Algeria: Women at War
Parminder Vir, 1992, 52 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Algeria: Women at War offers a rare insight into the key role Algerian women played in their country’s liberation struggle from the French thirty years ago and their equally important place in today’s politics. This high-quality documentary uses a combination of interviews and archival footage to ponder the position of women in Algeria in the light of thirty years of single party rule, the rise of Islam and increasing political violence. It raises critical questions about the balancing act between women’s and national liberation struggles.

Ana Mendieta: Fuego de Tierra
Kate Horsfield, Nereyda Garcia-Ferraz, and Branda Miller, 1987 52 minutes
Swarthmore
This beautiful video is a portrait of the life and work of Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta. Mendieta used her own body, the raw materials of nature, and Afro-Cuban religion to express her feminist political consciousness and poetic vision. Interview footage with Mendieta and her own filmed records of her earthworks and performances are incorporated to render a vivid testament to her energy and extraordinary talent after her tragic, untimely death in 1985.

Artist on Fire:The Work of Joyce Wieland
Kay Armatage, 1987, 54 minutes
Swarthmore
A pioneer of feminist avant-garde cinema, Joyce Wieland has explored the crux of nationalism, feminine sexuality and ecology for more than thirty years in films such as her influential Rat Life and Diet and Reason over Passion. This richly suggestive portrait surveys Wieland's involvement in structural filmmaking with Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton in the 1960s and her reinvention of women's crafts in her artwork....

Bedevil
Tracey Moffatt, 1993, 90 minutes
Swarthmore
The first feature directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman. Inspired by ghost stories she heard as a child from both her extended Aboriginal and Irish Australian families, Tracey Moffatt has constructed a sublime trilogy in which characters are haunted by the past and bewitched by memories.
Info on Moffat

Between the Lines: Asian American Women's Poetry
Yunah Hong, 2001, 60 minutes
Swarthmore
“Between the Lines offers are interviews with over 15 major Asian-Pacific American women poets. Organized in interwoven sections such as Immigration, Language, Family, Memory, and Spirituality, it is a sophisticated merging of Asian-American history and identity with the questions of performance, voice,and image…”

Beyond Voluntary Control
Cathy Cook, 2000, 30 minutes
Swarthmore
Acclaimed filmmaker Cathy Cook (The Match That Started My Fire) breaks new cinematic territory by devising a new visual language that explores the psychological and emotional effects of physical confinement in her latest film, Beyond Voluntary Control. Stimulating the senses through haunting and poetic images, the film imaginatively conveys the obsessions, phobias and illnesses constricting personal freedom. While lyrically meditating on the limits of the body, Cook incorporates the evocative movements of modern dancer, David Figueroa, and blends a mesmerizing soundtrack set to the poems by Emily Dickinson and Sharon Olds. Through Figueroa’s gestures and dance, along with a moving interview of Cook’s own mother suffering from Parkinson’s, the film succeeds in humanizing and reconciling the effects of physical metamorphosis and stasis. Through artistry and visual astuteness, Beyond Voluntary Control innovatively investigates the limits of human physicality and movement.

La Boda(TheWedding)
Hannah Weyer, 2000, 53 minutes
Swathmore
In an intimate portrait of migrant life along the U.S.-Mexican border, Hannah Weyer La Boda delves into the challenges faced by a community striving to maintain their roots in Mexico, while pursuing the “American Dream” across the border.

The Body Beautiful
Ngozi Onwurah, 1991, 23 minutes
Swarthmore
A bold, stunning exploration of a White mother who undergoes a radical mastectomy and her Black daughter who embarks on a modeling career.

A Boy Named Sue
Julie Wyman, 2000, 56 minutes
Swarthmore
"Julie Wyman's compelling documentary chronicles the transformation of a transsexual named Theo from a woman to a man over the course of six years. The film successfully captures Theo's physiological and psychological changes during the process, as well as their effects on his lesbian lover and community of close friends. Taking full advantage of the unlimited access she received into an extraordinarily personal process, Wyman carefully composes a moving story about gender identity, relationships, and how even things that seem permanent can change. A Boy Named Sue is one of the best videos to date on female-to-male transsexual experience. Wyman spent six years taping Sue's transformation into Theo and then organized a huge archive of material into a moving, informative and smart rendering of what a difference sex reassignment surgeries can make not only to the transsexual himself but also to all those in his immediate circle. Theo is a great subject and Wyman is a talented and imaginative documentarian. If you are looking for a sensitive and sophisticated representation of transsexual experience, look no further." -Judith Halberstam, University of California, San Diego.

Bread and Dignity
María José Alvarez, 1983, 30 minutes
Bryn Mawr ...reviews the role of women in political struggles in Nicaragua.

Brincando El Charco
Frances Negrón-Muntaner, 1994, 55 minutes
Swarthmore
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.

Calling the Ghosts Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic, 1996, 63 minutes
Haverford
Swarthmore
An extraordinarily powerful documentary, Calling the Ghosts is the first-person account of two women caught in a war where rape was as much an everyday weapon as bullets or bombs. Jadranka Cigelj and Nusreta Sivac, childhood friends and lawyers, enjoyed the lives of "ordinary modern women" in Bosnia-Herzegovina until one day former neighbors became tormentors.

Chronic and other Films
Jennifer Reeves,1993, 58 minutes
Swarthmore
This collection of films from emerging filmmaker Jennifer Reeves includes “The Girl's Nervy,” “Monsters in the Closet,” and “Chronic.” Innovative, perceptive, and powerful, each challenges filmic conventions. Beautiful and skillful, it probes her misogynistic and violent surroundings for the motives behind her compulsive self-mutilation.

Closer
Tina Gharavi, 2000, 24 minutes
Swarthmore
An experimental documentary which has at its heart a poignant character study of a 17 year-old lesbian living in Newcastle, England, Closer innovatively explores the process of documentary filmmaking and boldly challenges traditional forms of storytelling. Produced without a script and in close collaboration with the subject, Annelise Rodger, the filmmaker presents a hypnotizing array of montages and fictive sequences to introduce the day-to-day happenings of this extraordinary person. From the streets of Newcastle -- where we find Annelise speaking frankly to the camera about her experiences as a young lesbian -- to the emotionally charged reenactment of her coming out to her mother, this highly original film provides a rare auto-portrait where fiction and documentary collide. In the end what emerges is not only a remarkable encounter with a young woman, but also a story that has broader implications about being young, being at the cusp of adulthood, and finding one's identity.

Coffee Coloured Children
Ngozi Onwurah, 1988, 15 minutes
Swarthmore
This lyrical, unsettling film conveys the experience of children of mixed racial heritage.

Columbus on Trial
Lourdes Portillo, 1993, 18 minutes
Swarthmore
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.

Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter
Deborah Hoffmann, 1994, 44 minutes
Swarthmore
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.

Conjure Women
Demetria Royals, 1995, 85 minutes
Swarthmore
Conjure Women is an exciting performance-based documentary exploring the artistry and philosophy of four African American female artists. These four artists use their disciplines to reclaim their 'africanisms', a intuitive experience of what their foreparents had to deny if they were to survive. Conjure Women is a moving and entertaining record of the work of these remarkable women.

Damned if You Don’t
Su Friedrich,1987,42 minutes
Swarthmore
Damned If You Don’t" is a vivid portrait of a young nun fighting a losing battle with her sexual desires. Full of intrigue and suspense, it combines narrative and experimental elements, among them the testimony from the trial of a 17th-century nun accused of lesbian relations and the deconstruction of the classic nun film, Black Narcissus. Friedrich expands film language to tell a story of forbidden desire, repression and seduction.

Daring to Resist:Three Women Face the Holocaust
Martha Lubell and Barbara Attie, 1999, 57 minutes
Swarthmore
In this gripping documentary, three Jewish women answer this question by recalling their lives as teenagers in occupied Holland, Hungary and Poland, when they refused to remain passive as the Nazis rounded up local Jewish population.

Daughter Rite
Michelle Citron, 1979, 53 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Swarthmore
In this remarkable and groundbreaking film, one of the most widely used feminist films in cinema studies classes, Citron has produced a complex and unsettling work exploring the psychological dynamics of the nuclear family. As Citron describes it: "I wanted to make a film about women in families, especially the mother/daughter and sibling/ sister relationships. But I wanted to do so in a provocative way, that is, create a narrative that did not offer solutions or answers but instead motivated the audience to think, and possibly change."

