FILMS from AFAR

Today’s lesson: Patience in the kitchen is not just a virtue, it’s a necessity. More on this below. Spoiler alert: I'm not always the most patient person. In activities I enjoy or that matter a lot to me, I have all the time in the world. In other areas of life, I move fast so I can move on. And now that I've written that, I realize this may be the balance that's keeping me sane. Either way, being impatient in the kitchen means I'm naturally attracted to faster, fewer-ingredient recipes. So, when I stumbled upon this 20-minute, 6-step ditty in the New York Times Cooking app, I thought it looked right up my galley. Anything with “sheet-pan” in the title promises simplicity. Right? From Fresh to Frozen If the internet is to be believed, the Italian "scampi" refers to small, shrimp-like creatures in the lobster family (also known as Dublin Bay prawns, Norway lobsters or langoustines). So the name "shrimp scampi" actually makes no sense? The concept likely originated as "shrimp prepared scampi-style" as Italian chefs tried to adapt a dish in America without the proper seafood ingredients found back home. I can relate. I love seafood of almost all kinds, and I’m pretty adventurous about it (though there are a few species I won’t touch, like razor clams, which taste like sweatsocks). But I learned to love seafood living abroad. Growing up in the States, I didn't eat a lot of variety of fish. A typical oxymoron heard in these parts is that people don’t want fish that tastes “too fishy.” In Spain, I was exposed to the delights of conservas , or canned fish. My favorite is calamares en su tinta , squid pieces in their own inky sauce. The fishier the better! Seafood became a staple of my diet, stocked fresh in markets and widely served on menus. From hake to seabass to cod to octopus, I learned to love it all. Which is why I am sometimes hyper-critical of the seafood sections in my local stores today. These sad affairs often feature limp white filets slouched atop yellowing ice. Even the peppy lemon wedges can’t liven up this situation. Okay, maybe I'm overstating for effect, but it's true that most of the seafood I eat on a regular basis now comes from the frozen section. That's how I found myself with an opened 2-pound bag of raw shrimp in my freezer. Knowing I needed to feed some hungry mouths later that eve, I popped what was left of the bag into the fridge to defrost, and I started scrolling Cooking’s database. Planning & Patience One thing I’ve seen more mild-mannered home chefs do that I’ve never, not once done myself is to get all the ingredients measured and ready before they even start cooking. I am beginning to see how this can be useful. In my kitchen, things have been known to bubble over or burn while I’m frantically skimming instructions or chopping and measuring next ingredients. I think the challenge entertains me, but the truth is I'm not always fast enough. On this recipe, I got everything out of the fridge, measured the wine and washed and peeled the shrimp – all before starting. Yeah, me! I did not cut the butter, chop the herbs or get the needed saucepan ready. Whoopsie. This turned out to be especially foolhardy because, had I slowed down and read the recipe again more closely, I would have realized that I only had 6 to 12 minutes to do all this while the lemons flirted with disaster under the broiler’s flames. Step by Step Thankfully, I managed not to burn the lemons, though I’m not sure the wine reduced by half, as the recipe called for. I’ve found in my life that a little extra wine never hurts, so I went with it. As an aside, why is broiling so exciting? Here’s where my impatience could have sabotaged my scampi – again. When my butter melted, I poured it over my cold shrimp, rather than mixing the shrimp into the butter in its warm pan, as the recipe advised (though not clearly enough for us beginners, IMHO). The result, of course, was congealed butter. Determined, I pivoted and used a utensil to spread the butter, now a paste mixed with my thinly-sliced garlic, over the shrimp, which I carefully layered on top of my decoratively charred lemons. I don’t think I’ve ever cooked shrimp in the oven before. But why not? They plumped up surprisingly fast and turned a gorgeous pink. Making a Meal One thing I haven’t mentioned is that among the items I did not measure before beginning this recipe was the actual quantity of shrimp I had left in my 2-pound bag. The recipe called for a pound, and the bag looked about half full, so I went with it. (Yes, I'm seeing the pattern.) I also hadn’t thought too much about the fact that one pound of shrimp and a few lemon slices, no matter how exquisitely broiled, weren’t going to feed all the people in my house (on this day, me plus two teens and several of their friends). I decided to turn my pan-sheet scampi into a pasta dish. Pasta fills tummies and everyone likes it. Feeling smart. Now, most pasta shrimp