Browse Films

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    [id] => 267
    [title] => They Are Their Own Gifts
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    [year_released] => 1978
    [text] => A three volume set of film portraits--Muriel Rukeyser, Alice Neel and Anna Sokolow.  The poetry, painting, and dance of these three women is not artistic purism, but the product of a life conducted within social fabric.

Through interviews, photographs and her own poetry readings, Muriel Rukeyser is shown as a civil rights and political activist.  "This film shows beautifully how Rukeyser's courageous and independent life and her fierce and compassionate lyricism are forged to make the long poem that is her life."  --Galen Williams, Executive Director, Poets and Writers.

Portrait painter Alice Neel has created a psychological and spiritual history of the modern era, as it has been registered in the human face.  "A dazzling portrait of an exuberant and vivacious painter." --Dr. Joyce Rosa, Professor of Art History, Long Island University.

Anna Sokolow's choreography and dance draws on her early life experience with poverty and oppression.  "Modern dance was originally an expression of social concern.  This film illuminates both a period that needs to be recalled and a leading choreographer who grew out of that period."  --Anna Kisselgoff, dance critic, New York Times.
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    [id] => 187
    [title] => Daughter Rite
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    [year_released] => 1978
    [text] => "Daughter Rite is a classic, the missing link between the 'direct Cinema' documentaries and the later hybrids that acknowledged truth couldn't always be found in front of a camera lens. Scandalous in its day for bending the rules of representation to enlighten its audience about filmmaking, DAUGHTER RITE has a lot to teach folks hooked on reality TV, too. Citron's documentary inquiries into feminism, women in the trades, and feminist approaches to media representation are time capsules that merit re-opening."
 -B. Ruby Rich, author of " Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement"

Includes special bonus feature, WHAT YOU TAKE FOR GRANTED, also by Michelle Citron.
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    [id] => 370
    [title] => Theatre Girls
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    [year_released] => 1978
    [text] => In her final piece at film school, Longinotto and her partner take us into the "Theatre Girls Club" in Soho, London–a hostel for elderly and destitute women and the only shelter in London that would take in any woman at any time. The filmmakers lived in the hostel for more than two months, establishing an extraordinary level of trust with their “cast” —from the home’s feisty cook to an elderly resident who was a terminal alcoholic. In what will later be recognized as a signature style, Longinotto films without judgement and finds the humor and humanity in situations and characters that might otherwise be seen as tragic. This stunning film debut earned awards at several European festivals and screened to acclaim in the US and Asia.
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    [id] => 667
    [title] => Diary of an African Nun
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    [year_released] => 1977
    [text] => DIARY OF AN AFRICAN NUN (dir. Julie Dash, 1977), adapted from a short story by Alice Walker, follows a nun in Uganda consumed by doubt as she prepares to take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Her anguish intensifies night after night as she lies in her convent room and listens to the rhythmic, beckoning drums of her village. This short, which precedes and anticipates her acclaimed feature DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST, was a deliberate first move by director Julie Dash toward narrative filmmaking. 

Restored by Indie Collect in collaboration with the UCLA Film Archive and Women Make Movies. Available for exhibition. Please contact [email protected] for more information.
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    [id] => 199
    [title] => A Minor Altercation
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    [year_released] => 1977
    [text] => A fight between an African American and a white schoolgirl in Boston is explored in all its complexity in this fact-based drama from one of the producers of EYES ON THE PRIZE.
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    [id] => 169
    [title] => Divine Horsemen-The Living Gods of Haiti
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    [year_released] => 1977
    [text] => A journey into the fascinating world of the Voudoun religion edited from footage shot by Deren in Haiti.
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    [id] => 203
    [title] => In the Best Interests of the Children
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    [year_released] => 1977
    [text] => This groundbreaking film on lesbian mothering portrays the diversity of experience, race and class among eight lesbian mothers and their children.
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    [id] => 140
    [title] => Mother of Many Children
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    [year_released] => 1977
    [text] => Composed of a series of vignettes featuring Native women from different first nations, this classic work by Alanis Obomsawin, an Abenaki, reflects a proud matriarchal culture that for centuries has been pressured to adopt the values and traditions of white society.  By tracing the cycle of Native women's lives from birth to childhood, puberty, young adulthood, maturity and old age, the film shows how Native women have struggled to regain a sense of equality, instilled cultural pride in their children and passed on their stories and language to younger generations.  Produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
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    [id] => 160
    [title] => The Yellow Wallpaper
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    [year_released] => 1977
    [text] => This short dramatic film brings to life the classic Charlotte Perkins Gilman story of the same name, which has become an important addition to American literature course curricula. Set in the late 1800s, the story features Elizabeth, an aspiring writer who becomes ill and is forced by her doctor and her husband to take a "rest cure." Completely isolated, her mind creates a world inside the wallpaper in her room-a world in which a woman is trapped and unable to escape.
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    [id] => 233
    [title] => La Nouba des Femmes du Mont-Chenoua
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    [year_released] => 1977
    [text] => Finally available in the United States, this classic film from the acclaimed, late novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar is essential viewing for an understanding of women in Algeria. Taking its title and structure from the “Nouba," a traditional song of five movements, this haunting film mingles narrative and documentary styles to document the creation of women’s personal and cultural histories.