The Desert Is No Lady
Shelley Williams in collaboration with Susan Palmer,1995,45 minutes
Bryn Mawr
With provocative imagery and spirited juxtapositions, The Desert Is No Lady looks at the Southwest through the eyes of its leading contemporary women artists and writers, including author Sandra Cisneros. The Southwest is a border territory - where cultures meet and mix - and the work of these nine women from Pueblo, Navajo, Mexican-American and Anglo backgrounds reflects its special characteristics. The Desert Is No Lady is a vibrant celebration of the diversity of women's creativity and changing multicultural America.

DiAna’s Hair Ego
Ellen Spiro, 1990, 29 minutes
Haverford
Swarthmore
This provocative, funny and informative videotape documents the growth of the South Carolina AIDS Education Network which operates out of DiAna's Hair Ego, the beauty salon where a condom display is as common as a basket of curlers! DiAna's Hair Ego has been used by hundreds of educational and community organizations as a model for making a difference.

Displaced View
Midi Onodera, 1988, 52 minutes
Bryn Mawr
“The Displaced View is a film that movingly depicts the odyssey of an American-born Japanese granddaughter in search of her identity through her grandmother who is the last of the family born in Japan. The sense of isolation the granddaughter feels as a Japanese woman who cannot speak Japanese is skillfully evoked in a montage of images gleaned from old photographs, movies, animated puppets, and various experimental film techniques. Onodera focuses almost exclusively on Japanese women as preservers of the old traditions in a country where they have no meaning. By revealing the inconsistency of memory and the cultural erosion of assimilation, the fragile identity of the Japanese in North America is eloquently expressed, and the sense of alienation and displacement heightens as the old voices try to remember the past....”-Roxanna Herrick, SUNY at Stony Brook Library.

Divorce Iranian Style
Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, 1998, 80 minutes
Swarthmore
Hilarious, tragic,stirring, this fly-on-the-wall look at several weeks in an Iranian divorce court provides a unique window into the intimate circumstances of Iranian women’s lives. Following Jamileh, whose husband beats her; Ziba, a 16 year old trying to divorce her 38 year old husband; and Maryam, who is desperately fighting to gain custody of her daughters, this deadpan chronicle showcases the strength, ingenuity, and guile with which they confront biased laws, a Kafakaesque administrative system, and their husbands and families' rage to gain divorces.
Official site

Dream Girls
Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams, 1993, 50 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Swarthmore
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.

Dry Kisses Only
Jane Cottis and Kaucyila Brooke, 1990, 75 minutes
Swarthmore
Through manipulated film clips, the hilarious commentary of Theory Woman and interviews with the Lesbian on the Street, this marvelous videotape explores the lesbian subtext of classical films-- the dry kisses of the tape’s title. Hollywood movies are re-edited to find the truth behind the relationships between the heroine and the “other woman.” Dykella and Dykenna chew over lesbian vampire stereotypes. And gossip columnist Lady Manilla Lively gives the inside scoop on lesbians in today’s Hollywood. Dry Kisses Only tells a story at once obvious and long-overdue, affirming the validity of lesbian readings of popular culture and the tenuous truths of gossip.

Eat the Kimono (Genshu)
Claire Hunt and Kim Longinotto, 1989, 60 minutes
Bryn Mawr
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.

The Female Closet
Barbara Hammer, 1998, 60 minutes
Swarthmore
This fascinating videotape from renowned filmmaker Barbara Hammer combines rare footage, interviews, and rich visual documentation to survey the lives of variously closeted women artists from different segments of the 20th century: Victorian photographer Alice Austen, Weimar collagist Hannah Höch, and present day painter Nicole Eisenman. In a compelling examination of the art world’s treatment of lesbians, Hammer documents how the museum devoted to Austen ignores the implications of her cross dressing photos, how the Museum of Modern Art glossed over Höch’s sexuality in a major exhibit, and how Eisenman’s work based on patriarchal porn is described by critics as “liberating, fun, and over the top”. Examining the museum as closet, and the negotiation of visibility and secrecy in lesbian history, this thoughtful video is a provocative look at the relationship between art, life, and sexuality.

Filming Desire: A Journey Through Women's Film
Marie Mandy, 2000, 60 minutes
Swarthmore
“In this bold documentary Marie Mandy asks the question: how do women directors film love, desire, and,especially, sexuality? In rare interviews with many of the leading women directors working in the world today -- including Sally Potter, Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, Doris Dörrie, Deepa Mehta, Moufida Tlatli, Safi Faye, and Jane Campion -- Filming Desire: A Journey Through Women’s Cinema directly engages the sexual politics of cinematographic choice....

5 Girls
Kartemquin Educational Films, 2001, 113 minutes
Swarthmore
From the producers of Hoop Dreams, comes this deftly subtle portrait of five girls from different class and ethnic backgrounds that emotionally wade through the all-too-familiar muck known as high school. With rare insight and sensitivity, filmmaker Maria Finitzo examines the relationships of these girls, their expectations and goals for the future, as well as those of their parents. Finitzo and her crew spent three years with this diverse group of young women and their families, who live in and around Chicago, to ambitiously document their journey from adolescence into adulthood. Leaving sentimentality behind, this unique survey delves into the minds of these five remarkable girls to demonstrate how they confront a myriad of social dilemmas from sexual awakenings to poverty to ethnic isolation and how they begin forming their increasingly complex identities as young women. Sensitively weaving together the stories and personalities of each girl, this provocative documentary succeeds in providing a rare glimpse into the resilience, intelligence and self-awareness that many young women confidently demonstrate, but are rarely given credit for possessing.

Forbidden Love
Aerlyn Weissman and Lynne Fernie, 1992, 85 minutes
Swarthmore
Compelling, often hilarious and always rebellious, the ten women interviewed in Forbidden Love paint a portrait of lesbian sexuality and survival during the sexual dark ages of the 1950s and '60s. Against a fascinating backdrop of book covers from lesbian pulp novels, tabloid headlines, archival photographs and film clips, these women recount stories about living and loving in their clandestine world.

Flaming Ears
Angela Hans Scheirl, Ursula Püürrer, and Dietmar Schipek, 1991, 84 minutes
Swarthmore
Flaming Ears is a pop sci-fi lesbian fantasy feature set in the year 2700 in the fictive burned-out city of Asche. It follows the tangled lives of three women-- Volley, Nun and Spy. It’s a story of love and revenge, and an anti-romantic plea for love in its many forms.

The Fourth Dimension
Trinh T. Minh-ha 2001, 87 minutes
Swarthmore
Acclaimed filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha ventures into the digital realm with her stunning new feature, The Fourth Dimension, an incisive and insightful examination of Japan through its art, culture, and social rituals. As is the case with Trinh's previous films, her new video is a multi-layered work addressing issues around its central theme: the experience of time, the impossibility of truly "seeing," and the impact of video on image-making. The Fourth Dimension is an elegant meditation on time, travel, and ceremony in the form of a journey. In her first foray into digital video, Minh-ha deconstructs the role of ritual in mediating between the past and the present. She explains, "Shown in their widespread functions and manifestations, including more evident loci such as festivals, religious rite and theatrical performance, 'rituals' involve not only the regularity in the structure of everyday life, but also the dynamic agents in the world of meaning." With its lush imagery, Minh-ha's Japan is viewed through mobile frames, with doors and windows sliding shut, revealing new vistas as it blocks out the old light. “Trinh T. Minh-ha’s newest essayistic work and her first videotape, cuts an intricate key for unlocking this elusive culture. Her tack finds great visual pleasure in the everyday, composing and decomposing the social landscape, while constructing a poetic grid of temporalities, symbolic meaning, and ritual. In The Fourth Dimension, Trinh’s lyrical narration guides us through ‘Japan’s likeness,’ the perfected framing of the sacramental familiar.” -Steve Seid

Four Women of Egypt
Tahani Rached, 1997, 90 minutes
Bryn Mawr
These four women are the subject of this impressive documentary exploration of opposing religious, social, and political views in modern-day Egypt.