scampi recipes online call for a long noodle, like spaghetti. Okay, not most – apparently all, according to a quick Google search (mocking me with its uniformity). You guessed it: I didn’t have spaghetti on hand, which I discovered during the roughly 5 minutes the shrimp were in the oven. So, I substituted mini-penne. It might have been unconventional. It might not have fit in on Google. But I believe it tasted just as good! Reactions The kids agreed. Gabi and Teresa both gave it a thumbs up, and their friends approved. One dared eat a lemon slice. Another sprinkled nutritional yeast on top, though I’m not sure how the NYT would feel about that. Being a little impatient caused some preventable stress and meant more dishes to clean than necessary, but it didn’t ruin this quick, elegant, tasty and relatively simple recipe. I learned from the process that preparation in the kitchen – doing your reading, thinking, chopping and measuring in advance – isn’t just showing off. Does that mean I’ll always do it moving forward? Probably not. But I’ll go with it. How about you? What favorite quick-n-easy recipes do you have up your chef’s apron? Do you have a shrimp scampi recipe worth sharing? Also: Do you get everything ready before you start cooking? Has improvising ever worked well for you? Lastly, is cooking going to make me a more patient person?

“Being a woman is beautiful,” says one of the elderly narrators of Costa Rica’s entry for the International Oscar, Memories of a Burning Body . “But there’s also an ugly side to it: you’re always vulnerable.” Judging by this year’s leading contenders for the International Oscar, the feeling is global. Countries around the world submitted women-centered stories for the non-English-language Oscar category this year, with female protagonists finding themselves in disadvantaged situations but also often discovering their own strength against all manner of obstacles. Some of these films made the shortlist for the award, announced Tuesday, Dec. 17, such as Brazil’s I’m Still Here , France’s Emilia Pérez , Germany’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig , Palestine’s From Ground Zero and the UK’s Santosh . Many did not, including Memories of a Burning Body . Notably, only three of the 15 shortlisted films were directed by women – four if you count the compilation film From Ground Zero , which includes seven female-directed short films out of 22 total. The shortlist is also dominated by European entries, though in three cases the films are set outside Europe ( The Seed of the Sacred Fig , Santosh and Emilia Perez ). Read the full article and see the shortlist at AWFJ.org Links to my reviews: Emilia Pérez , The Seed of the Sacred Fig, From Gound Zero , Santosh , Kneecap Images courtesy of film distributors.

This surprisingly tender and personal story of one man's connection to two individual whales is a remarkably rewarding watch. Patrick and the Whale clocks in at a reasonable 53 minutes, during which time viewers are treated to spectacular images from both above and below the ocean surface. The visuals are gorgeous and will stick in the memory, but what makes this film so magical is its star and narrator. Dykstra forges relationships with his whales, most of whom he has named and can identify individually. He communicates with two specific females via clicks on the side of his camera; they approach him and check him out through what he calls a "3D sonar scan." His connection is so deep that he sheds tears when he thinks he's offended one of them, and again when she returns and entrusts her beloved calf to his supervision while she deep-dives for food. You'll learn plenty from this film about whale behavior, but you'll also be prompted to think about the best and worst of human behavior and our complicated relationship with nature. Read the full review at Common Sense Media Images courtesy of Prime Video

Iranian film The Seed of the Sacred Fig opens with a description of a plant whose own seeds grow to eventually strangle its host tree. In the film, children grow to eventually question their parents’ values – and, in the case here of Iran, call for the overthrow of an authoritarian government, stifling social traditions and use of violence against citizens. What makes this film so impactful is the way one family’s story is developed to reflect and embody the realities of an entire society. Tellingly, last spring, director Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison in Iran and other punishments for his critical work. He concluded shooting this film clandestinely and, in a tale worthy of its own film, made his way out of Iran on foot. He now resides in exile in Germany, which nominated Sacred Fig to represent it in this year’s International Oscar race. The film also screened in competition at last May’s Cannes Film Festival. In Sacred Fig , Rasoulof incorporates actual video footage, mostly shot on cell phones (so, watched