Girlfriends (Blu-Ray)

When her best friend and roommate abruptly moves out to get married, Susan (Melanie Mayron), trying to be an artist while making ends meet as a bar mitzvah photographer on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, finds herself adrift in both life and love. A wonder of American independent cinema by Claudia Weill (who, when she was admitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a director in 1981, was one of only four women ever to have received that honor), Girlfriends is a remarkably authentic vision of female relationships that has become a touchstone for makers of an entire subgenre of films and television shows about young women trying to make it in the big city. This 1970s New York time capsule captures the complexities and contradictions of women’s lives and relationships with wry humor and refreshing frankness.

Special features:
– New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director Claudia Weill and director of photography Fred Murphy, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
– New interview with Weill
– New interview with Weill and actors Melanie Mayron, Christopher Guest, and Bob Balaban
– New interview with screenwriter Vicki Polon
– New interview with Weill and writer and filmmaker Joey Soloway
– Joyce at 34, a 1972 short film codirected by Weill and Joyce Chopra
– Commuters, a 1970 short film by Weill and Eliot Noyes
– Subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
– PLUS: Essays by film critic Molly Haskell and scholar Carol Gilligan