The subject of this short film will only be familiar to niche audiences, which doesn't detract from the value of sharing her unique life story, but could limit the movie's appeal. Indie filmmaker Julia Reichert, the title subject of Julia's Stepping Stones, passed away in 2022, before she had completed this autobiographical short. Her partner, Steven Bognar, finished it instead.
Reichert lived at once an ordinary and an extraordinary life. Ordinary, because many women of her class and generation experienced similar upbringings and faced parallel barriers–in fact, this is the subject of her own first film, Growing Up Female.
Her life was extraordinary because she actively fought barriers of sex, class, and race, first by joining the burgeoning "women's liberation movement," and then by becoming an independent filmmaker, producer, and distributor taking on social justice topics.
This short film has intrinsic value as a first-person historical document, and a companion piece to Reichert's own filmography. However, it's a disappointment that all that we see of her contemporarily is from behind, while she talks on the telephone, even as we're offered plenty of photos of her younger self.
It's the one place where the 32-minute short feels incomplete. That's assuming that leaving off where her career begins was a conscious choice; if not, then the incompleteness of the film is part of the story.
Read the full review at Common Sense Media
Images courtesy of Netflix
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