I think many of us have that particular movie that we can watch over and over and seem to never tire of its familiar scenes. A piece of work that calls out themes and values that we hold dear perhaps, and inspires us once again, every time to go out and live those things we hold dear. For our daughter Emma, her mom and I, that movie is “Ever After”, writer/director Andy Tennant’s feminist re-visioning of the Cinderella story starring Drew Barrymore.

The film invents a historical context for Cinderella as the character Danielle De Barbarac, the daughter of a woman from the landed gentry and a commoner father, which by patrilineal protocol made Danielle a commoner as well. Danielle never knew her mom, who died when she was an infant, and was raised by her father, who she adored, but came to die an untimely death as well, soon after remarrying Danielle’s step mother. The story is set in the environs of the French royal court during the early 1500s as it is just beginning to be influenced by the ideas of the Renaissance. Continue reading →