Director Daniel Friedman & Sharon Grimberg
Year 1992
Subject Documentary
Language English
Running Time 47 minutes
Distributor Filmakers Library
Comments: The generation that came of age since Roe v. Wade knows little of the sordid realities once faced by women seeking to end an unwanted pregnancy. This historical documentary tells the story of illegal abortions as they were experienced by all kinds of women- rich and poor, white and minority, married and single. It also chronicles the physicians, the clergy, and the women's health activists whose quiet defiance of abortion laws stands as a dramatic unwritten chapter in the history of U.S. civil disobedience. Back Alley Detroit recalls a period when women lived in terror of unwanted pregnancies, while an underworld profited from their vulnerability.
Director Percy Adlon
Year 1988
Subject Feature Film
Language English
Running Time 90 minutes
Distributor Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Comments: From Percy Adlon, the Director of Sugarbaby, an English-Language film about a friendship between two women at a desert truck stop motel and diner. One is black and overworked. The other is German and overdressed. A haunting musical score and a top notch supporting cast, which includes Jack Palance, makes this sweet comedy starring C.C. Pounder and Marianne Sagebrecht a delight.
Running Time: 4:55
Distributor, Producer, Artist/Director: Harriette Yahr
Year: 2002
Comments: Two little girls deconstruct a nursery rhyme. A film about boys, girls and playground philosophy.
Director Susan Stern
Year 1997
Subject Documentary
Language English
Running Time 53 minutes
Distributor New Day Films
Comments: The Barbie Doll is not just the world's most popular toy, she's a Rorscach test, revealing attitudes about sexuality, body image, gender roles and creativity in an increasingly mass produced world. Journeying from Barbie conventions to anti-Barbie demonstrations, from girls' play dates to Barbie web pages, Barbie Nation is the story of Barbie creator and Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler. Handler's ironic rise and fall brings Barbie Nation to a climax that is about the creation of femininity and the marketing --and subversion -- of femininity's icon.
Director Marita Giovanni
Year 1995
Subject Feature (Comedy)
Artists Nancy Allison Wolfe, Liza D'Agostino
Screenplay Lauran Hoffman
Language English
Running Time 95 minutes
Distributor Orion Home Video
Comments: A funny and fresh romantic comedy featuring a group of women whose lives and loves intertwine against the backdrop of a Los Angeles lesbian bar. The film centers around Loretta (Nancy Allison Wolfe), a clever yet insecure cartoon writer, and Rachel (Liza D'Agnostino), a lovely, commitment-shy actress. Together, they face their fear of past loves and pain and start anew. But their hangout, local lesbian establishmen Girl Bar, soon becomes a catalyst for conflict as old girlfriends resurface and new hurts are inevitably unleashed. Bar Girls is an honest, witty, and passionate gender variation on one of the most maddening rituals of all timeÉ the dating game.
Director Angelica Huston
Year 1996
Subject Feature
Artists Jennifer Jason-Leigh, Michael Rooker, Jena Malone, Ron Eldard
Screenplay Anne Meredith
Language English
Running Time 101 minutes
Distributor BMG Entertainment
Comments: Anney Boatright, young and single, gives birth to a daughter - an illegitimate child - nicknamed "Bone" because her Uncle Earl says, "She ain't no bigger than a knucklebone." Although she grows up poor in South Carolina in the 1950's, Bone and her mother share a deep and loving bond. Daddy Glen, Anney's new husband and Bone's new stepfather, becomes jealous of the powerful bond between mother and daughter.
Director Steven Lipscomb
Year 1997
Subject Documentary
Language English
Running Time 75 minutes
Distributor Battle For the Minds, Inc.
Comments: Battle For the Minds is a stunning expose of the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY. With shocking honesty, Lipscomb explores the rising tensions within the Southern Baptist world as he focuses on one woman's struggle against the movement's religious leaders and their views on the role of ordained women in the Baptist church. The film's resonance lies in its far-reaching application. The growing fundamentalist influence in the world of the Southern Baptist Convention serves as a microcosm for the alarming outbreak of the intolerant religious right in many areas of our society. A fresh new talent, Lipscomb intriguingly conveys the chilling whirlwind of controversy in this evocative piece of work.
Director Hettie MacDonald
Year 1997
Subject Feature Film
Language English
Running Time 90 minutes
Distributor Columbia Tristar
Comments: One of the best gay films to come out of Britain in Years. With Linda Henry, Glen Berry and Scott Neal. "A warm and funny love story. Refreshingly spunky and unsentimental" (Michael Musto, Village Voice).
