Soft Fiction

In this acclaimed document and expression of gendered pain, joy, and hardship, experimental filmmaker Chick Strand collaborates with five women who communicate their experience through direct and frank stories. Strand’s technique focuses on close-ups of facial expressions, profiles, and attention to physical gestures like the tension of hands, resulting in a unique documentary of intimacy and sexuality. This approach creates an elliptical mise en scène where little context is offered, and the subjects are presented as interlocutors rather than characters. Throughout these testimonies, the film considers the identification and representation of womanhood, and the sense of possession and dispossession through consensual and abusive sexuality.