Written and directed by Miranda July; director of photography, Nikolai von Graevenitz; edited by Andrew Bird; music by Jon Brion; production design by Elliott Hostetter; costumes by Christie Wittenborn; produced by Gina Kwon, Roman Paul and Gerhard Meixner; released by Roadside Attractions. With: David Warshofsky (Marshall), Isabella Acres (Gabriella) and Joe Putterlik (Joe/the Moon).

I cannot agree with reviewers who found July's stories 'laugh out loud funny'; I am actually kind of horrified by the thought of someone laughing at the plights of her painfully unhappy protagonists. July's language stutters and chokes as each internal monologue unfolds its ugly revelations, almost as if recoiling in disgust. My father’s first book, Xeebtii Geerida (1990). The complete devotion to his craft inspired me. This book was about the looming Somali civil war, and it kept him sane and gave him a way to process the collapse of everything. His focus on writing and how it helped him survive left an impression on me.Michael Morris & James Lingwood, Co – Directors of Artangel, said: “Artists continually lead Artangel into uncharted territory so we are delighted to be collaborating with Miranda July in joining forces with four faith – based charities on the third floor of Selfridges. Our shop within a shop, like London itself, is proudly open to the world.” Everybody gets lonely sometimes, and Miranda July crams as many forms of loneliness she can think of in her first collection of stories. Official Somebody hotspots so far include Los Angeles County Museum of Art (with a presentation by Ms. July on Sept. 11), The New Museum (presentation on Oct. 9), Yerba Buena Center for The Arts (San Francisco), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and Museo Jumex (Mexico City.) Museum-goers are invited to send and deliver messages in these spaces where there are likely to be other users.

But this same theme kept rinsing and repeating. And I kept thinking, regardless of who was narrating, that it was Miranda July the whole time. She was just making each puppet-character open and close their mouths while she did the talking (and it would be just like her to turn her short stories into a puppet show - that's just the quirky kind of thing she'd do). By Miranda July with Oumarou Idrissa, commissioned for “The Future Starts Here” exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. July's stories startle us at every turn, sometimes by their sexual frankness, sometimes by passages of impossibly lush eloquence . . . and very often by their inventiveness" ( San Francisco Chronicle) The first sentence of the message is automatically “[Recipient’s name]? It’s me, [Sender’s Name]” — reminding the stand-in to assume the identity of the sender. Alan Stewart is currently the vicar of two churches in Hertford, England. He studied Foundation Art at Belfast Art College, then graduated with a degree in Fashion and Textiles from Central St Martins in London. From an early age he has drawn and painted. He has exhibited in various churches and galleries. He works are in charcoal, pastel and collage.

I thought her movie was pretty good too, although right on the edge of being twee and pretentious. You see, when you take a picture of something you give it weight. You're saying: this moment is important enough to be recorded exactly, in sight and sound, for posterity. And Miranda July's fancies just can't take very much weight. They're will o' the wisps, soap bubbles. Pretty but ephemeral. In "Something That Needs Nothing", two teenage girls run away from the suburbs together and move to the city. "In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents. I even had two." Again, the fantasy doesn't match the reality. The narrator, the less confident of the two girls, is deserted by her lover. To pay her rent, she gets a job in a sex shop, where she wears a wig and plays with herself while lonely men watch her through a grimy window. "I hated my job, but I liked that I could do it. I had once believed in a precious inner self, but now I didn't. I had thought that I was fragile, but I wasn't. It was like suddenly being good at sports."