Girls Around the World
Maria Barea, Kaija Jurikkala, Monique Mbeka Phoba, Pascale Schmidt, and Sabiha Sumar, 1999, 104 minutes
Swarthmore
Girls Around the World is a collection of extraordinary documentaries on seventeen-year-old girls across the globe. Each focuses on one girl—her hopes and dreams, her world and her worldview. Directed by local women filmmakers in Peru, Pakistan, Benin, Germany and Finland, a mosaic emerges that not only depicts the great diversity in the lives of the seventeen year old girls, but also embodies the perspectives of an international roster of contemporary women filmmakers. In Anna from Benin, Congolese filmmaker Monique Phoba profiles the life of Anna, one of 31 children, star of her family’s singing group and the recipient of a scholarship to study in Paris. Daughters of War (Peru) by Maria Barea documents the life of Gabriela, the leader of a girl gang and mother of a 7 month old daughter, in Ayacucho, the former Maoist guerrilla lives stronghold torn by civil war in the 1980's. Heaven And Earth (Germany) by Pascale Schimdt profiles Ramona who is following a religious path,rather than Techno, club-wear, designer drugs and boyfriends—the pastimes of most teenage girls in Munich. In Frontier (Finland), Kaija Jurrikkala brings us to an isolated region near the Russian border where Tarja lives on a small family farm and is confronted with having to leave her home for a better future. Don’t Ask Why (Pakistan), by award winning director Sabiha Sumar, is an intimate look at the life of Ayesha who shares her dreams of education as well her conflicts with her Muslim religion and her father.

Girls Like Us
Jane C. Wagner and Tina DiFeliciantonio, 1997, 57 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Swarthmore
An ethnically diverse group of four working class girls strut, flirt, and testify in this vibrant, affecting portrait of teenage girls' experiences of sexuality. Filmed in South Philadelphia and following its subjects from the ages of 14 to 18, Girls Like Us reveals the conflicts of growing up female by examining the impact of class, sexism, and violence on the dreams and expectations of young girls. Intimate interviews and candid footage introduce Anna, whose need for freedom in a new culture conflicts with her parents' strictness; De'Yona, who dreams of a singing career while coping with family tragedy; Raelene, who confronts violence and issues of self-esteem as a teenage mother; and Lisa, who faces the differences between the feminine roles of her Catholic upbringing and her own wishes. In documenting the friendships, challenges, and triumphs of these four young women, acclaimed filmmakers Jane C. Wagner and Tina DiFeliciantonio have created something truly rare: a searingly honest, inspiring depiction of girls' experiences that provokes reaction from and dialogue between educators, parents, and young women alike.

The Good Wife of Tokyo
Claire Hunt and Kim Longinotto, 1992, 52 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Kazuko Hohki goes back to Tokyo with her band, the “Frank Chickens”, after living in England for 15 years. This wry and delightful film records her re-experiencing of Japan after a long absence, examining traditional attitudes to women and those of Kazuko’s friends who are trying to live differently.

Grrly Show
Kara Herold, 2000, 18 minutes
Swarthmore
Examines the girly Zine revolution and culture in such a way that the film intellectually and stylistically addresses anyone's question concerning whether or not feminism has reached it's 3rd wave.
Press Kit

Guerillas in Our Midst
Amy Harrison, 1992,35 minutes
Swarthmore
Guerrillas in our Midst presents a savvy exploration of the machinations of the commercial art-world during its boom in the 1980s, and brings the Guerrilla Girls to the screen. This anonymous group of art terrorists has succeeded in putting racism and sexism on the agenda in the art-world since 1985, and their witty and creative tactics have changed the face of political and cultural activism. Interviews with key figures in the Manhattan art scene, record-breaking auction sales, exhibition openings and interviews with the Guerrillas Girls themselves combine to highlight how the myth of the heroic male painter is perpetuated.

Halving the Bones
Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury, 1995, 70 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Skeletons in the closet? Halving the Bones delivers a surprising twist to this tale. This cleverly-constructed film tells the story of Ruth, a half-Japanese filmmaker living in New York, who has inherited a can of bones that she keeps on a shelf in her closet. The bones are half of the remains of her dead Japanese grandmother, which she is supposed to deliver to her estranged mother. A narrative and visual web of family stories, home movies and documentary footage, Halving the Bonesprovides a spirited exploration of the meaning of family, history and memory, cultural identity and what it means to have been named after Babe Ruth!

A Healthy Baby Girl
Judith Helfand, 1996, 57 minutes
Swarthmore
In 1963 filmmaker Judith Helfand's mother was prescribed the ineffective, carcinogenic synthetic hormone diethylstilbestrol (DES), meant to prevent miscarriage and ensure a healthy baby. At twenty-five, Judith was diagnosed with DES-related cervical cancer. After a radical hysterectomy she went to her family's home to heal and picked up her camera. The resulting video-diary is a fascinating exploration of how science, marketing and corporate power can affect our deepest relationships. Shot over five years, A Healthy Baby Girl tells a story of survival, mother-daughter love, family renewal, and community activism. Intimate, humorous, and searing, it is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the relationship between women's health, public policy, medical ethics and corporate responsibility.

Hide and Seek
Su Friedrich, 1996, 65 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Swarthmore
The fictional narrative of Lou: a twelve year old girl living in Brooklyn in the mid 1960’s, coming to terms with her burgeoning sexuality. Her story is skillfully woven between interviews with twenty adult women who recount salient moments from their childhoods, including their first attractions, how they felt when they first heard the word lesbian and thoughts about the possible cause for their homosexuality. Mixing several genres, the film also includes more than 100 photographs of lesbians when they were young girls, and archival footage from educational films and home movies.

History and Memory:For Akiko and Takashige
Rea Tajiri, 1991, 32 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Swarthmore
This moving exploration of personal and cultural memory juxtaposes Hollywood images of Japanese Americans and World War II propaganda with stories from the videomaker’s family. Ruminating on the difficult nature of representing the past, the artist blends interviews, memorabilia, a pilgrimage to the camp where her mother was interned, and the story of her father, who had been drafted pre-Pearl Harbor and returned to find his family’s house removed from its site. A haunting testament to the Japanese American experience.

Hollywood Harems
Tania Kamal-Eldin, 1999, 24 minutes
Swarthmore
A stunning video, a half-hour documentary, this time taking critical aim at Hollywood's abiding fascination with and fantasies about all things east

Home is Struggle
Marta Bautis, 1991, 37 minutes
Swarthmore
Using interviews, photographs and theatrical vignettes, Home is Struggle explores the lives of women who have come to the United States from different Latin American countries-Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina and the Dominican Republic-for very different reasons, economic and political. In sharing stories about their pasts and present and their views on issues such as sexism and personal and political repression, Home is Struggle presents an absorbing picture of the construction of 'Latina' identity and the immigrant experience.

Honey Moccasin
Shelley Niro, 1998, 47 minutes
Swarthmore
This irreverent reappropriation of familiar narrative strategies serves as a provocative spring-board for an investigation of authenticity, cultural identity, and the articulation of modern Native American experience in cinematic language and pop culture.

I is a Long Memoried Woman
Frances-Anne Solomon, 1990, 50 minutes
Haverford
This extraordinary video chronicles the history of slavery through the eyes of Caribbean women. A striking combination of monologue, dance, and song-- griot-style-- conveys a young African woman’s quest for survival in the new world. Based on award-winning poems by Guyanese British writer Grace Nichols, the evocatively rendered story charts abusive conditions on sugar plantations, acts of defiance and the rebellion which led to eventual freedom.

I Need your Full Cooperation
Kathy High, 1989, 28 minutes
Haverford
Swarthmore
This fascinating video chronicles the relationship between women and the medical institution using experimental techniques. Critical commentary is provided by feminist scholars Barbara Ehrenreich and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. Archival footage from educational and Hollywood films reveals the persistent image of male doctors' control of female patients.

Illusions
Julie Dash, 1983, 34 minutes
Swarthmore
The time is 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor; the place is National Studios, a fictitious Hollywood motion picture studio. Mignon Duprée, a Black woman studio executive who appears to be white and Ester Jeeter, an African American woman who is the singing voice for a white Hollywood star are forced to come to grips with a society that perpetuates false images as status quo. This highly-acclaimed drama by one of the leading African American women directors follows Mignon's dilemma, Ester's struggle and the use of cinema in wartime Hollywood: three illusions in conflict with reality.

