CHRISTIE PITS Park
Sunday, August 3, 2025

Lady bird

With the short films In the Shadow of the Pines and For Nonna Anna

Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial début Lady Bird cemented her as an important American director with a distinct voice and point-of-view on womanhood. The film follows the titular “Lady Bird” (Saoirse Ronan, in her third Oscar-nominated performance), a precocious high school student who longs to flee what she sees as her humdrum life in sleepy 2002 Sacramento and live her dream life in a “real city” far away from her hometown and her mother (Laurie Metcalf in a career-best role). While in lesser hands this familiar coming-of-age plot may have resulted in a movie as uninspiring as Lady Bird’s life in Sacramento, Gerwig’s assured direction and incisive screenplay, along with the cast members’ raw and luminous performances elevate Lady Bird into a moving, poignant, and entertaining portrait of growing up in the twenty-first century. 

Paired with Lady Bird are two shorts that also explore teen dynamics with parents (or parent-figures). For Nonna Anna is a loving and intimate portrait of a young trans woman’s relationship with her Italian grandmother. Like Lady Bird, the film is a deceptively simple but powerful observational drama that centres around a moment of shared vulnerability for the two women. Meanwhile, Anne Koizumi’s autobiographical short In the Shadow of the Pines grapples with the filmmaker’s relationship to her father. Using a mix of stop-motion animation and documentary footage, Koizumi explores the feelings of shame and regret that haunt us as adults when we reflect on our past relationships with our parents – especially after they’re gone.