Returning to her native region 15 years after the end of the Algerian war, Lila is obsessed by memories of the war for independence that defined her childhood. In dialogue with other Algerian women, she reflects on the differences between her life and theirs.  In lyrical footage she contemplates the power of grandmothers who pass down traditions of anti-colonial resistance to their heirs.  Reading the history of her country as written in the stories of women’s lives, Assia Djebar’s LA NOUBA DES FEMMES DU MONT-CHENOUA is an engrossing portrait of speech and silence, memory and creation, and a tradition where the past and present coexist.

Widely hailed as one of the most important figures in francophone Maghrebian literature, Djebar authored more than a dozen books, including A SISTER TO SCHEHEREZADE and WOMEN OF ALGIERS IN THEIR APARTMENT.  She also was a Professor and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at the Louisiana State University.
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    [id] => 245
    [title] => Riddles of the Sphinx
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    [year_released] => 1977
    [text] => Laura Mulvey, author of the seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema , helped to establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study. With Peter Wollen, she directed one of the most visually stimulating, theoretically rigorous films to emerge from the 1970s. RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX is a landmark fusion of feminism and formal experimentation that seeks to create a non-sexist film language. Its title figure, the legendary creature of antiquity, terrorized Thebes and self-destructed only after  Oedipus correctly answered her riddle.  Invoking  and challenging traditional interpretations of the Oedipus story as a movement from matriarchal culture to patriarchal order, the film also probes  representation in film itself.  The central narrative section, about  Louise, a middle-class woman, and her four-year-old daughter Ana, is an inquiry into the arbitrary nature of conventional film techniques that captures  Louise's struggles with motherhood in a patriarchal society.
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    [id] => 196
    [title] => Healthcaring
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    [year_released] => 1976
    [text] => HEALTHCARING: FROM OUR END OF THE SPECULUM, produced by Women Make Movies, is a pioneering, bold, and sensitive documentary — one of the first to honestly chronicle women’s relationship to gynecology and healthcare. Made more than four decades before #MeToo, the film was ahead of its time in taking on issues of abuse by male doctors and portraying women taking control of their own vaginal exams. Women of all ages and backgrounds speak candidly of their experiences with the healthcare system, and the film documents the growing number of women who are questioning long standing medical practices and working to implement alternative and more effective health care. The positive, warm style of the film encourages women to share their own experiences and gain a better sense of their right to receive better healthcare.

New 4K restoration funded by the HFPA Trust and IndieCollect donors to our Jane Fonda Fund for Women Directors. Available for exhibition. Please contact [email protected] for more information.
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    [id] => 369
    [title] => Pride of Place
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    [year_released] => 1976
    [text] => A rarely seen classic, PRIDE OF PLACE was made as a first project while Longinotto was a student at England’s National School of Television and Film. As a teenager, the filmmaker had been condemned to a girls' boarding school in an old, isolated castle in Buckinghamshire. Wisely, she ran away at the age of 17, and years later took the opportunity for sweet revenge. In this dark and expressive film, Longinotto exposes the repressive school from the students’ perspective—as a kind of miniature state with bizarre rules, indigestible food and absurd punishments. One year after the release of the film, the boarding school was closed down. With PRIDE OF PLACE, Longinotto sets the tone for a long career of films in which individuals revolt against oppressive authorities and stifling traditions.
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    [id] => 177
    [title] => Invisible Adversaries
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    [year_released] => 1976
    [text] => Breaking free of conventional unities of body, space and time, this early feature by one of Europe's leading feminist filmmakers is a haunting excursion into psychic disintegration and crumbling identity.  It loosely covers one year in the life of Anna, a young Viennese photographer increasingly convinced that the Hyksos, a hostile alien force, are invading people's bodies and responsible for the decay and rising violence around her.  Valie Export skillfully exploits montage and integrates video, performance and installation art with elements from Cubism, Surrealism, Dada and avant-garde cinema.
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    [id] => 666
    [title] => Four Women
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    [year_released] => 1975
    [text] => In FOUR WOMEN (dir. Julie Dash, 1975), one of the first experimental films by a Black woman filmmaker, dancer Linda Martina Young interprets the same-titled ballad by Nina Simone and embodies the spirits of four women — Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing and Peaches — who represent common stereotypes of Black women attempting to survive in America. Just as Nina Simone sings as each of the four women, Linda Martina Young costumes herself as each woman and shifts her style of movement to embody each one. And Dash changes the editing style slightly, at times pausing the film, halting the fluidity of motion, before cross-dissolving it into the next shot.  

