This curation of The Conversation UK’s arts and culture coverage was first published in our fortnightly newsletter, Something Good.

Hollywood still has an aversion to telling older women’s stories.

Research has found that older women are frequently relegated to supporting roles, or portrayed as grumpy, frumpy or senile. So when I saw the Brazilian film The Blue Trail at the Leeds Film Festival earlier this year, it felt like a breath of fresh air.

Tereza (Denise Weinberg) lives in a chilling near-future where a totalitarian regime forcibly removes anyone over 75, relocating them to remote colonies without consultation or consent. Faced with this looming threat of exclusion and invisibility as she turns 77, Tereza refuses to comply. Instead, she embarks on a surreal journey along the Amazon River to chase one final dream before she is “put out to pasture”. As she takes the steering wheel of a boat she has commandeered to engineer her escape, she also takes control of her life.

Throughout the film, Tereza proves younger people’s assumptions about her body wrong. When she is forced to wear an adult nappy she clearly doesn’t need, she uses it to kick-start her escape. When others assume she is ready to end her life quietly, she instead embarks on a surprising and thrilling new........

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