Miranda July is one of the most intriguing directors I know of.
She was born is Barre, Vermont in 1974. Both of her parents were writers. She began writing at an early age and continued to write when her family moved to Berkeley, California. There, she began writing short plays and staging them at a local all-ages theater.
She grew up to attend UC Santa Cruz, but dropped out in her sophomore year. She then moved to Portland, Oregon and took up performance art. She was very successful and began to dabble in all kinds of media, including film and music.
Her first feature-length film was called Me and You and Everyone We Know. It is a complicated film to explain, since it has so many subplots and seemingly meaningless moments. I suppose I can start by saying that it is about a strange and lonely performance artist named Christine. It is also about a recently-separated shoe salesman and his two sons, Peter and Robby. These are the circulating characters that lead the story onwards. However there are also two teenage girls wandering the streets, doing each other's make-up and waiting for something exciting to happen, a watchful younger girl who collects household appliances and stores them in her "Hope Chest", hoping to one day give these items to her future husband and children as her dowry.
The film is set in a sort of generic city neighborhood. The neighborhood is a confined world, including a strip mall, an apartment complex, and some houses, so it feels very intimate and helps to make the coincidences and collisions of characters in the story more believable.
It is a very sensitive film, filled with reality mixed with magic, and that I what I love about it. Especially this scene:
