Winter’s Bone,” Debra Granik’s 2010 four-time Academy Award-nominated rural film noir, will close out the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival’s Neo-Noir Selects Series with a special screening at 3 p.m., Sunday, April 27, at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater. The film won multiple awards, including the Grand Prize, at that year’s Sundance Film Festival, and it introduced the larger world to fast-rising star, Jennifer Lawrence, who plays teenage, poverty-stricken Ree Dolly in the neglected rural Ozarks of Missouri who looks after her mentally ill mother and must find her missing father to save her family from homelessness.

JAY CRAVEN

Gravelly veteran character actor, John Hawkes, is superb as Dolly’s absent dad — both he and Lawrence were nominated for Oscars.

“Winter’s Bone” qualifies as an unconventional film noir for its stark rural landscapes, strong resilient female protagonist, dark and gritty atmosphere and imminent sense of nerve-wracking tension and foreboding. Writing in the Bright Lights Film Journal, critic C. Jerry Kutner notes that “one of the key figures in film noir is the “innocent investigator.”  In this case, the investigator role is played to perfection by 20-year-old Lawrence.

“Classic examples of the innocent investigator include Teresa Wright in ‘Shadow of a Doubt,’ Ella Raines in ‘Phantom Lady,’ Kim Hunter in ‘The Seventh Victim,’ or — a more recent male example — Kyle MacLachlan in ‘Blue Velvet,’” Kutner pointed out. “The loss of innocence is generally connected to a discovery of how corrupt the world really is. In ‘Winter’s Bone,’ the innocent investigator is a teenage girl investigating the disappearance of her father.”

Debra Granik broke ground, making “Winter’s Bone.”  This picture combines a noir feel with an astonishing and effective naturalism that has the distinctive feel of fine documentary filmmaking.  It’s no coincidence that Granik has worked as a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer.

It was — and is — still unusual to have narrative films directed by women.  Granik explores this question in an interview she gave to Matt Wray for Public Books — when he asked her whether she thought that a woman director brings something to the job that a man can’t — or won’t bring.”

“It’s very hard to generalize,” said Granik. “I think that some women have different expectations about the use of money. Maybe it’s that our power or self-worth doesn’t come from having access to gobs of money. Sometimes I feel like the entrance of women into the filmmaking community was feared because budgets would get driven down. What if a bunch of women said: “Hey, I can make a film for a million dollars. That’s enough for me.”

“I think that is potentially threatening to the industry, in more ways than one. It might mean you’d tell different kinds of stories, ones without expensive car chases or burning everything down. What if a whole bunch of women made films without any guns? If we’re a gun-dependent cinema, oh, my word, that could be threatening. There’s also the idea — and this is a pretty threatening on e —that women could be interesting in film without taking off their clothes. What if you put in women who are attractive for what’s inside their minds, not what’s below their shoulders? This kind of stuff could really upset the cinematic status quo.”

“I think it’s always been important for women to operate on the margins, because that’s where change often happens. But, you know, we can also be the invaders of the palace. I love the metaphor of the Trojan Horse: the idea of getting inside a big, big film and changing it up, subverting it.”

Granik has made only three narrative feature films, which is a shame.  Her powerful pictures were partly inspired by what she learned about Italian Neo-Realism, the post-WWII European film movement that rendered socially realistic characters and stories that transported audiences through renderings of everyday life as it was lived on the margins.  “Winter’s Bone” takes us on that kind of unforgettable journey.

“Winter’s Bone” will play at 3 p.m., Sunday, April 27, at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater.  Tickets are available at the door, or online at townhalltheater.org.