ONLINE—Flannery

(Mark Bosco, Elizabeth Coffman, US 2019, 97 min.)

The life and work of Mary Flannery O’Connor is explored in this documentary featuring Alice Walker and Tommy Lee Jones, with Mary Steenburgen reading O’Connor’s writings. O’Connor was heavily influenced by many factors of her upbringing, including her Irish heritage, her Catholic faith, and her Georgia surroundings, and the lupus that took both her father’s, and her own, life. The film explores her early life into World War II, when O’Connor attends the Georgia State College for Women and discovers that there may be more for her in the world than the farm back home. Following her calling as an artist and a writer, O’Connor is accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then into the Yaddo artists’ community in Saratoga Springs. The film then covers her twelve-year career, the difficulty in adapting her works to the screen, and the relationships that shaped and informed her writing.