feminist/visual/culture: A 30th anniversary celebration of women make movies
The Body Beautiful
A film by Ngozi Onwurah
1991
23 minutes
England
Thomas 110
Friday April 5
In the "Autobiography and History" screenings starting at
9:30 A.M
This bold, stunning exploration of a white mother who undergoes a radical mastectomy and her Black
daughter who embarks on a modeling career reveals the profound effects of body image and the strain of
racial and sexual identity on their charged, intensely loving bond. At the heart of Onwurah’s brave
excursion into her mother’s scorned sexuality is a provocative interweaving of memory and fantasy. The
filmmaker plumbs the depths of maternal strength and daughterly devotion in an unforgettable tribute
starring her real-life mother, Madge Onwurah.
- Click for larger scan of above photo
- Onwurah at Flaherty Seminar
- Mama Africa story on Onwurah's Hangtime
- Onwurah's Monday's Girls
- "What is a Feminist Film? A Look at Ngozi Onwurah's The Body Beautiful (Carmela Garritano, 1998)
and an essay from the same site on her
I Bring You Frankincense
- Chapter on Onwurah and Body Beautiful cover art for Gwendolyn Audrey Foster's Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity
and in her Women Film Directors: An International Bio-Critical Dictionary
- Onwurah in Sisters of the Screen: Women of Africa on Film,Video and Telivision by Beti Ellerson
- Onwurah a topic in Linda S. Kauffman's
Bad Girls and Sick Boys Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture, from
UC Press
- Onwurah's UM interview
- Black Maria awardee fot Coffee Coloured Children
- The Body Beautiful at a conference on "Mothering in the African Diaspora:Literature, History, Society, Popular Culture and the Arts", Liss' paper becoming "Revisioning the Maternal Body: Loving in Difference in Ngozi Onwurah's film 'The Body Beautiful'," in Mothers and Daughters: Connection, Empowerment & Transformation, eds. Andrea O'Reilly and Sharon Abbey (Lanhan, MD: Rowman and Littlefield and Toronto: Centre for Feminist Research, York University, 2000
- The Body Beautiful featured in a paper on "Women's Autobiographical Documentary and the Construction of Identity," by Laura Vazquez at the Visible Evidence Conference
- Venus Analogue essay which discusses
The Body Beautiful and Onwurah's Coffeee Coloured Children
“Somber yet fanciful. Achieves a painful honesty” Janet Maslin, New York Times
“As cathartic as it is transgressive,” Amy Taubin, Village Voice
- Press Kit for The Body Beautiful and other films by Ngozi Onwurah
Center for Visual Culture
Bryn Mawr College
101 North Merion Avenue
Bryn Mawr,PA
19010-2899
