Eat the Kimono
EAT THE KIMONO is a brilliant documentary about Hanayagi Genshu, a Japanese feminist and avant-garde dancer and performer, who has spent her life defying her conservative culture’s contempt for independence and unconventionality. She denounced Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal, and dismissed death threats made against her by right-wing groups. “You mustn’t be eaten by the kimono,” says Genshu, making reference to the traditional Japanese dress designed to restrict movement for women, “You must eat the kimono, and gobble it up.” From the directors of THE GOOD WIFE OF TOKYO and HIDDEN FACES.
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The Edge of Each Other's Battles: The Vision of Audre Lorde
This powerful documentary is a moving tribute to legendary black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde, One of the most celebrated icons of feminism's second wave.
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The Education of Shelby Knox
Winner of the Sundance Best Cinematography Award and the SXSW Audience Award, WMM is pleased to be finally releasing this fascinating and powerful documentary. Lubbock, Texas has an abstinence-only sex education policy in its schools and some of the highest teen pregnancy and STD infection rates in the nation. Shelby Knox is a devout Baptist teenager who has pledged abstinence until marriage. When her interest in politics leads her to get involved in a campaign for comprehensive sex education in her town's public schools, and then to a fight for a gay-straight alliance, she must make a choice: Stand by and let others be hurt, or go against her parents, her pastor, and her peers to do what she knows is right.
THE EDUCATION OF SHELBY KNOX is an exceptionally timely and intimate look at the cultural wars from the perspective of a young woman’s life. The support her conservative family provides is an example of how a healthy democracy could look given the time and will to listen.
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Elida Schogt Trilogy
Elida Schogt’s deeply personal trilogy of short documentaries on Holocaust memory: ZYKLON PORTRAIT (1999), THE WALNUT TREE (2000) and SILENT SONG (2001) have been screened around the globe, garnering numerous awards. This trilogy includes:
ZYKLON PORTRAIT, a Holocaust film without Holocaust imagery that combines archival instructional films with family snapshots, home movies, underwater photography, and hand-painted imagery for an expressive exploration of how history and memory are related to one family's loss.
THE WALNUT TREE examines Holocaust memory, the family, and the role of photography in history through a striking combination of documentary and experimental approaches. As its point of departure, the film shows three girls in Dutch costumes posing for their father's camera. This sweet but fleeting moment, made static in a snapshot, is contrasted with live-action images of railway tracks--tracks that carried the death transports--now blurred by the passage of time.
“In SILENT SONG Schogt deftly conjures an elaborate dialogue around issues of memory in its various forms - personal, historical, filmic… [her] rich and nuanced economy of style is brilliantly illustrated here as these meditations lead to the most basic, yet most cogent statements on the nature of memory itself. Perhaps more importantly, Schogt points to the unstable nature of the recorded image, one that history has come to rely on.” - Barbara Goslawski, Independent Film Critic and Curator, Toronto
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Ella es el Matador (She is the Matador)
For Spaniards—and for the world—nothing has expressed their country’s traditionally rigid gender roles more powerfully than the image of the male matador. So sacred was the bullfighter’s masculinity to Spanish identity that a 1908 law barred women from the sport.
Visually stunning and beautifully crafted, ELLA ES EL MATADOR (She is the Matador) reveals the surprising history of the women who made such a law necessary, and offers fascinating profiles of two female matadors currently in the arena, the acclaimed Maripaz Vega and neophyte Eva Florencia. These women are gender pioneers by necessity, confronting both bull and social code. But what emerges through this mesmerizing film is their truest motivation—a sheer passion for bullfighting, in the pursuit of a dream.
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Emergence
Common themes of identity, alienation and herstory in the context of the diasporan experience emerge in this powerful film. Four Black and Third World women artists, among them African American feminist poet Audre Lorde and Palestinian performance artist Mona Hatoum, speak forcefully through their art and writing.
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Enemies of Happiness
"In September 2005, Afghanistan held its first parliamentary elections in 35 years. Among the candidates for 249 assembly seats was Malalai Joya, a courageous, controversial 27-year-old woman who had ignited outrage among hard-liners when she spoke out against corrupt warlords at the Grand Council of tribal elders in 2003. ENEMIES OF HAPPINESS is a revelatory portrait of this extraordinary freedom fighter and the way she won the hearts of voters, as well as a snapshot of life and politics in war-torn Afghanistan.
Amidst vivid, poetic images of Joya's dusty Farah Province, the film tracks the final weeks of her campaign, when death threats restrict her movements. But the parade of trusting constituents arriving on her doorstep leaves no doubt that Joya is a popular hero. Among her visitors is a 100-year-old woman who treks two hours to offer loyalty and herbal medicine. King Solomon-style, Joya acts as folk mediator and advocate, adjudicating between a wife and her violent, drug-addicted husband and counseling a family forced to marry off their adolescent daughter to a much older man. Protected by armed guards, Joya heads to poor rural areas to address crowds of women, pledging to be their voice and ‘expose the enemies of peace, women, and democracy.’ In the presence of her fierce tenacity, we can imagine the future of an enlightened nation.” - Caroline Libresco, Sundance Film Festival
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Escuela
There are over 800,000 students enrolled in migrant education programs in the United States and, of those, only 45-50% ever finish high school. ESCUELA, the sequel to Hannah Weyer’s critically acclaimed documentary LA BODA, personalizes these glaring statistics through the honest portrait of a teenage Mexican-American farm worker, Liliana Luis.
