Emerging as one of the great directors of the sensitives and complexities of youth with her three features thus far, It Felt Like Love, Beach Rats, and Never Rarely Sometimes Always, we’ve been waiting to see what filmmaker Eliza Hittman would tackle for her fourth feature. It’s now been unveiled thanks to an announcement on projects that Rooftop Films’ 2024 Filmmaker Fund will be supporting.
Titled MOTHERLOVE, Hittman’s fourth film will follow Ana, “a Georgian immigrant in Brooklyn, who takes a job caring for Lori, an elderly woman in Manhattan, where she is forced to navigate end of life issues and complex family dynamics, while haunted by the separation from her own young daughter whom she has left behind in Tbilisi, Georgia.”
The announcement also features a new documentary in the works from Debra Granik and Alex Mallis exploring the cannabis industry in NYC. Here’s a synopsis: “The promise of legal weed in New York is pushed to its breaking point by an onslaught of illicit opportunists, weaponized stigma, and multi-billion dollar corporations racing to claim a share of the largest cannabis market in the world. By design, newly enacted legislation should benefit those who were disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs, but when idealism meets concrete, who wins and who loses in the future of cannabis in New York State?”
“It’s about a character in crisis,” Hitmann told me following the world premiere of Never Rarely Sometimes Always at Sundance, just before the pandemic thwarted its original release plans. “It’s different in the sense that I’m usually exploring very self-destructive characters and this character is trying to find her way out of her crisis. I was really interested in creating an obstacle-based narrative about the bureaucracy and barriers of what she encounters. How embarrassing it must be to ask her boss for time off work to get an abortion. I think those little moments that are sort of unspoken that women encounter everywhere. I hope the subtlety of those moments resonate, and politics is embedded underneath.”