The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press
Ulrike Ottinger,1984, 150 minutes
Swarthmore
"In the poses of the dandy and the manufactured excesses of the tabloid press, Ottinger finds connections between our 'fin de siecle' moment and the last one, as well as a way to explore her own obsession with the artifice inherent in cinema and gender presentation. Her ingenious reworking of the Dorian Gray story features the late Delphine Seyrig as Dr. Mabuse, the chief executive of a multinational media organization whose machinations are worthy of her namesake, the sinister doctor of German expressionist film. Her unscrupulous plan to increase circulation—"We will create personalities, sensations, scandals and catastrophes of our own"—provides an perfect framework for Ottinger's rich tableaux and episodic narrative structure. Dorian Gray—young, rich, handsome and narcissistic—is the tool: 'We will build him up, seduce him and destroy him!' Played in drag by 60's supermodel Veruschka von Lehndorff, this Dorian's initiation takes place on a indelible nighttime tour of the Berlin underworld. In a fantastically staged opera within the film, Seyrig appears as a Spanish Inquisitor and Dorian confronts his mirror image and his great love. Will Dorian Gray become Dr. Mabuse's victim or her best pupil? This epic of queer cinema is a fitting tribute to Oscar Wilde and an uncanny evocation of our current preoccupation with celebrity and the transgressive possibilities of gender performativity." — Patricia White, Swarthmore College

In My Father’s House
Fatima Jebli Ouazzani, 1997, 67 minutes
Bryn Mawr
In this beautiful, poetic and deeply personal film, Moroccan filmmaker Fatima Jebli Ouazzani investigates the status accorded women in Islamic marriage customs and the continuing importance of virginity. Ouazzani left her father’s house in Morocco sixteen years ago to escape the constraints her culture and its traditions have put on women. She returns now to confront those traditions, her own family and herself.

Invocation: Maya Deren
Jo Ann Kaplan, 1987,53 minutes
Swarthmore
Maya Deren is a legend of avant-garde cinema. This authoritative biography of the charismatic filmmaker, poet and anthropologist features excerpts from her pioneering Meshes of the Afternoon and her unfinished documentary on Haiti, interviews with Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, and recordings of her lectures. Narrated by actress Helen Mirren, this definitive documentary offers startling insights into one of the most intriguing, accomplished figures in cinema history

It Starts with a Whisper
Shelly Niro and Anna Gronau, 1993, 28 minutes
Swarthmore
It Starts With a Whisper follows a young woman who has grown up on a Reserve and her decision about which path to follow in life. Guided by her ancestral spirits- three matriarchical clowns who appear in the form of her three aunts - she comes to the realization that she may live her life in the present, while remembering and respecting the people of the past and traditional ways. Directed by Shelly Niro (Mohawk) and Anna Gronau and produced with an all-Native cast, It Starts With a Whisper blends traditional Iroquois imagery, music and themes with motifs from contemporary, secular life to celebrate the strength, wisdom, beauty and humor of Native women.

Japanese American Women: A Sense of Place
Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro and Leita Hagemann Luchetti, 1992, 28 minutes
Bryn Mawr
The stereotype of the polite, docile, exotic Asian woman is shattered in this documentary in which a dozen women speak about their experiences as part of the “model minority”. Japanese American Women explores the ambivalent feelings the women have both towards Japan and the United States. The underlying theme is the burden of being different, of being brought up “one of a kind” as opposed to growing up part of an ethnic community. An uneasy feeling prevails of being neither Japanese nor American, and the documentary ultimately becomes the story of Japanese American women and their search for a sense of place.

Johanna d’ Arc of Mongolia
Ulrike Ottinger, 1989, 165 minutes
Swarthmore
Ulrike Ottinger's epic adventure traces a fantastic encounter between two different worlds. Seven western women travelers meet aboard the sumptuous, meticulously reconstructed Trans-Siberian Express, a rolling museum of European culture. Lady Windemere, an elegant ethnographer played by the incomparable Delphine Seyrig in her last screen role, regales a young companion with Mongol myths and lore while other passengers-a prim tourist (Irm Hermann), a brash Broadway chanteuse and an all-girl klezmer trio-revel in campy dining car cabaret. Suddenly ambushed by a band of Mongol horsewomen, the company is abducted to the plains of Inner Mongolia and embark on a fantastic camel ride across the magnificent countryside

Juggling Gender
Tami Gold, 1992, 27 minutes
Bryn Mawr
A loving portrait of Jennifer Miller, a lesbian performer who lives her life with a full beard. Miller works as a performance artist, circus director, clown and as the "bearded lady" in one of the only remaining sideshows in America. In public she is often mistaken for a man, an experience she handles with the wit and intelligence that characterize her stage performances. Her lifestyle suggests the impossibility of defining anyone as truly feminine or masculine. Juggling Gender explores the fluidity of gender and raises important questions about the construction of sexual and gender identity.

Juxta
Hiroko Yamazaki, 1989, 29 minutes
Bryn Mawr
This beautiful drama observes the psychological effects of racism on two children of Japanese women and American servicemen. Thirty-one year old Kate, the daughter of a Japanese/white mixed marriage visits her childhood friend, Ted, a Japanese-Black American. Together they confront the memory of her mother’s tragic story in this telling, emotionally nuanced journey into the complexity of US racism.

Khush
Pratibha Parmar, 1991, 24 minutes
Swarthmore
Inspiring testimonies bridge geographical differences to locate shared experiences of isolation and exoticization but also the unremitting joys and solidarity of being “khush.”. Accentuated by beautifully lit dream sequences, dance segments and a dazzlingly sensuous soundtrack, this uplifting documentary conveys the exhilaration of a culturally rooted experience of sexuality.

Knowing Her Place
Indu Krishnan, 1990, 40 minutes
Bryn Mawr
A moving investigation of the cultural schizophrenia experienced by Vasu, an Indian woman who has spent most of her life in the U.S. Vasu's relationships with her mother and grandmother in India and her husband and teenage sons in New York, reveal profound conflicts between her traditional upbringing and her personal and professional aspirations. The tape fuses photographs, vérité sequences and experimental techniques to probe the multilayered experience of immigrant women with rare candor and emotional resonance. Useful for courses on immigration, sex roles and the study of documentary form.

L is for the Way you Look
Jean Carlomusto, 1991, 24 minutes
Swarthmore
L Is For The Way You Look is a playful exploration of lesbian history and the women who have served as role models and objects of desire for young lesbians--from Martina Navratilova to Madonna, Simone de Beauvoir to Fran Lebowitz, Angela Davis to Dolly Parton, Patti Smith to Reno. The director also turns the camera on herself and her friends to discuss how media images of lesbians affect the construction of identity and how lesbians are written in and out of history.

La Nouba des Femmes du Mont-Chenoua
Assia Djebar, 1977, 115 minutes
Bryn Mawr
This classic film from acclaimed novelist/ 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.

The Lost Garden: the life and cinema of Alice Guy-Blache
Marquise Lepage, 1995, 53 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Swarthmore
The Lost Garden looks at the life and times of Alice Guy-Blaché (1873-1968), arguably, the first narrative filmmaker in the world. Creating her first motion picture in France in the 1890s, Alice Guy-Blaché went on to found her own successful production company in the US, producing and writing more than 700 films.

Love Story
Catrine Clay, 1997, 60 minutes
Swarthmore
In 1942 Berlin, Lilly Wurst was a model Aryan hausfrau with a picture of the Führer on the wall, a husband in the army, and a German motherhood medal for bearing four sons. With this distinction came mother's helper Ulla Schaaf, who unbeknownst to Lilly was deeply involved with the Jewish underground.When Lilly boasted that she could "smell a Jew", Ulla tested her by introducing her to Felice Schraderheim, aka Felice Schrader, a 20 year old Jewish woman living in hiding. The result of that meeting is an unusual love story whose arc is followed through recollections, documents, and archival footage in this beautifully made documentary.

