The latest in Miu Miu's Woman's Tales series is available to stream now.
The Miu Miu x Women’s Tales series is building a reputation for its anticipated short films by some of the world’s most important female filmmakers—investigating femininity and vanity in the 21st century.
Edition 26 is the turn of Croatian-born Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic (who directed 2021’s excellent Murina) and focuses on a young woman named Stane, who is going to inherit a demolition company from her immigrant father. Her marriage, as it happens, is also under threat of crumbling down—and the film explores how Stane reckons with patriarchal and traditional expectations to go her own way.
Power is a central theme here. If women can be ‘given’ power, then surely it can be taken away from them too, argues Kusijanovic. But although Stane has a political undertone, the filmmaker seems more curious about her central character—which allows the questions of female power in and around the patriarchy, as well as its overbearingness to her as the child of an immigrant, to subtly bleed through. It is an engrossing short, beautifully acted, and its message is poignantly told, with male and female characters sat in situations—like a Croat dance scene at a dinner—where their performative ideas around gender and tradition come to surface.
Stane is filmed with a sense of tension, grey building blocks and muted rooms, housing a private disquiet that must inevitably boil over. There is wealth all around, but who gets to be in control of it? The latest Miu Miu x Women’s Tales film addresses these questions with panache and style, but even through the telling of its serious themes, Stane remains wholly entertaining.
Stane is now available to stream on MUBI.