Restored by Indie Collect in collaboration with the UCLA Film Archive and Women Make Movies. Available for exhibition. Please contact [email protected] for more information.
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    [id] => 163
    [title] => Womanhouse
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    [year_released] => 1974
    [text] => WOMANHOUSE is an historic documentary about one of the most important feminist cultural events of the 1970s. Judy Chicago (best-known as the creator of THE DINNER PARTY) and Miriam Shapiro rented an old Hollywood mansion and altered its interior through decor and set-pieces to "search out and reveal the female experience...the dreams and fantasies of women as they sewed, cooked, washed and ironed away their lives." WOMANHOUSE is a fascinating historical look at feminism, its reception in the 1970s, and the ever-important relationship between art and social change.
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    [id] => 268
    [title] => The Films of Maya Deren
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    [year_released] => 1959
    [text] => Maya Deren's fascinating and beautiful films are masterpieces of their era and provide an important insight into the history of the avant-garde. MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943, 14 minutes), AT LAND (1944, 14 minutes, Silent), A STUDY IN CHOREOGRAPHY FOR CAMERA (1945, 3 minutes, Silent), RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME (1946, 15 minutes, Silent), MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE (1948, 13 minutes), and THE VERY EYE OF THE NIGHT (1959, 15 minutes).
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    [id] => 538
    [title] => Bhangra Jig
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    [year_released] => 
    [text] => A vibrant short film about how young Asian people in Scotland celebrate desire and self-pride through dance and music.
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Array
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    [id] => 689
    [title] => Test film #1
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    [id] => 185
    [title] => Peel
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    [year_released] => 
    [text] => This film is only available as part of the series "The Films of Jane Campion." View series.
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    [id] => 474
    [title] => Helen Lee Compilation
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    [year_released] => 
    [text] => Helen Lee’s internationally acclaimed short films are now available for purchase in a 3-DVD set. This compilation includes SALLY’S BEAUTY SPOT (1990), MY NIAGARA (1992) and SUBROSA (2000).

(12 mins) SALLY'S BEAUTY SPOT - A large black mole above an Asian woman's breast serves as a metaphor for cultural and racial difference in this engaging experimental film. Offscreen women's voices and scenes from THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG parallel and counterpoint Sally's own interracial relationships and emerging self-awareness. A provocative and stylish meditation on Asian femininity.

(40 mins) MY NIAGARA - Grasping the texture of half-expressed desire, this beautifully drawn drama evokes the complex dislocations of an Asian American woman. Shadowed by the death of her mother, Julie Kumagai's life with her widower father is marked by pained, turbulent exchanges. Indifferent to a break-up with her boyfriend and the lure of a long-planned trip, she finds some refuge in her workplace where meets Tetsuro, a young Korean man newly emigrated from Japan who is obsessed with all things American. But together they discover no easy resolutions.
MY NIAGARA was funded by the Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 

(22 mins) SUBROSA traces a young woman's journey to Korea, the land of her birth, to find the mother she's never known. This exquisitely crafted drama probes the idealized, often false constructions of cultural and maternal identities wrought by the adoptee's return. SUBROSA tracks the unnamed heroine from a sterile adoption agency office to seedy bars and motel rooms on neon strips, then to a stark U.S. army camp town and the bustling flower markets of Seoul. Though her path to self-destruction and ultimate self-revelation ironically and tragically mirrors that of her imagined biological mother, the past remains elusive to her, the secret intact.
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