Madame X: An Absolute Ruler
Ulrike Ottinger, 1977, 141 minutes
Swarthmore
"Ulrike Ottinger has a larger body of work than almost any other lesbian filmmaker, and her rarely seen first feature contains most of the elements that make her work so unique and ahead of its time. In this extravagantly aestheticized, postmodern pirate film she appropriates the male genre for feminist allegory.Madame X — the cruel, uncrowned ruler of the China seas — promises "gold, love, and adventure" to all women who'll leave their humdrum lives behind. Gathered aboard her ship, Orlando, are a range of types: a frumpy housewife, a glamorous diva, a psychologist, a very German outdoorswoman, a bush pilot, an artist (played by Yvonne Rainer), and a "native" beauty. Their utopia devolves into betrayal and self-destruction—leading to eventual transformation—as the power games of the outside world are ritualized among the women. Tabea Blumenschein, who designed the film's outrageous costumes, appears in a dual role as the pirate queen and the ship's lovely, leather clad figurehead. Refusing conventional storytelling and realism for a rich, non-synchronous soundtrack, the film invites its audience along for an unprecedented journey that celebrates the marginal." — Patricia White, Swarthmore College....

Made in India: SEWA: Self-Employed Women's Association
Patricia Plattner, 1998, 52 minutes
Swarthmore
This powerful documentary is a portrait of the now-famous women's organization in India, called SEWA, that holds to the simple yet radical belief that poor women need organizing, not welfare.

Made in Thailand
Eve-Laure Moros and Linzy Emery, 1999, 30 minutes
Swarthmore
In Thailand, women make up 90 percent of the labor force responsible for garments and toys for export by multinational corporations. This powerful, revealing documentary about women factory workers and their struggle to organize unions exposes the human cost behind the production of everyday items that reach our shores.

The Match That Started My Fire
Cathy Cook,1991,19 minutes
Swarthmore
The telephone rings and the girl-talk begins: secrets emerge and confessions build. An exciting experimental comedy in which the joy of sexual pleasure is discovered and experienced by women in their childhood and early teens. Climbing a rope, descending a slide, being stung by insects...a host of women tell their hilarious anecdotes of "the match that started their fire". The film is a visual montage of images that evoke a world of 1960s kitsch and nostalgia, with occasional darker hints of taboo and transgression.

Measures of Distance
Mona Hatoum, 1988,15 minutes
Swarthmore
In this resonant work, Palestinian-born video and performance artist Mona Hatoum explores the renewal of friendship between mother and daughter during a brief family reunion in war-torn Lebanon in 1981. Through letters read in voice-over and Arabic script overlaying the images, the viewer experiences the silence and isolation imposed by war. The politics of the family and the exile of the Palestinian people are inseparable in this forceful, moving video.

Meeting of Two Queens
Cecilia Barriga, 1991, 14 minutes
Swarthmore
In this witty, luminous tape Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich star in the roles of their lives--cast as lovers by Chilean video artist Barriga. Queen Christina meets the Scarlet Empress; Anna Karenina and Blonde Venus transcend tragedy. This beguiling tape links the queens of the silver screen through motifs such as the cigarette and a circuitry of meaningful gazes and gestures. Clips from their signature roles are remounted in silent film style vignettes to tell a burgeoning tale of desire and destiny.

Menopause Our Shared Experience
Suzanne Landau and Valerie Toizer, 1992, 29 minutes
Haverford
...explores the physical and psychological experience of menopause. Hot flashes, sexuality and vaginal dryness, osteoporosis, depression, hysterectomy, Hormone Replacement Therapy, diet and exercise are all put under the spotlight by a range of professional experts and women who have or are experiencing menopause.

Mirror, Mirror
Jan Krawitz, 1990, 17 minutes
Haverford
Swarthmore
...explores the relationship between a woman's body image and the quest for an idealized female form. 13 women, of varying age, size, and ethnicity, candidly reveal the ambivalence with which they regard their own bodies. The film incisively illuminates the vagaries in the concept of an "ideal" body type, thereby encouraging women to love and accept their own bodies.

Mitsuye and Nellie: Asian American Poets
Allie Light and Irving Saraf, 1981, 58 minutes
Bryn Mawr
This absorbing documentary examines the lives of Asian Americans through the inspirational poetry of Mitsuye Yamada and Nellie Wong. Interviews, rare archival footage, intimate family scenes and a lively dialogue between these fascinating women underscore the different histories of Chinese and Japanese Americans but also shared experiences of biculturalism and generational difference.

My Journey, My Islam
Kay Rasool, 1999, 56 minutes
Swarthmore
My Journey, My Islam is an intriguing look at the questions that some Muslim women in the West ask themselves: what is Islam's relationship to me and my relationship to it, living in the West? Rasool's personal quest to answer these questions also introduces the viewer to the lives of several Muslim women (mostly non-Arab), including several Indian Muslims, a convert and a Lebanese woman marrying an non-Arab Muslim, as she journeys between the West and the Indian sub-continent where she was born. Rasool's portraits are particularly striking and well-fleshed out, accompanied as they are by visually compelling images of everyday Islamic life. While this is not an introductory guide to women in Islam, it is must see viewing for those who wonder how Muslim women reconcile and the interpret the requirements of their faith and the obligations of Western culture. In addition, it is refreshing to find a documentary on Muslim women which talks not about them, but to them. This documentary is particularly timely in light of the fact that there is a growing, highly visible second generation of young Muslims in the West who seek to combine their faith with busy, productive Western lives. This would be a wonderful video to use to initiate conversations on cultural and religious plurality as well as discussions on assimilation and dual identity." Rebecca Romani, Co-chair, Middle East Caucus, Society for Cinema Studies
Press Kit

Navajo Talking Picture
Arlene Bowman, 1986, 40 minutes
Swarthmore
Arlene Bowman (Navajo) travels to the Reservation to document the traditional ways of her grandmother. The filmmaking persists in spite of her grandmother's forceful objections to this invasion of her privacy. Ultimately, what emerges is a thought-provoking work which abruptly calls into question issues of "insider/outsider" status in a portrait of an assimilated Navajo struggling to use a "white man's" medium to capture the remnants of her cultural past.

Nice Coloured Girls
Tracey Moffatt, 1987, 16 minutes
Swarthmore
This stylistically daring film audaciously explores the history of exploitation between white men and Aboriginal women, juxtaposing the “first encounter” between colonizers and native women with the attempts of modern urban Aboriginal women to reverse their fortunes. Through counterpoint of sound, image, and printed text, the film conveys the perspective of Aboriginal women while acknowledging that oppression and enforced silence still shape their consciousness.
Info on Moffat

Night Cries:A Rural Tragedy
Tracey Moffatt, 1990, 19 minutes
Swarthmore
On an isolated, surreal Australian homestead, a middle-aged Aboriginal woman nurses her dying white mother. The adopted daughter’s attentive gestures mask an almost palpable hostility. Their story alludes to the assimilation policy that forced Aboriginal children to be raised in white families. The stark, sensual drama unfolds without dialogue against vivid painted sets as the smooth crooning of an Aboriginal Christian singer provides ironic counterpoint.
Info on Moffat

Nu Shu: A Hidden Language of Women in China
Yue-Qing Yang, 1999, 59 minutes
Swarthmore
In feudal China, women, usually with bound feet, were denied educational opportunities and condemned to social isolation. But in Jian-yong county in Hunan province, peasant women miraculously developed a separate written language, called Nu Shu, meaning "female writing." Believing women to be inferior, men disregarded this new script, and it remained unknown for centuries. It wasn't until the 1960s that Nu Shu caught the attention of Chinese authorities, who suspected that this peculiar writing was a secret code for international espionage.

On Cannibalism
Fatimah Tobing Rony, 1994, 6 minutes
Swarthmore
King Kong meets the family photograph in this provocative experimental video 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.

On the Eighth Day
Gwynne Basen, 1992, 51 minutes
Haverford
...critical viewing about new reproductive and genetic technologies and poses disturbing questions about why these technologies are being developed and how they may affect the lives of women and society as a whole.

Outlaw
Alisa Lebow,1994, 26 minutes
Swarthmore
Leslie Feinberg, a self-identified "gender outlaw" who has spent much of her life passing as a man, speaks with passion and intelligence about her experiences in this video manifesto. Raw and confrontational, this videotape 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.

