My dream was an arthouse film. The director wanted to both interrogate her experience of second-wave feminism and to partially rebuke it. It was a murder anti-mystery. The murder happens ten minutes in and it is never in doubt to characters or audience who did it. The murder victim is the only male character in the story, and I’m not sure whether he had a name. Everyone on-screen was a woman. The murderer was tracked down, apprehended, tried, and convicted, but most of the people involved were aware that her resistance to any of these steps was perfunctory. The whole edifice of justice operates without men involved - it was distinctly not vigilante justice, it was just an operation of the courts that happened not to involve men at all. The women involved spanned a wide age range - there were definitely some precocious ten-year-olds and tweens in there as well as some high-school students. The point was to show participants and audience a world in which women operate all of these things is not only not particularly difficult to imagine, but it’s also possible to enact if you’re clever about it. The world is not better or worse run by just women - but isn’t it peculiar that the world we live in is run mostly like this but with men at the helm?

I have some problems with the system independent of who’s operating it and I’m not sure that the director agreed with me about that. But it was a good movie, and it appealed to me that the protagonist and her unseen collaborators among the police and prosecution only with difficulty came to the conclusion that demonstrating their principles was worth two lives.