and exchanged appropriately by young characters on their phones) from the mass protests that gripped Tehran in 2022. The real-life suspicious death at a police station of 22-year-old protestor Mahsa Amini is also incorporated into the storyline. In the film, the older daughter Rezvan’s (Mahsa Rostami) best friend Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi) gets similarly caught up in protests, violently shot and unjustly arrested. The rising tension on the streets seeps into the household and family. Dad Iman (Missagh Zareh) has just been promoted to a government investigator role. He is working morning until night handling protestor arrests, despite his initial discomfort at having to rush investigations and even death sentences. Mom Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) is mostly focused on the improvements the promotion will bring to their lifestyle – a bigger apartment, a new dishwasher – and to making sure her daughters comply with morality rules for women in public. She serves her husband’s every request and need. When Iman’s government-issued gun goes missing in their home, and the family’s address gets published online, dad begins feeling increasingly paranoid. Rezvan and younger sister Sana (Setareh Maleki) empathize with the protestors’ demands, undermining everything their father stands for. Najmeh, initially stuck in the middle and supportive of both her husband and the propaganda coming through the news, eventually has to take a side when events start slipping out of control. The first half the film spends significant time on developing these characters. Two intimate scenes in particular are set to haunting music and given significant screen time – Najmeh removing buckshots from Sadaf’s face and dropping them, slow-motion, into a bloodied sink, and later Najmeh painstakingly grooming her husband’s face and hair. Najmeh is the cornerstone between facets of her family – between genders and generations. She is both caretaker and protector. She has a line in the film where she tells her daughters she’s tried to shield them from their father’s rougher side, which seems intended to explain his eventual unraveling. In earlier scenes, Iman seems genuinely troubled by the ethically questionable requirements in his new job, and he admits to his wife in a private late-night conversation that he’d like to give his grown daughters a hug and a kiss. Later, he subjects his family to interrogations and detentions like the inspector he has become. His unraveling in the latter half of the film is suspenseful, with final cat-and-mouse scenes playing out in an especially memorable location, but the ending could feel somewhat forced upon these characters. However, this meshes with their intended embodiment of the polarization between generations and genders in Iran, and the unraveling of traditional values and social mores, in particular women taking back power and agency. This review originally ran on AWFJ.org Images courtesy of Neon

As a woman in one of the 22 short films in Palestine’s International Oscar entry, From Ground Zero , says, the loved ones lost in the ongoing war in Gaza are at risk of becoming “just numbers.” This film aims to resist that happening. But it also aims to go beyond stories of human suffering, according to producer Rashid Masharawi, who conceived of, organized and financed the anthology. On the one hand, he notes, the film intends to “document what’s going on.” On the other hand, he says, “I want this film to be shown internationally. It’s about life, it’s about love, it’s about hope. It’s about resistance. It’s not trying to show complaining all the time.” Masharawi is an award-winning, Gaza-born filmmaker ( Curfew , Haifa and many more) responsible for launching the Cinema Production and Distribution Center in Ramallah, which offers training and workshops for aspiring filmmakers as well as a mobile cinema and a children’s film festival. The film doesn’t focus on “political discussions or debates.” Instead, “It has to do with our life, with our culture, with our history. It has to do with people who want to have all these dreams – to make stand-up comedy, to paint, to dance, to sing. It’s about life.” There is also a heavy presence of women creatives in this collection, something that “was not easy,” Masharawi notes, “because women are having a difficult life during this war. They are more responsible for lives and family, kids, food, for many things, than men are. Besides, they live in tents and they have no privacy.” Getting them to take time to make a film was tough, but he says “it was very important for me to have maximum women.” I spoke with Masharawi by Zoom from France about the inspiration and logistics behind this collection. From Ground Zero had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Read the full interview here on the Alliance of Women Film Journalists page. Read my review of From Ground Zero here.

