year's Eve, in fact, at the age of 85.

And I didn't really know her work.

I don't think Justin did either all that well, although I know from her passing that she

meant a lot to a lot of people.

So we wanted to do a bit of a deep dive into her work. And I got to tell you, Justin, just before we lead off, this is an example of one of those episodes that's hard for me.

Really? I don't think it's hard at all for me.

Well, I'll tell you why. Because first of all, I went into this week knowing nothing about Joan Mickland-Silver.

So I don't have any relationship with her work.

Wait, I should point out, oh, wait, we're doing a women filmmaker. All right, we gotta start the episode by saying that it's gonna be hard for us. I've seen four for movies now. I think they're probably the four most popular ones. I liked them all. I still don't feel a strong affinity with the work. And a lot of that, I think, comes from just not having lived with

it for very long. So, you know, the challenge of an episode like this is, like, you kind of have

to get yourself into the headspace of someone who does have a strong affinity with the work

to understand it more. But, you know, invariably, when we talk about these filmmakers,

I always leave with a greater appreciation of them.

...