Catherine Called Birdy

Lina Dunham's "Catherine Called Birdy" (2022) is a medieval period comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Bella Ramsey plays Birdy — a fourteen-year-old girl in 1290 England who keeps a diary cataloguing every man her debt-ridden father lines up as a potential husband. The film adapts Karen Cushman's 1994 Newbery Medal-winning novel.

Her father (Andrew Scott) is broke and determined. Each suitor is worse than the last. Her mother (Billy Piper) is quietly sympathetic. An aunt played by Sophie Okonedo is the one adult in Birdy's world who sees her as something other than a transaction. Dunham leans into anachronism deliberately — the dialogue is contemporary, the humor is dry, and the mud-and-chainmail setting is precisely the system Birdy is up against.

Amazon released the film in September 2022, two months before "The Last of Us" gave Ramsey a global audience. Watching it now, the performance is already fully formed. "Don't call me lady," Birdy announces at the start. Watch "Catherine Called Birdy" (2022) online on iFILM.