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

Q&A with the director of Costa Rica's International Oscar entry.   Costa Rican director Antonella Sudasassi spent two and a half years talking with older women for her film  Memories of a Burning Body (Memorias de un Cuerpo que Arde) , Costa Rica’s submission for the International Oscar.  “In the beginning, I was looking for a specific kind of woman,” she says. “I was looking for someone more traditional, who got married, had kids, always lived with her husband and eventually died or divorced or whatever.” “I also looked for someone who was more open about her sexuality,” she adds, admitting that she thought her initial “idea of talking about sexuality and trying to understand how women of that age live their sexuality” might be funny and full of “juicy details.”  Sudasassi initiated the project out of a longing to have had these conversations with her own grandmothers before they died or lost their memories.  But through the long conversations with the women, which took place during the COVID shut down, Sudasassi says she “realized that it was about something else. It was about identity. It was about understanding themselves as women.” “And quite honestly, when I started talking to them, I realized that they had never talked about this with absolutely anybody, not even their mothers, daughters, sisters or granddaughters. They’d never talked about this, and they had such a need to talk about it. It felt a bit urgent for them to talk about it.”   Indeed, the women interviewed reveal very personal information. There are eight voices in the film in total, though only one woman is seen on screen (and younger versions of her), and she is an actress embodying the group of interviewees. Sudasassi says she decided to “intertwine” their voices and stories and wrap them into one “because I felt like there was such a common experience, even if the context was different.” The result is a fascinating piece of documentary work (that some are calling fiction because of the dramatized reenactments of the women’s words). In an interview with AWFJ, Sudasassi explains her process. Read the interview on AWFJ.org at this link . Read my review of the film here.

This poetically-narrated, beautifully-visualized short film offers a glimpse into the world of an exceptional teenager and a poignant documentation of her inspiring story. It is a testament to director Julio Palacio's insightfulness that  Makayla's Voice: A Letter to the World  is kept to 24 minutes, especially in an age of overly-long documentaries. In that amount of time, the film conveys the very special person Makayla is, and the shock her parents felt when she first began communicating via a letterboard at age 14. It turns out Makayla is intelligent and deeply thoughtful, nearly a poet. "I dream of one day hearing my voice," she says (via an actor's voiceover). Makayla compares feeling trapped inside her body to the way the artist Van Gogh felt trapped inside his emotions. He used color to communicate while Makalya sees color in emotions and actions: "my soul sees what others cannot." Palacio dexterously visualizes these themes and ideas through a variety of techniques, from animation to on-camera interviews, from daily footage to lyrical images of nature that very nearly match the poetry of Makayla's words. Read the full review on Common Sense Media . Images courtesy of Netflix.

