Jean of the Joneses

Price: $4.99 + taxes and fees

Bonus Content: Rental includes 80 minutes of bonus content, including a conversation from the TIFF 2020 Industry Conference with directors Stella Meghie, Radha Blank, and Lulu Wang.

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Stella Meghie’s whip-smart comedy focuses on a young writer wrestling with her career aspirations, romantic mishaps, and chaotic funeral preparations.

A hit at TIFF 2016, Toronto-born writer-director Stella Meghie’s (The Photograph, The Weekend) debut feature is a whip-smart comedy concerning three generations of women in the Jones family. Jean (Taylour Paige) is a chronically self-analyzing twentysomething writer seeking solace from a recent breakup and a vista of unenticing career prospects by hanging out with her mother, grandmother, and two aunts in their Brooklyn apartment. The death of the family’s estranged patriarch, and the ensuing chaos as the women attempt to plan his funeral, compels the Joneses to confront their complex family history, and to understand themselves and each other.

Jean of the Joneses takes the multigenerational family comedy into clever new territory. The Jones women are thoughtful, shockingly honest, and exceptionally funny, and Meghie’s film observes them all with infectious affection.

Meghie’s debut feature set the tone for a body of work imbued with fresh storytelling “center[ed] around the multiplicity of [B]lack familyhood, but more importantly, on [B]lack women that are complex and animated” (Fariha Róisín, SSENSE).

Official Selection, 2016 Toronto International Film Festival

Content advisories: drug use, coarse language