Since its release, Annie Hall has established itself as a key film for Woody Allen’s career and the history of romantic comedy more generally. At the 1978 Academy Awards, it won Oscars for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress and is regularly cited as one of the greatest film comedies ever released, credited with influencing directors such as Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Richard Linklater, Greta Gerwig and Desiree Akhavan. This lively collection brings a new ethical and philosophical perspective to bear on Allen’s work quite different from previous generations of scholars. At the same time as exploring the film’s continuing influence on contemporary cinema, this book’s contributors engage explicitly and implicitly with ongoing debates about Allen’s cinematic output following the renewal of accusations against Allen by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow in 2014 and 2018. The book is alive to debates within film studies about the limits of auteur theory and the role of the spectator.

María Sánchez is obsessed with what she cannot see. As a field veterinarian following in the footsteps of generations before her, she travels the countryside of Spain bearing witness to a life eroding before her eyes—words, practices, and people slipping away because of depopulation, exploitation of natural resources, inadequate environmental policies, and development encroaching on farmland and villages. Sánchez, the first woman in her family to dedicate herself to what has traditionally been a male-dominated profession, rebuffs the bucolic narrative of rural life often written by—and for consumption by—people in cities, describing the multilayered social complexity of people who are proud, resilient, and often misunderstood. Sánchez interweaves family stories of three generations with reflections on science and literature. She focuses especially on the often dismissed and undervalued generations of women who have forgone education and independence to work the land and tend to family. In doing so, she asks difficult questions about gender equity and labor. Part memoir and part rural feminist manifesto, Land of Women acknowledges the sacrifices of Sánchez’s female ancestors who enabled her to become the woman she is. A bestseller in Spain, Land of Women promises to ignite conversations about the treatment and perception of rural communities everywhere.