Féminisites – Fireside Chat
2026 · 43m · Canada
Directed by Anne-Lovely Etienne
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Anne-Lovely Etienne discusses dating-app safety with sociologist Lamia Djemoui and journalist Vanessa Destiné. Their fireside conversation covers violence against women, platform responsibility, and fourth-wave digital sisterhood.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A fireside chat about dating apps and feminist praxis sounds like NPR middleware, but Etienne's decision to let three voices orbit the same problem without forcing consensus is genuinely weird—she's made a conversation film that refuses to resolve, which is either boring or radical depending on your tolerance for ambiguity.
Etienne positions this within a lineage of feminist essay cinema and talk-based documentary (Marker, Varda, contemporary essay forms), and the formal restraint—three voices, one room, time to breathe—demonstrates real curatorial confidence in the premise's intellectual weight without needing stylistic decoration.
The crucial move here is Etienne's decision to keep the camera static and let the rhythm of conversation—the pauses, the overlaps, who defers—become the film's architecture; it's a high-wire act on a shoestring that could collapse into static talking heads, but instead the sound design and editorial pacing make silence feel like argument.