Pain, Passion, and Profit
Gurinder Chadha, 1992, 49 minutes
Bryn Mawr
...gives an in-depth look at global feminism and economic development as well as a personal and spirited view of the connections between the experiences of women entrepreneurs in the First and Third Worlds.

The Passion of Remembrance
Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, 1986, 80 minutes
Swarthmore
Within a dramatic framework the film gives a mosaic impression of the different dimensions of Black experience lived and imagined by a generation of filmmakers in the UK. As beautiful as it is eloquent.

Performing the Border
Ursula Biemann, 1999, 42 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Swarthmore
A video essay set in the Mexican-U.S. border town of Ciudad Juarez, where U.S. multinational corporations assemble electronic and digital equipment just across from El Paso, Texas, this imaginative, experimental work investigates the growing feminization of the global economy and its impact on Mexican women living and working in the area. Looking at the border as both a discursive and material space, the video explores the sexualization of the border region through labor division, prostitution, the expression of female desires in the entertainment industry, and sexual violence in the public sphere. Candid interviews with Mexican women factory and sex workers, as well as activists and journalists, are combined with scripted voiceover analysis, screen text, scenes and sounds recorded on site, and found footage to give new insights into the gendered conditions inscribed by the high-tech industry at its low-wage end.

Perils, Mayhem and Mercy: Three Films by Abigail Child
Swarthmore
Perils, Mayhem and Mercy are three parts of Abigail Child's series Is This What You Were Born For? which investigates power and gender relations. Perils (5 minutes) is an homage to silent film: the clash of ambiguous innocence and unsophisticated villainy. Mayhem (20 minutes) focuses on sexuality and the erotic; it has become infamous for its Japanese lesbian erotic scene. Mercy(10 minutes) is the final title in the series and it dissects the game mass media plays in private perceptions.

Permissible Dreams
Ateyyat El Abnoudy, 1983, 30 minutes
Bryn Mawr
...an unforgettable look at life for Egyptian women.

Picking Tribes
Saundra Sharp, 1988, 7 minutes
Swarthmore
“In a heartfelt, and often hilarious, attempt to be more than ‘ordinary’, a girl growing up in the 1940s tries to choose between her African-American and Native-American heritages.” Moving Pictures Bulletin

A Place of Rage
Pratibha Parmar, 1991, 52 minutes
Bryn Mawr
This exuberant celebration of African American women and their achievements features interviews with Angela Davis, June Jordan and Alice Walker. Within the context of the civil rights, Black power and feminist movements, the trio reassess how women such as Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer revolutionized American society. A stirring chapter in African American history, highlighted by music from Prince, Janet Jackson, the Neville Brothers and the Staple Singers.

Positive Images: Portraits of Women with Disabilities
Julie Harrison and Harilyn Rousso, 1989, 58 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Offering crucial role models for women and girls with disabilities, this powerful tape also locates disability as a women's issue of concern to us all by discussing education, employment and careers, sexuality, family life and parenting, and societal attitudes.

A Powerful Thang
Zeinabu irene Davis, 1991, 57 minutes
Swarthmore
This innovative drama, set in Ohio, traces an African American couple's search for intimacy and friendship. The spirited, African-identified Yasmine Allen is a writer and single mother who has been dating saxophone teacher Craig Watkins for a month. Wishing to end her self-imposed celibacy following her son's birth, Yasmine has reached a turning point in the relationship-but Craig, the Big Lug, wants to take it slow. Sage advice from friends and family members remind them, "sex is a powerful thang."

Ramleh
Michal Aviad, 2001, 58 minutes
Swarthmore
A timely and powerful look at the ideological, cultural and political conflicts in contemporary Israel, this highly original documentary profiles three seemingly disparate women residing in the town of Ramleh. Located in the heartland of the Israel, this former Palestinean territory serves as a microcosm of the beliefs, biases and conflicts of women living in the country today. Profiled in this compelling documentary are Sima and Orly, two ultra-orthodox Jewish women who rediscover religion and enthusiastically support the conservative “Shas” party, the third largest political party in Israel; Svetlana, a single-mother and recent immigrant struggling to establish herself in her new country; and Gehad, a young Muslim teacher and law student attempting to find a sense of national identity in a predominately Jewish state. Filmed between the general elections in 1999 and the 2001 elections, Ramleh demonstrates the profound cultural and political divisions barring these women from living together as a united community, as well as reveals how their political landscape helped sow the seeds of the intifada in 2000. It similarly raises the question whether each woman and the communities they represent will ever peacefully reconcile their search for tradition, religion and homeland.

Rate it X
Lucy Winer and Paula De Koenigsberg, 1986, 93 minutes
Swarthmore
With great humor and compassion, the film reveals men's deeply imbedded attitudes, showing how sexism becomes rationalized through commerce, religion and social values. Hotly controversial upon its release, Rate It X is a challenging, invaluable film that illuminates crucial issues of censorship, advertising, pornography and violence against women.

Real Indian
Malinda Maynor, 1996, 7.5 minutes
Swarthmore
As a Lumbee Indian, the filmmaker is constantly confronted with the fact that she doesn't fit any of society's stereotypes for Native Americans. Those stereotypes are imposed by both whites and other Indians, alienating the filmmaker from many of the conventional definitions of Native American identity. Real Indian is a unique look into the fascinating and complex world of Lumbee Indian culture and makes the viewer question perceptions of Native Americans, as well as the meaning of our own cultural identity.

Reassemblage
Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982, 40 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Women are the focus but not the object of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s influential first film, a complex visual study of the women of rural Senegal. Through a complicity of interaction between film and spectator, Reassemblage reflects on documentary filmmaking and the ethnographic representation of cultures.

Riddles of the Sphinx
Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen,1977, 92 minutes
Swarthmore
One of the most visually stimulating, theoretically rigorous films to emerge from the 1970s, this landmark fusion of feminism and formal experimentation 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.

Runaway
Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, 2001, 87 minutes
Swarthmore
“Runaway is a powerful and heart-breaking documentary about a group of young runaway girls who are taken to a women's shelter in Tehran-Iran. The film focuses on the sufferings of young girls who struggle to free themselves from the tyrannical and abusive power of their families, mainly their fathers, brothers, and stepfathers-- a subject rarely touched upon by Iranian filmmakers. The sisterly feelings of the girls towards each other, their spiritual strength, their courage to rebel, and their wit are shown with a great degree of compassion and empathy in the film. The filmmakers have beautifully criticized the patriarchal system of family and the destructive power of male family members over the lives of their daughters and sisters. Although the film focuses on the poor uneducated families, one can imagine that the issue of confinement and abuse goes beyond the issue of class when it comes to the problem of domestic violence and the desire to control women through anger, aggression, and madness.”- Mehrnaz Saeed, Colombia College.

Sally’s Beauty Spot
Helen Lee, 1990, 12 minutes
Swarthmore
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.

Sambal Belecan in San Francisco
Madeleine Lim, 1997, 25 minutes
Bryn Mawr
In intimate interviews, three women who emigrated to live openly as lesbians share their feelings of exclusion both from their families and culture of origin and the United States. Poetic sequences examine the challenges of immigration, discrimination, and homophobia and the rewards of self-determination and coalition building among immigrant lesbians of color. This rich film raises provocative questions about the nature of home and belonging, and speaks compellingly for a community whose voices are seldom heard.

Searching for Go-Hyang
Tammy Tolle, 1998, 32 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Swarthmore
A moving personal documentary, Searching for Go-Hyang traces the return of twin sisters to their native Korea after a fourteen year absence. Sent away by their parents for the promise of a better life in the US, they instead suffered mental and physical abuse by their adoptive parents, including the erasure of their cultural heritage and language. Reunited with their biological parents and brothers, the young women explore their past in an attempt to reconnect with their “Go-Hyang”, their homeland, which they find they may not have a place in anymore. Thousands of Korean and Chinese girl babies have been brought to the US for adoption in the last twenty years. This beautiful video is a rare feminist look at the issues of cross-cultural adoption and national identity.

