What Goddeses Watch is a multi-cultural, feminist Film and TV podcast. Film critic Soma Ghosh is joined by today's most fabulous feminine thinkers to deep-dive films about and by womxn. From hot releases to independent streamers, combining English & non-English speaking films, it's clever, fun & badly behaved.
Film critic Soma Ghosh probes a problmatic vein, in TV & film, of fake feminism that glamorises female trauma and MeToo abuses, while taking us through the Monia Chokri's zinging new comedy thriller, The Babysitter. Also touching on popular TV like The Undoing, The Morning Show and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Ghosh asks, "Is it OK to joke about MeToo?"
Want emotional nuance and alternative film-making in your queer screen stories? Maybe even some moral ambiguity and irony? Soma Ghosh considers what kinds of stories and cinematography queer female audiences want. She reviews two new films from the BFI LGBTQ Flare festival, uplifting rock doc Sirens & the Argentinian, sympathetically moody teenage story Camilla Comes Out Tonight (available to stream on BFI Player).
As Sciamma's Petite Maman arrives for worldwide streaming on MUBI, on which it's also your last chance to stream a gem of feminist film history, The Heiresses, with Isabelle Huppert, critic Soma Ghosh discusses two films of female friendship. Both are set in rural isolation and tinged with Gothic mystery. This 'Strange Mothers' episode queries how we construct maternal instinct and the drive behind female bonding.
As a new season of her films shows at London's BFI Southbank, we take a look at Asta Neilsen, silent film star, starting with her first film in 1910. Bizarrely largely forgetten, she was so beloved that her picture was pinned up soldiers on both sides of WW1 and called simply 'die Asta' - the Asta - across the world. Soma Ghosh explains how her revelatory acting technique inspired Garbo and Apollinaire, pushed gender norms and redefined the sexuality of women on screen. Films discussed include The Abyss and Hamlet, in which Hamlet is a genderqueer prince assigned male sexuality at birth and in love with Horatio.
