Ventre Livre
Ventre Livre is only available as part of a series "Women's Lives and Choices." View series.
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What My Mother Told Me
Exquisitely beautiful and profoundly moving, WHAT MY MOTHER TOLD ME is a dramatic journey towards self discovery. The story focuses on Jesse, a young woman from England, who goes to Trinidad to bury her father. Reluctantly she agrees to meet her mother, whom she thought had abandoned her when she was a child. Her mother tells her stories, revealing a troubled and violent marriage, and Jesse is forced to face the truth about her past. WHAT MY MOTHER TOLD ME cleverly evokes complex connections between history, memory, violence and cultural identity.
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Voices Heard Sisters Unseen
VOICES HEARD SISTERS UNSEEN is a powerful and inspirational film showing how survivors of domestic violence are working to change the way the system treats battered women in search of justice and safety. Interviews, poetry, dance and music combine to present a feminist analysis about how courts, police and social services 're-victimize' battered women who are deaf, disabled, lesbians, prostitutes, HIV-positive or without official immigrant status. VOICES HEARD SISTERS UNSEEN is an important call for multi-issue activism and an integrated response to services for battered women.
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Covered: The Hejab in Cairo, Egypt
Just over a decade ago it was hard to find women on the streets of Cairo who veiled, a custom that their forebearers struggled to overthrow at the beginning of the twentieth century. But today, many Muslim women in Egypt wear a head scarf called the hejab, and in more extreme cases they cover their entire faces. This absorbing documentary offers a rare opportunity to examine the restoration of veiling and the reasons for its pervasiveness through the eyes of Egyptian women. In unique interviews with women of different ages and backgrounds, COVERED reveals that Islamic tradition, religious fundamentalism, and growing nationalism are not solely responsible for decisions to wear the hejab. Diverse social, economic and political factors, as well as personal preferences, often play prominent roles. As timely as it is compelling, the film shows how complex causes account for a phenomenon that is poorly understood outside the Muslim world.
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The Vienna Tribunal
Highlights of moving personal testimonies at the Global Tribunal on Violations of Women's Rights-held in conjunction with U.N. World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993-reveal why women's rights need to be seen as human rights. Made in conjunction with the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University, THE VIENNA TRIBUNAL is not simply a film documenting events of the past, but a thought-provoking analysis of the abuses women suffer all over the world.
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Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice
Yuri Kochiyama was a Japanese American woman who lived in Harlem for more than 40 years and had a long history of activism on a wide range of issues. Through extensive interviews with family and friends, archival footage, music and photographs, YURI KOCHIYAMA chronicles this remarkable woman’s contribution to social change through some of the most significant events of the 20th century, including the Black Liberation movement, the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, and the Japanese American Redress movement. In an era of divided communities and racial conflict, Kochiyama offered an outstanding example of an equitable and compassionate multiculturalist vision.
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Cancer in Two Voices
“I’m the first among our friends to have cancer... Many will see their future in the way I handle mine,” Barbara Rosenblum wrote after learning she had advanced breast cancer. For three years Barbara had yet to live, she and her partner, Sandra Butler, documented their lives with courage and frankness. This stunning film provides a unique view into the intimacy of a relationship in a time of crisis. The two women talk about their identity as Jewish women and as lesbians, and they speak openly about the difficult issues each is facing: anger, guilt, feelings about their bodies and changing sexuality, about death and loss. Never once losing either its balance or its fierce emotional integrity, CANCER IN TWO VOICES provides a practical example of dealing with death with sensitivity and a deep commitment to living.
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Home Away from Home
A bittersweet drama that unfolds almost without dialogue, this prizewinning short film from Sankofa Film and Video conveys the isolation of immigrant women’s experiences. Miriam lives with her children in a cramped and dreary house near the airport where she works. The planes coming and going overhead remind her of how far removed she is from her rural African roots. Eventually Miriam constructs a beautiful mud hut in her garden, a magical space which takes her away from the loneliness crowding her suburban existence. Although her neighbors are intolerant, her daughter Fumi learns something about the African side of herself.
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The Mother: Mitos Maternos
This wry, self-reflective film explores the mythical figure of the mother from multiple viewpoints-documentary and fiction, Spanish and English, theory and experience. The director interviews people on the street, views Hollywood stalwarts of maternal sentiment like Stella Dallas, reads what feminist thinkers have to say on the subject, and copes with life as a single Latina mother. A feminist telenovela for the 90s, THE MOTHER challenges popular beliefs about the mother's place and traditional representations of sacrifice and guilt.
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On Cannibalism
King Kong meets the family photograph in this provocative experimental film exploring the West's insatiable appetite for native bodies in museums, world's fairs, and early cinema. Intertwining personal narrative about race and identity in the U.S. with layered footage, artifacts and video effects, ON CANNIBALISM looks back at anthropological truisms with outrage and irony.
"...In these times of heated debates around diversity and multiculturalism, ON CANNIBALISM is bound to arouse interesting discussions concerning race, identity and difference. " - Teshome Gabriel, UCLA
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Lebanon: Bits and Pieces
LEBANON: BITS AND PIECES is an exquisitely beautiful and profoundly moving exploration of the myths and realities of present-day Lebanon, as reflected through the voices of women. During Olga Naccache's childhood, Lebanon was known to the outside world as an exemplary model of peace in the heart of an Arab Middle East dominated by dictators. Following a seven year absence, Naccache returned to Lebanon with a camera to record the dreams, disappointments and worries of women of her own generation and to meet a younger generation of women whose only memory is that of war. Through these voices, Naccache’s own voyage of rediscovery is revealed — rediscovery of her country and of herself.