Selbe
Safi Faye, 1983, 30 minutes
Bryn Mawr
This revealing documentary offers a rare view of daily life in West Africa. Shot in Senegal, Selbe focuses on the social role and economic responsibility of women in African society. Because men often leave their communities to earn money in the city, women are left with the sole responsibility for their families. One woman’s personal struggle reflects the broader issues facing many women in developing countries. Safi Faye, an ethnologist, is the most important woman director of documentaries in West Africa.

SexFish/Sex Bowl
E.T. Baby Maniac and Baby Maniac,1994, 13 minutes
Swarthmore
Four of the smartest and sexiest videos to emerge in a long time.

Shinjuku Boys
Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams, 1995, 53 minutes
Swarthmore
From the makers of Dream Girls, Shinjuku Boys introduces three annabes who work as hosts at the New Marilyn Club in Tokyo. Annabes are women who live as men and have girlfriends, although they don't usually identify as lesbians. As the film follows them at home and on the job, all three talk frankly to the camera about their gender-bending lives, revealing their views about women, sex, transvestitism and lesbianism. Alternating with these illuminating interviews are fabulous sequences shot inside the Club, patronized almost exclusively by heterosexual women who have become disappointed with real men. This is a remarkable documentary about the complexity of female sexuality in Japan today.

Shoot for the Contents
Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1991, 101 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Swarthmore
Reflecting on Mao’s famous saying, "Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend," Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film--whose title refers in part to a Chinese guessing game--is a unique excursion into the maze of allegorical naming and storytelling in China. The film ponders questions of power and change, politics and culture, as refracted by Tiananmen Square events. It offers at the same time an inquiry into the creative process of filmmaking, intricately layering Chinese popular songs and classical music, the sayings of Mao and Confucius, women’s voices and the words of artists, philosophers and other cultural workers. Video images emulate the gestures of calligraphy and contrast with film footage of rural China and stylized interviews. Like traditional Chinese opera, Trinh’s film unfolds through bold omissions and minute depictions to render the “real in the illusory and the illusory in the real. Exploring color, rhythm and the changing relationship between ear and eye, this meditative documentary realizes on screen the shifts of interpretation in contemporary Chinese culture and politics.

Sink or Swim
Su Friedrich, 1990, 48 minutes
Bryn Mawr
This resonant autobiographical film is a compelling account of the immutable, highly charged relationship between father and daughter. Traveling backwards from the letter Z, a young girl narrates 26 short stories which recount memories of a father she both fears and admires. Images from family vacations, the circus and Death Valley, interlaced with her voice-over, suggest an unbreachable distance, culminating in her father’s betrayal. Fraught with tension, ambivalence and finally love, the film’s vignettes combine the precision of structural filmmaking with the emotional power of storytelling.

Sisters in Resistance
Maia Wechsler, 2000, 60 minutes
Swarthmore
“This compelling documentary shares the story of four French women of uncommon courage who, in their teens and twenties, risked their lives to fight the Nazi occupation of their country. Neither Jews nor Communists, they were in no danger of arrest before they joined the Resistance. They could have remained safe at home. But they chose to resist. Within two years all four were arrested by the Gestapo and deported as political prisoners to the hell of Ravensbruck concentration camp, where they helped one another survive. Today, elderly but still very active, they continue to push forward as social activists and intellectual leaders in their fields. The film captures their amazing lives, and reveals an uncommon, intense bond of friendship that survives to this day.”- Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

Slaying the Dragon
Deborah Gee, 1988, 60 minutes
Swarthmore
...a comprehensive look at media stereotypes of Asian and Asian American women since the silent era. From the racist use of white actors to portray Asians in early Hollywood films, through the success of Anna May Wong’s sinister dragon lady, to Suzie Wong and the ‘50s geisha girls, to the Asian-American anchorwoman of today, this fascinating videotape shows how stereotypes of exoticism and docility have affected the perception of Asian-American women.

A Song of Ceylon
Laleen Jayamanne, 1985, 51 minutes
Swarthmore
A formally rigorous, visually stunning study of colonialism, gender and the body. The title echoes the classic British documentary and evokes a country erased from the world map. The soundtrack enacts a Sri Lankan anthropological text observing a woman’s ritual exorcism. Visually, the film brings together theatrical conventions and recreations of classic film stills, presenting the body in striking tableaux. This remarkable film is a provocative treatise on hybridity, hysteria and performance.

Sphinxes Without Secrets
Maria Beatty, 1991, 58 minutes
Swarthmore
Since its inception, performance art provided a forum for those artists whose work challenges the dominant aesthetic and cultural status quo. In Sphinxes Without Secrets, performers, curators and critics unravel the mysteries of performance art and ponder the world women confront today. Performers featured in this stylish program include Diamanda Galas, Holly Hughes (one of the 'NEA Four'), Robbie McCauley and Rachel Rosenthal; intercut with appearances by many others such as Laurie Anderson, Annie Sprinkle and Reno.

Sudesha
Deepa Dhanraj, 1983, 30 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Sudesha tells the story of one woman involved in the "Chipko" environmental movement in India.

Surname Viet, Given Name Nam
Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1989, 108 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Swarthmore
Vietnamese-born Trinh T. Minh-ha’s profoundly personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women historically and in contemporary society. Using dance, printed texts, folk poetry and the words and experiences of Vietnamese women in Vietnam--from both North and South--and the United States, Trinh’s film challenges official culture with the voices of women. A theoretically and formally complex work, Surname Viet Given Name Nam explores the difficulty of translation, and themes of dislocation and exile, critiquing both traditional society and life since the war.

A Tajik Woman
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, 1994, 20 minutes
Swarthmore
A picture of an unknown Tajik woman found in a Russian book on Tajikistan encourages videomaker Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa to reflect on issues of exile and cultural conflict for Muslim women from Afghanistan and Iran living in the United States. Moving interviews with four women (including the director’s mother) are interwoven with personal observations, images of the Tajik woman and fascinating footage of Iran and Muslim culture in the US. A Tajik Woman touches on many issues familiar to Muslim immigrants: war and revolution, loss of homeland and conflict with fundamentalist Islamic values. Sharing these stories begins a much-needed dialogue for Muslim women; it also provides a better understanding of Muslim women who now live in the US.

A Tale of Love
Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1995, 108 minutes
Bryn Mawr
Portraying the Vietnamese immigrant experience through Kieu, A Tale of Love follows the quest of a woman in love with ‘Love’. The film is loosely inspired by ‘The Tale of Kieu’, the Vietnamese national poem of love which Vietnamese people see as a mythical biography of their ‘motherland,’ marked by internal turbulence and foreign domination. A free-lance writer, Kieu also works as a model for a photographer who idealizes the headless female body and who captures Kieu sheathed by transparent veils. Voyeurism runs through the history of love narratives and voyeurism is here one of the threads that structures the ‘narrative’ of the film. Exposing the fiction of love in love stories and the process of consumption, A Tale of Love marginalizes traditional narrative conventions and opens up a denaturalized space of acting where performed reality, memory and dream constantly pass into one another. Sublimely beautiful to watch, A Tale of Love eloquently evokes an understanding of the allusive and powerful connections between love, sensuality, voyeurism and identity.

Thriller
Sally Potter, 1979, 34 minutes
Swarthmore
Since its release in 1980, Sally Potter's rewriting of Puccini's opera, La Boheme, has become a classic in feminist film theory. A model for the deconstruction of the Hollywood film, Thriller turns the conventional role of women as romantic victims in fiction on its head. Mimi, the seamstress heroine of the opera who must die before the curtain goes down, decides to investigate the reasons for her death. In doing so, she begins to explore the dichotomy which separates her from the opera's other female character, the "bad girl" Musetta. As rich in sounds and imagery as it is theoretically compelling, Thriller provides the female spectator with a long-awaited recognition of her version of the story.

Ticket of No Return
Ulrike Ottinger, 1979, 108 minutes
Swarthmore
A portrait of two unusual but also extremely different women. One rich, eccentric, hiding her feelings behind a rigid mask, consciously drinks herself to death. The other is a known drinker in town. In the course of the story they try to get to know each other, but they cannot come together. The background is Berlin, thrown open to a grotesque kind of sightseeing (drinkers’ geography) and complemented by authentic contributions from people who live here or are visiting, rock singers, writers, artist, taxi drivers. With Tabea Blumenschein, Magdalena Montezuma, Nina Hagen and Eddie Constantine.