Santosh  has been selected to represent India in the International Oscar category. Crouched in this brooding, well-acted and adeptly structured two-hour mystery, viewers will find layers upon layers of social critique of modern Indian society. We meet Santosh (Shahana Goswami) just as her husband Raman has been killed while on duty for the local police. In one of the next scenes, the camera watches her, head bowed, as her parents and in-laws argue over who will take care of her now. She’s not deciding her future, they are. When she’s offered the opportunity to “inherit” Raman’s job in what’s called a “compassionate appointment,” drawing a salary as well as widow’s compensation and an apartment in the deal, she jumps on it. This economical opening offers us all kinds of details, beyond the disempowered status of women, such as that Santosh’s was a “love marriage,” and that her husband was respected for his integrity. Although we are only just getting to know the film’s protagonist, these details set her up as a hero worthy of our support. As this sophisticated tale unfolds, however, we find ourselves questioning our own faith in Santosh, realizing how little we have actually been told. Santosh initially tries to do good in her role as “lady constable,” but the male-led police force is corrupt to its core, bullying or ignoring lower castes, accepting bribes and serving as the butt of online jokes about their incompetence. When Santosh gets wrapped up in a case of a murdered 15-year-old girl, led by female superior Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), she finds skills and courage she didn’t know she had.  Santosh leans on her superior for assistance, but then finds herself trapped in following her lead on questionable methods and ethics. It appears that’s just the way things are done, and there are “untouchables” that you don’t want to touch in India just as there are wealthy landowner “untouchables” you cannot touch, even with the law on your side. At least in Sharma’s case her motivation includes helping empower women. Goswami is physically perfect for this role, not just because her natural good looks can be comfortably played down to appear more average. It’s her wide eyes that are most memorable. They embody the character’s own metaphorical eye-opening. The camera also takes on her wide-eyed perspective in some scenes; in others, it accompanies her and witnesses her contained anger, humiliation, pride and understanding.   Review originally published on AWFJ.org Images courtesy of Metrograph Pictures

This poignant film about family, love, war, and loss is a throwback in style and subject matter to similarly sentimental fare out of Europe from several decades ago . The Children's Train is reminiscent of 1990s-era Italian classics like Cinema Paradiso, Life is Beautiful and Malena in narrative style and a somewhat wistful portrayal of mid-century Italy. Life was harsh in wartime – illiteracy, poverty, hunger, and death. But the portrayal on screen softens that harshness through the lens of a child's more innocent perspective. Color schemes in Train also soften, from the crisp modern day to the pastels of the Mediterranean flashbacks and the natural hues of the inland north, where 8-year-old Amerigo finds a new life. The music complements these tonal changes. Based on true events of children sent to live with families while waiting out the bombing of Naples in the mid-1940s, the film shows a sensitive boy's life as being marked by women. Absent their men sent to war, women kept families and societies functioning. Amerigo's birth mom does what she has to in order to put food on the table. She tells her son – whose name sounds like "America" (and whose last name translates to "hope") – that his father is in America seeking his fortune. In Cinema Paradiso , the fatherless child imagines his dad to be Clark Gable, and cinema is used as a metaphor for changing times. In Train , music, an education, and the values of communism and feminism represent the framework for a happy life and a rewarding future, something Amerigo intuitively knows when he makes the heartrending choice to board the train north a second time. Read the full review on Common Sense Media . Images courtesy of Netflix.

In a time when immigrants from south of the border are being vilified in the US, a film like Sujo offers a poignant rendering of the brutality which forces some people to flee their homes. From writing-directing team Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez and a female-dominant creative and technical crew, the film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and was selected to represent Mexico in this year’s International Oscar category. Sujo is a tense film full of visual symbolism that takes an unexpected turn in its third act. The main character is a boy who survives and ultimately gets a chance at life only because of three women who intervene at key moments to save him. As a small child, Sujo is found abandoned in a car. His beloved father, a sicario, has been killed. His aunts hide him away and negotiate with men who want the child dead. He’ll grow up to bring them trouble, they say. They know this because there’s no other path for boys and men in this rural area of Michoacan named, appropriately, Tierra Caliente. Sujo’s aunt, Nemesio, promises to keep the boy hidden away from the town, ruled over by the cartel. He’s raised alongside his cousins, Jai and Jeremy. Though he misses his father, and he’s raised in poverty, he is well cared for and loved by his aunts. As the boys