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Song Journey
SONG JOURNEY takes Arlene Bowman (Navajo) on the pow-wow circuit in the hope of reviving her connection to traditional Native culture. There she finds a fascinating movement amongst Native American female musicians who are both carrying forward the musical traditions of the First Nations as well as conducting a gentle but effective rebellion against the male monopoly of the "inner circle" represented by the drum. SONG JOURNEY is a powerful illustration of the strength of contemporary Native cultural identity and a wonderful companion to Bowman's award-winning NAVAJO TALKING PICTURE.
SONG JOURNEY was funded by the Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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Beyond Black and White
BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE is a personal exploration of the filmmaker’s bicultural heritage (Caucasian and Asian/Begali) in which she relates her experiences to those of five other women from various biracial backgrounds. In lively interviews and group discussions these women reveal how they have been influenced by images of women in American media, how racism has affected them, and how their families and environments have shaped their racial identities. Their experiences are placed within the context of history, including miscegenation laws and governmental racial classifications. BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE is a remarkable celebration of diversity in American society.
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The Veiled Hope
THE VEILED HOPE explores the personal and political challenges facing Palestinian women through a series of wonderful portraits of women living on the Gaza and West Bank. The women explain how in their daily lives as doctors, schoolteachers, and activists they are working to rebuild Palestinian cultural identity. They also provide a rare insight into the complex feelings women have surrounding the emergence of political Islamic movements. THE VEILED HOPE gives an in-depth analysis of the position of Palestinian women as they juggle women’s and national liberation struggles.
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Outlaw
Leslie Feinberg, a self-identified "gender outlaw" who has spent much of zir life passing as a man, speaks with passion and intelligence about zir experiences in this film manifesto. Raw and confrontational, this film asks its audience to examine their assumptions about the "nature" of gender and calls for more sensitivity and awareness of the human rights and the dignity of transgendered people. Feinberg is the author of STONE BUTCH BLUES (Firebrand), an account of a working-class lesbian who passes as a man.
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Sweating Indian Style
The appropriation of Native American traditions by non-Natives comes under thoughtful scrutiny in this insightful documentary. As it follows the New Age activities of a group of Californian women learning to construct a sweat lodge and perform their own ceremony, it raises important questions about the use of elements of Native culture out of context, apart from the complex realities of American Indian experience. Interviews with diverse Native American women point out the problems inherent in this increasingly popular New Age phenomenon and its relationship to traditional forms of colonialism.
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Brincando El Charco
Refreshingly sophisticated in both form and content, BRINCANDO EL CHARCO contemplates the notion of “identity” through the experiences of a Puerto Rican woman living in the US. In a wonderful mix of fiction, archival footage, processed interviews and soap opera drama, BRINCANDO EL CHARCO tells the story of Claudia Marin, a middle-class, light-skinned Puerto Rican photographer/videographer who is attempting to construct a sense of community in the US. Confronting the simultaneity of both her privilege and her oppression, BRINCANDO EL CHARCO becomes a meditation on class, race and sexuality as shifting differences.
BRINCANDO EL CHARCO was funded by the Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter
With profound insight and a healthy dose of levity, COMPLAINTS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER chronicles the various stages of a mother's Alzheimer's Disease and the evolution of a daughter's response to the illness. The desire to cure the incurable-to set right her mother's confusion and forgetfulness, to temper her mother's obsessiveness-gives way to an acceptance which is finally liberating for both daughter and mother. Neither depressing nor medical, COMPLAINTS OF A DUTIFUL DAUGHTER is much more than a story about Alzheimer's and family caregiving. It is ultimately a life-affirming exploration of family relations, aging and change, the meaning of memory, and love.
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Monday’s Girls
This fascinating documentary, by the filmmaker of THE BODY BEAUTIFUL, follows two young Nigerian women’s different experiences of a traditional rite of passage. Young virgins, irabo, spend five weeks in “fattening rooms”, emerging to dance before the villagers and to be married. The girls wear heavy copper coils on their legs to enforce inactivity as they are waited on and honored by their families. One of the young village women, Florence, is keen to take part. But Akisiye, who returns from the city at her father’s behest, is not certain she wants to. Combining voice-over and interviews, MONDAY'S GIRLS documents tradition, modernity, dissent and contradiction in African women’s lives.
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Dream Girls
This fascinating documentary, produced for the BBC, opens a door into the spectacular world of the Takarazuka Revue, a highly successful musical theater company in Japan. Each year, thousands of girls apply to enter the male-run Takarazuka Music School. The few who are accepted endure years of a highly disciplined and reclusive existence before they can join the Revue, choosing male or female roles. DREAM GIRLS offers a compelling insight into gender and sexual identity and the contradictions experienced by Japanese women today.
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Columbus on Trial
Inspired by the controversy surrounding the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' "discovery" of America, Portillo has fashioned a fanciful version of a courtroom were Columbus to return from his grave to stand trial. Cross-examined by the Latino comedy group, Culture Clash, Columbus is charged with atrocities against the Native peoples of the New World, including the rape and violent treatment of women. Satire and parody rule in this dynamic document about American history and colonization.
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