Rebecca Miller started rolling film on Personal Velocity: Three Portraits on this day in 2001. As the educated woman’s answer to girl-power cinema, the movie showcased the acting talents of Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey and Fairuza Balk in telling three separate tales of women grasping for their own empowerment. Sedgwick plays Delia, a woman on the path to freedom from her abusive husband; Posey is Greta, wavering in fidelity to her husband; Balk takes to the highway as Paula, desperate to prevent further meltdown. Personal Velocity premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2002 and earned both the Grand Jury Prize and Cinematography Award for now-frequent Miller collaborator Ellen Kuras.
Quotable: “How could he still love me? If he does, it’s because he doesn’t know me. I’m rotten with ambition, a lusty little troll, the kind of demon you’d find at the bottom floor of hell pulling fingernails off the loansharks.” –Parker Posey as Greta, often cited as the movie’s stand-out star.