grow, however, they begin to push their boundaries, eventually and inevitably getting involved with the cartel (each is branded with a large, tattooed number in the gang on his chest). When Jeremy is killed, Nemesio rushes Sujo onto a bus bound for Mexico City and tells him never to return. This is where the film takes an unexpected turn. Now college-aged, Sujo begins to make a life for himself in the city. He finds work unloading produce at a warehouse. One day he wanders into a college class, and the professor takes him under her wing. When Jai comes to town, the violence and rage of his past life revisits him, threatening to upset the balance and future Sujo is slowly shaping. The two parts of the film have very different looks and feels. The first two acts construct a portrayal of a bucolic rural area infested with violence. An opening scene shows a horse escaping a rural rodeo. The horse gallops across a flat landscape, a location we will see again and again as people escape violent men, running in one direction or another. The horse has more symbolism than we realize until the end of the movie, and it’s just one of many wild animals DP Ximena Amann’s camera captures. There seems to be a constant barking, bleating, howling, hooting or neighing heard in the distance and through the fog of these lands, reminding us both of the persistence of the natural world and of the dangers lurking everywhere here. When Sujo settles into the city, the animals disappear, replaced by other dangers. But the dread seems to have disappeared as well. Without it, Sujo is able to get on with the business of living. He has work, a small room in a shared building, and intellectual stimulation in the form of the literature class and books his teacher loans him. He doesn’t need much, but how different his life and his future feel here versus in his dead-end village, representative of so many like it (the number “43” painted on a wall at the university, referring to a group of male college students abducted and killed in 2014, reminds us of this). The women of this story are the caretakers, giving the boys at least a chance at a manhood free from crime and violence. Nemesio even has some powers of divination which help her save Sujo’s life on more than one occasion. In the city, the professor takes over. Though she has plenty of reason not to, she takes Sujo under her wing, shepherding him through the university system. A final scene suggests the promise of a real future for Sujo, once again at the protective hand of a woman who sees not just that he has potential, but that he – like all children, no matter where they’re born – is deserving of the opportunity to live in peace. Despite the darkness in this film, it comes as a relief when it ends on this hopeful note, even if we know for every Sujo there are more Jai’s and Jeremy’s who don’t make it out. Review originally published at AWFJ.org Images courtesy of The Forge

Could the 4-Day Workweek Be the Answer to Finding Work-Life Balance? Change doesn’t come quickly, but there’s a rising movement to make the 5-day week a thing of the past   Article originally published in SUCCESS+ When Greece introduced a 6-day workweek for some business sectors last July, the backlash was immediate. Unions called it “barbaric,” and protestors took to the streets, according to news reports.   In fact, the Greek initiative contradicts a prevailing worldwide trend. Many countries and companies are instead eying a 4-day workweek. In 2022, Belgium became the first country in Europe to give workers the legal right to work the same number of hours in four days rather than five.   Last year, a widely reported 4-day workweek trial in the UK , which allowed companies to tailor the model to fit their individual needs , was the largest of its kind and boasted excellent results. Some 71% of employees reported less burnout and 39% less stress, while 15% of the 2,900 employees who participated in the trail said that “no amount of money” would convince them to return to a 5-day workweek.   Companies in the trial also reported an average 35% increase in revenue. Of the 61 companies that participated in the UK trial, 56 opted to continue with the 4-day workweek. “In Britain, and this is the same in the States as well, we have a culture of very long working hours,” says Joe Ryle , director of the UK-based advocacy group the 4 Day Week Campaign, one of the organizations behind the UK trail. “ Particularly in the UK, we work the longest full-time hours compared to our neighbors in Europe, but we also have one of the least productive economies. What we are producing is a workforce that’s burnt out, stressed, overworked, not very happy.” “It’s time for a change,” Ryle says. “And the encouraging thing is that the 4-day week has come a long way in quite a short space of time.” A Brief History Historical records show that industrial laborers in the 1800s worked as many as 100 hours per week. This prompted the creation of labor unions in the late 1800s that called for limiting the workday to 8 hours. It would take many more proposals and a half a century before Congress would pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which officially restricted the workweek to 44 hours, amended two years later in 1940 to 40 hours per week.   That model is still the norm. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics , American workers averaged 8.09 hours of work per weekday in 2023. That’s an average, meaning many workers regularly exceed those hours. In some fields, it can be seen as a sign of status and dedication to put in much more.   