Strong women

The Sisters Quilt Show brings thousands of women to town. I thought they’d appreciate films about strong women.

These are not “fun” films. They tell the stories of women around the world who keep their families fed and clothed despite miserable conditions.

Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun, the first successful Broadway play ever written by a black woman. Raisin was nominated for the 1960 Best Play Tony award. Hansberry, the director (Daniel Petrie) and actors (Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil) in the 1961 movie version were nominated for various awards. The play was remade as a technically-acclaimed TV series in 1989.

Raisin is about a black woman, Lena, who lives in crowded housing on the impoverished south side of Chicago with daughter Beneatha, son Walter, his wife Ruth, and their son Travis. Lena’s husband has just died after a lifetime of hard work. Lena gets $10,000 in insurance, a huge sum in 1959.

The dilemma is what to do with the money.

Beneatha wants to go to medical school. Ruth is pregnant and there is no room for a new child. Walter wants to quit his chauffeur job, buy a liquor store with two pals, attain middle-class status and give his son a new life.

Lena wants to fulfill the dream she and her husband had to buy a house with a garden.

Walter says that all women care about is how people want their eggs cooked. He wants to make money, which for him represents dignity and respect.

A sub-plot involves future neighbors trying to pay the black family not to move into a white neighborhood. Hansberry’s father won a 1940 court case when his family was restricted from a white neighborhood.

Under the Skin of the City (Zir-e post-e shahr, 2001), written and directed by female Iranian director Rakhshan Bani Etemad, illustrates the universality of Raisin’s main theme.

In Skin a woman with a disabled husband supports her family of two sons and two daughters by working in a factory. The movie portrays working-class life in contemporary Iran, especially that of women, who are mentally and physically abused.

The central conflict in Skin, as in Raisin, is between the mother, Tuba (Golab Adineh) and her eldest son, Abbas (Mohammad Reza Forutan). He wants to sell the family’s house, their only source of stability, so he can go to Japan and earn more money.

Perhaps the most arresting aspect of Skin is how similar the Iranians’ circumstances are to contemporary working-class life in the U.S.

The Harlan County War is a made-for-TV fictionalized account of a real event explained by Barbara Kopple in her 1976 Oscar-winning documentary, Harlan County, U.S.A. In 1973 Kentucky coal miners confronted the Eastover Mining Company. The United Mine Workers of America supported a protracted, increasingly violent strike that involved not only the miners but also their wives.

The fictionalized version won several awards and Holly Hunter, for her performance as Ruby Kincaid, was nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

Ruby leads the miners’ wives on the picket line when a court ruling says only three miners at a time can man the line. This backwoods woman, who has never been anywhere, becomes nationally known as a result of TV coverage and her New York appearance at a company board meeting.

Ruby’s husband, Silas (Ted Levine), is discouraged by the strike, wants to give up, and is both amazed and disgruntled by his wife’s strength.

In another movie based on real events, Angela’s Ashes (1999), Angela (Emily Watson) worries about how to get eggs while her husband, Malachy (Robert Carlyle), a Northern Irishman who is ostracized in independent Ireland, turns to drink over his inability to supersede their situation.

Overburdened by children, most of whom die in infancy, ill-treated by the Irish government and the Catholic Church, Angela is helped only by her eldest son Frankie.

That son, Frank McCourt, wrote the memoir about his “miserable childhood.” Laura Jones and director Alan Parker adapted the book for the screen.

Emily Watson, Robert Carlyle and John Williams (for his music score) were nominated for numerous awards for Ashes but it is cinematographer Michael Seresin’s photography of the sodden, impoverished, largely colorless Limerick environment that makes this film memorable.