There is perhaps no genre more thoroughly gendered than the western, and it is here that Kelly Reichardt (Meek's Cutoff) has staked her claim as a singular voice in a crowded terrain. No sweeping vistas or grand antagonisms, First Cow is the story of a friendship between a couple of misfit pioneers: one a cook, Cookie (John Magaro), a gentle, soft-spoken man, and the other a Chinese immigrant, King Lu (Orion Lee), a prototypical entrepreneur, ambitious and scheming, but more out of necessity than greed. True to the genre, Reichardt is deep in the weeds of American myth-making. After the arrival of the first dairy cow in the territory, Reichardt, with the painstaking exactness of a procedural, plots the emerging relations of frontier capitalism—part exploitation and theft; part survival and partnership. The scope is miniaturist, but the import is monumental.

With opening remarks by Professor of Film and Media Studies Shevaun Mizrahi

D: Kelly Reichardt, US, 2019, 2h2m

Programmed as part of the Asian Diaspora on Screen series in collaboration with the Dartmouth Asian American Studies Collective (DAASC).