Still, cracks in the structure and acceptance of traditional work schedules have been appearing for decades. In the 1950s , then-Vice President Richard Nixon promoted the 4-day workweek as a means to raise the “standard of living” for Americans. In the 1980s , the feminist movement began advocating for flexible schedules and maternity leave for women, demands that eventually extended to men. Following the COVID pandemic , many workers realized they wanted more flexibility in their work lives.   A Gallup survey of 5,458 US adults in May 2023 found that 77% were optimistic that a 4-day workweek option would enhance their wellbeing more than any other offered initiatives, such as offering mental health days or limiting work outside of work hours.   “In just a few years, we now have evidence that shows that actually when people are working over four days rather than five, not only are they much happier because they have a better work-life balance,” Ryle says, “they also are much more productive in the workplace. They're able to get on with the work that needs to get done in four days rather than five.” The website for 4 Day Week Campaign further broadens the benefits of a shortened workweek out from the individual to society at large, the economy and the environment, through outcomes like lower unemployment, increased productivity, boosts to tourism, more gender equality and wellbeing, strengthened communities, a more sustainable lifestyle and a reduced carbon footprint. “This isn't a change which is going to happen overnight for everyone,” Ryle cautions. “If you look at the history of moving from a 6-day week to a 5-day week, it does take a while. It does tend to take around a decade or even longer for… an entire economy to shift. It's going to take time, and there will be different ways of getting there and it will look different in different sectors.”   One Company’s Experience   Jenna Kutcher, CEO of her own self-named digital marketing firm, opted to try the 4-day workweek for her business after reading Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s 2020 book , “Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less – Here’s How,” which profiles South Korean companies that went against the grain of local culture and found great success with shorter workweeks.   She was also inspired by a friend who asked if she ever took a “sacred day,” described as “ one day of the week that was reserved just for you. No guilt. Do whatever you need. Fill up your own cup before serving everyone else.”   “That was just a huge challenge to my way of thinking and working,” Kutcher notes. “I was finding that most of the time I was just shifting right from work into motherhood and vice versa.” Curious, she decided to try a 90-day trial of the 4-day workweek. “The expectation for my team was no using Slack on Fridays, no hitting emails, no expecting anyone else to be online.”   Though she says she didn’t want to commit without trying it out first, she found that her team “loved it,” and productivity and profits were not compromised. Outside contractors were informed that Fridays were not a workday, and they proved flexible. “It was a non-contested decision to continue on with a 4-day workweek, which we have done now for over a year because we absolutely love it.”   “My entire team is a team of women. Most of us are mothers. It was just amazing to have a little bit of time for ourselves, but also to fill that day with family, life stuff and admin so that our weekends could be more enjoyable.”   She adds: “Fridays are now my sacred day, where I can fit in appointments, I can go get a massage, I can take a nap, I can spend time with my family or sit down and read a book. And I feel like it's also challenged us in the work setting to be more efficient with the time that we have, but also to not overthink things, to just be in a more active state, whereas I think that a lot of times your projects will expand the amount of time given to them.”   “It’s something that I hope more companies put into practice, especially companies with moms,” Kutcher says. She advocates for companies to give it a trial run, like summer Fridays, for example, to see if it works for them. “I'm just a huge believer that yes, you can do it all, but you need the system and support to be able to do that. And so for me, the four day work week has totally helped.”   Her employees concur. Stephanie Montgomery, in Customer Support, says transitioning to a 4-day workweek has given her “ freedom and flexibility that I didn’t even know I needed.” She adds: “ Being able to fully enjoy my life outside of my job makes me a better employee and you can bet that I’m hustling to complete all necessary tasks by Thursday evening so that I can close my laptop for the week with a sense of accomplishment. ”   Marisa Vittoria, VP or operations, says that as a result of the 4-day week, “ I’m a better mother, wife, daughter, and I’d like to say leader.” She says her family has saved money on childcare and she is now able to spend more time with her retired parents. At work, her time management and execution efficiency have only improved, and “I’ve now become a pro at batching my days to get what I need done, communicating in a more effective and direct manner to manage and execute cross-brand deliverables and still protect evenings with my family.”   “This type of work week takes time, effort, consistency, leadership plus team commitment, and of course a little creativity,” Vittoria adds, “but once a flow is set, it is 100% worthwhile.”