PNW Awards: The Joyless Economy
November 15, 2026
Seattle Film Critics Society PNW Awards 2026
A documentary that explores how a woman's movie collection triggers her infidelity. Created for one viewer—the woman whose confessions are revealed through hypnotic second-person narration.
Director Marjorie Conrad and producer John Tuthill scheduled to attend, with post-film Q&A moderated by film critic Eric Zhu (The Insert, Drink in the Movies).
Tickets
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Sunday, November 15, 2026
Cinema can sometimes become the ground on which a person’s most intimate desires are built. Marjorie Conrad’s The Joyless Economy unfolds the inner landscape of a woman through an accumulation of film posters and images. Though it follows a woman whose relationship begins to fracture because of her film collection, the film is not ultimately about infidelity or obsession. Its deeper question concerns how two realms shape one another: a life formed under the influence of cinema, and cinema reshaped by the experience of life.
A second-person narration addressed to herself functions both as confession and as a voice of self-analysis, turning the speaker into an object of her own scrutiny. The film was made for a single viewer, yet paradoxically this private letter summons each audience member’s own memories of cinema. The films she has collected no longer remain other people’s stories. Each image encounters life, becoming a new memory and generating a new narrative.
"Exploring the long relationship between human beings and cinema known as cinephilia, The Joyless Economy becomes a small anthropology of how we collect images and invent ourselves within them." — DMZ International Documentary Festival
"A bracingly, beautifully confessional film that’s as formally inventive as it is emotionally illuminating, Marjorie Conrad’s documentary … is a daring demonstration of all that independent cinema can be." – Chase Hutchinson, The Wrap
- Director: Marjorie Conrad
- Country: USA
- Year: 2026
- Running Time: 58 min.
- Producer: Marjorie Conrad, John Tuthill
- Screenplay: B. Curran, Marjorie Conrad
- Cinematographers: B. Curran, J. McCarthy, John Tuthill, Marjorie Conrad
- Editors: Marjorie Conrad
- Filmography: Body Issues (2024), Desire Path (Final Cut) (2021), Chemical Cut (2016), Limehouse (2011)