Treyf
Alisa Lebow and Cynthia Madansky, 1998, 55 minutes
Swarthmore
Treyf –“unkosher” in Yiddish-- is an unorthodox documentary by and about two Jewish lesbians who met and fell in love at a Passover seder. With personal narration, real and imagined educational films, and haunting imagery, filmmakers Alisa Lebow and Cynthia Madansky examine the Jewish identity of their upbringings and its impact on their lives. Incisive cultural critics, astute, poignant, and poetic--never cynical--they weave their way from New York to Jerusalem in pursuit of a progressive, secular Jewish identity that draws from their childhood reminiscences as much as from their contemporary queer lives. A personal journey from kibbutz summers to coming out, from keeping kosher to Bat Mitzvahs, Treyf is iconoclastic and intelligent, humorous and poignant. A reflection on culture, community, and individual desire, this witty film follows the filmmakers as they discover what they thought was most profoundly “treyf” about their worldviews still has roots in Jewish history.

Trick or Drink
Vanalyne Green, 1985, 20 minutes
Swarthmore
Vanalyne Green's childhood world, growing up with alcoholic parents, is recreated through crayon drawings, family albums, excerpts from her adolescent diary and her interpretation of subsequent events in her life-including her own bulimia and her relationships with men.

Two Lies
Pam Tom, 1989, 25 minutes
Swarthmore
Doris Chu, a recently divorced Chinese American woman, has plastic surgery to make her eyes rounder. From her teenage daughter Mei's perspective, her mother's two eyes equal two lies. When the family journeys to a desert resort during Doris' recuperation, a series of revelations and bitter confrontations erupt. This beautiful black and white drama is a poignant study of generational conflict and the struggle for identity in a world of hybrid cultures.

2 or 3 Things But Nothing for Sure
Tina DiFeliciantonio and Jane C. Wagner, 1997, 12 minutes
Swarthmore
Acclaimed author Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina) is profiled in this moving, inspiring film. Combining poetic imagery with powerful readings, it evokes Allison's childhood in the poor white American South of the 1950's, her birth as a writer and feminist, and her coming to terms with a family legacy of incest and abuse. A beautifully realized portrait of an artist and survivor, this stirring film provides important insights into the roots of self-renewal, creativity.

Unbidden Voices
Prajna Paramita Parasher and Deb Ellis, 1989, 32 minutes
Bryn Mawr
This experimental documentary looks at the life of Manjula Joshi, an Indian woman who works making poori bread in a Chicago restaurant. Women's roles in traditional culture, the value of women's labor, and the experience of immigration are addressed by competing images, words and text.

Up in the Sky: Tracey Moffatt in New York
Jane Cole, 1999, 26 minutes
Swarthmore
"Up in the Sky scans the universe created by the provocative and talented photographer and filmmaker Tracey Moffatt, Australia's answer to Cindy Sherman and with even more of an edge, if that's possible. An important figure in the Australian postcolonial avant-garde, Moffatt started out with visually compelling (and often disturbing) photographs and films such as 'Nice Coloured Girls', 'Night Cries', and 'Bedevil' that explore her own Aboriginal heritage and the complex ways that power, race and gender intersect, often violently, in everyday life. More recently, her work draws on sources as diverse as Pasolini and Mad Max films, or Victorian photography. Jane Cole's documentary is an insightful portrait of Moffatt and her work, and an invaluable framework for anyone interested in the work of this cutting edge artist." Faye Ginsburg, Director, The Center for Media, Culture, and History, New York University
Info on Moffat

Visitors of the Night
An van Dienderen, 1998,34 minutes
Swarthmore
The failures of the ethnographic endeavor to discover "reality" are revealed in this expository and experimental film. The narrator-ethnographer embarks on an expedition to encounter the Mosou, an isolated and matrilinear tribe in the mountains of South West China. Their society is built on the principle of the axia-relationship, ties between ‘visitors of the night’. This means that a man only stays in his wife’s house at night and during the day he works for the benefit of his grandmother. Since men and women do not have economical obligations, their unique, polyandric relationships are based on love only. Recently due to funding by the Han government, The Lugo region has turned into a major tourist area, where tradition and modernity clash-- particularly when the polyandry of the Mosuo is seen as prostitution by outsiders. Van Dienderen, a visual anthropologist, playfully reveals the distance between textual knowledge and the experience of a cinematographic journey in a thoughtful and fascinating documentary.

Voices Heard, Sisters Unseen
Grace Poore, 1995, 75 minutes
Swarthmore
…a powerful and inspirational videotape 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 and without official immigrant status.

Ventre Livre
Ana Luiza Azevedo, 1995, 45 minutes
Bryn Mawr
…paints a grim picture of reproductive rights for millions of women in Brazil today. One in every four women of child-bearing age has been sterilized -- often in her teens. And, with no access to other forms of contraception, over two million women resort to illegal abortions every year -- leading to an estimated 50,000 deaths. Ventre Livre intercuts moving interviews with a range of different women describing their own experiences with statistics on the poor state of healthcare for women.

Warrior Marks
Pratibha Parmar, 1993, 54 minutes
Bryn Mawr
…a poetic and political film about female genital mutilation ...presented by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy. Female genital mutilation affects one hundred million of the world’s women and this remarkable film unlocks some of the cultural and political complexities surrounding this issue. Interviews with women from Senegal, Gambia, Burkino Faso, the United States and England who are concerned with and affected by genital mutilation are intercut with Walker’s own personal reflections on the subject.

Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts Anyway?
Janice Tanaka, 1992, 58 minutes
Swarthmore
A brilliant collage of interviews, family photographs, archival footage and personal narration, this videotape documents Japanese American video artist Janice Tanaka’s search for her father after a 40 year separation. The two reunited when Tanaka found her father living in a halfway house for the mentally ill. Telling the moving story of her search as well as what she discovered about history, cultural identity, memory and family, Who’s Going To Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? is a rare look at connections between racism and mental illness.

Womanhouse
Johanna Demetrakas, 1974, 47 minutes
Swarthmore
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 the art and social change.

Women’s Lives and Choices
Daniel Riesenfeld, 1995, 200 minutes
Bryn Mawr
This important and timely series deals with women's health and the social, cultural and economic factors underlying reproductive choices. Ventre Livre (Ana Luiza Azevedo) paints a grim picture of life for women in Brazil where sterilization and abortion are often the only forms of birth control available. Rishte (Manjira Datta) explores the practice of male sex preference in India and its ramifications for women.

Women of el Planeta
Maria Barea, 1983, 30 minutes
Bryn Mawr
…two women inspire the women of El Planeta in Peru to take action to solve their own community's problems.

The Works of Sadie Benning
Sadie Benning, 1989, 50 minutes
Swarthmore
At age 15, Sadie Benning began using a toy video camera to produce these frank, funny and remarkably self-aware missives about growing up lesbian.

Writing Desire
Ursula Biemann, 2000, 23 minutes
Swarthmore
"Ursula Biemann’s Writing Desire is a video essay on the new dream screen of the Internet and how it impacts on the global circulation of women’s bodies from the third world to the first world. Although under-age Philippine 'pen pals' and post-Soviet mail-order brides have been part of the transnational exchange of sex in the post-colonial and post-Cold War marketplace of desire before the digital age, the Internet has accelerated these transactions. Biemann provides her viewers with a thoughtful meditation on the obvious political, economic and gender inequalities of these exchanges by simulating the gaze of the Internet shopper looking for the imagined docile, traditional, pre-feminist, but Web-savvy mate. 'Writing Desire' delights in implicating the viewer in the new voyeurism and sexual consumerism of the Web. However, it never fails to challenge pat assumptions about the impossibility for resistance and the absolute victimization of women who dare to venture out of the third world and onto the Internet to look for that very obscure object of desire promised by the men of the West. This tape will promote lively discussion on third world women, the sex industry, mail order brides, racism and feminist backlashes in the West, and on women’s sexuality, desire, and new technologies."--Gina Marchetti, Ithaca College

Zyklon Portrait
Elida Schogt, 1999, 13 minutes
Swarthmore
A Holocaust film without Holocaust imagery, Zyklon Portrait 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.
Press kit