ESCUELA is a clear-eyed view into the lives of contemporary Mexican American migrants and their struggles to educate their children while obtaining employment. Centered around the life of Liliana, a daughter entering her first year of high school, Hannah Weyer follows the back-and-forth movement of the family between their home in Texas near the borderlands and the California agricultural fields. Despite the best efforts of the school systems to accommodate students like Liliana, the social and emotional life of this young woman is constantly in flux. This is an important work revealing the difficulties of girl life on the border in a way that no textbook could. - Joe Austin, Popular Culture Studies, Bowling Green University
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Esther Broner: A Weave of Women
Prolific writer, passionate activist, dedicated scholar and pioneering feminist, Esther Broner infused second wave feminism with a distinctive Jewish voice. In the mid-1970s, as the women’s movement was vastly changing views on gender and equality, Broner created a radical new Haggadah (the text for the Passover service seder) that preserved but reimagined Jewish rituals and culture by shifting the focus onto women. Transforming the male-centered service into a powerful reclamation of women’s lives and stories, it became, under Broner’s leadership, the basis for a Jewish feminist tradition that continues today.
This inspiring documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Lilly Rivlin revisits Broner’s richly engaged political, artistic and spiritual life through archival photos, video footage spanning several decades, and interviews with family and friends, including Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Grace Paley, and other famous feminists. Drawing its title from one of Broner’s celebrated novels, the film helps explore the intersection of feminism and religion, and helps answer the question, is there room for feminism and religious tradition in a traditionally male dominated space?
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Esther Newton Made Me Gay
A feature documentary about the pathbreaking cultural anthropologist, dog agility enthusiast, and iconic butch lesbian, Esther Newton.
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Eternal Seed
With insightful interviews and rare footage from India's agricultural industry, this keenly observed film depicts Indian women's struggles to use traditional farming practices instead of chemically-based agriculture. Comparing the practices of women who consider seeds sacred with multinational companies' use of sterilized hybrids, this evocative analysis celebrates the scientific basis of women's native traditions in a provocative look at the evolving meanings of healthy land use.
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Europlex
The fourth in Ursula Biemann's critically acclaimed series of video essays that investigates migration across borders, EUROPLEX, a collaboration with Angela Sanders, tracks the daily, sometimes illicit, border crossings between Morocco and Spain- a rare intersection of the first and third worlds. Paying off officials to look the other way, workers smuggle contraband across the border, sometimes crossing up to 11 times a day. In a now common scenario of global economics, Moroccan women work in North Africa to produce goods destined for the European market. And in perhaps the most surreal example of border logic, domesticas commute into a Spanish enclave in Moroccan territory, losing two hours as they step into the European time zone. With a mesmerizing soundtrack and a dizzying blend of video footage, digital graphics and text, the film exposes a fascinating, often hidden layer in the cultural and economic landscape between Europe and Africa- revealing the new rules and profound implications of globalization.
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Ever Shot Anyone?
Israeli filmmaker Michal Aviad provides a woman's take on how national culture is informed by male identity through the military experience that bonds her country's Jewish men. EVER SHOT ANYONE? documents Aviad's attempt to infiltrate the world of army reservists during their annual tour of duty on the Golan Heights. Gradually, but not without suspicion and hostility toward the intruder in their midst, the middle-aged civilian-soldiers reveal notions about male identity, friendship, family and gender relations. This dominant male culture through the eyes of the ultimate outsider--a woman.
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Everyone Their Grain of Sand
This award-winning documentary reveals the struggles of the citizens of Maclovio Rojas in Tijuana, Mexico as they battle the state government’s attempts to evict them from their homes to make way for multi-national corporations seeking cheap land and labor. Filmmaker Beth Bird followed the fiercely determined residents for three years as they persistently petitioned the state for basic services like running water, electricity and pay for their teachers, only to be met with bureaucratic stonewalling. Eventually, several community leaders are targeted for persecution, and one is arrested while others are forced into hiding.
Balancing these stories of hardship, Bird also captures intimate scenes of daily life in Maclovio Rojas, revealing hard-won triumphs such as the building of a school by hand and the graduation of an elementary school class. This compelling and ultimately inspiring documentary is an eye-opening look at the human cost of globalization and a moving testament to the power of grassroots activism.
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Exit: Leaving Extremism Behind
A former right-wing extremist explores why people join hate groups and what makes them decide to leave.
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