Director Mark Kitchell
Year 1990
Subject Documentary
Running Time 117 minutes
Distributor First Run Features
Comments: The Sixties come to life in this gripping film. Berkeley in the Sixties captures the decade's events -- the birth of the Free Speech Movement, civil rights marches, anti-Vietnam War protests, the counter-culture, the women's movement, and the rise of the Black Panthers -- in all their immediacy and passion. Dramatic archival footage is interwoven with present-day interviews and 18 songs from the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, The Band and many others.
Year 2002
Subject Lecture
Language English
Running Time 2 Volumes, 78 minutes and 105 minutes
Distributor Trustees of Dartmouth College
Comments: Bernice Sandler was a Dartmouth College Women's Research and Education Institute Senior Scholar in Fall 2002.
Director Anne Wheeler
Year 1999
Subject Feature Film
Language English
Running Time 102 minutes
Distributor Trimark Home Video
Comments: When Maggie falls into a passionate, physical love affair with Kim, she has to keep her relationship a secret from her mother. This proves to be very difficult when Mom moves in with her. Wendy Crewson, Karen Dwyer and Christina Cox star in this very sexy lesbian romp. "Brims over with good humor and high spirits and has moments of stunning eroticism" (Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times).
Director Nisma Zaman
Year 1994
Subject Documentary
Language English
Running Time 28 minutes
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: Beyond Black and White is a personal exploration of the filmmaker's bicultural heritage (Caucasian and Asian/Bengali) in which she relates her experiences to those of five other women from various biracial backgrounds. In lively interviews and group discussions these women reveal how they have been influenced by images of women in American media, how racism has affected them, and how their families and environments have shaped their racial identities. Their experiences are placed within the context of history, including miscegenation laws and governmental racial classifications.
Year 1992
Subject Documentary
Artist Susan Rook
Language English
Running Time 41 minutes
Distributor Cable News Network
Comments: Half the work force is locked out of the highest echelons of corporate power: half the talent; half the potential new ideas; half the brainpower that represents the competitive edge in the 21st century. Women have been trapped below an invisible glass ceiling, able to see the executive suite, but unable to enter. Those who do, tend to be relegated to a "pink ghetto" of executive jobs in marketing, advertising and human relations -- locked out of real decision-making positions. Now, CNN's award-winning documentary team, "Special Reports," takes us Beyond the Glass Ceiling for an in-depth examination of the challenges and opportunities ahead for women in the executive suite.
Subject Documentary
Running Time 70 minutes
Distributor Films for the Humanities and Sciences
Comments: This program follows eight women giving birth in a variety of circumstances, including natural births at home and in the hospital, a Caesarian, twins, and a water birth. With commentary by mothers, partners, obstetricians, and midwives, and extensive footage of childbirth, this program captures firsthand the experience of this intimate and exciting moment.
Producer Lawrence Pitkethly
Year 1995
Subject Documentary
Artist Elizabeth Bishop
Language English
Running Time 60 minutes
Distributor Mystic Fire Video
Comments: A genius of complex forms, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was preoccupied with perception and the boundaries of consciousness. Her poems were often fanciful and always accessible. Exotic documentary footage heightens the magical realism of this seasoned traveler's work. In her poetry the integrity of all life is felt. Commentators include Mary McCarthy and Octavio Paz. Poems include The Moose, Pink Dog and One Art.
Director Nadine Valcin
Year 1999
Running Time 40 mins
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: Afros, braids or corn rows--hairstyles have always carried a social message, and few issues cause as many battles between black parents and their daughters. To "relax" one's hair into straight tresses or to leave it "natural" inevitably raises questions of conformity and rebellion, pride and identity. Today, trend-setting teens happily reinvent themselves on a daily basis, while career women strive for the right "professional" image, and other women go "natural" as a symbol of comfort in their Blackness. Filmmaker Nadine Valcin meets a diverse group of black women who reveal how their hairstyles relate to their lives and life choices. "Black, Bold and Beautiful" celebrates the bonds formed as women attend to each other's hair while exploring how everyday grooming matters tap into lively debates about self-determination and society's perceptions of beauty.
Director Black Women On Productions, LLC
Year 1997
Running Time 52 mins
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: "Black Women On: The Light, Dark Thang" explores the politics of color within the African-American community. Women of hues--from honey-vanilla to brown-sugar chocolate--speak candidly about the longstanding "caste system" that permeates black society. These women share provocative, heart-wrenching personal stories about how being too light or too dark has profoundly influenced their life and relationships--from childhood on and throughout their adult years. Originating in a culture of slavery, the "light, dark thang" still persists. Even today it haunts black women's individual and collective memories. Both entertaining and transformative viewing, "Black Women On: The Light, DarkThang" combines personal interviews and historical footage with literary and dramatic vignettes.
Subject Documentary
Running Time 28 minutes
Comments: Many black men in America say they are getting a bum rap from black women writers. They accuse these writers of achieving success by focusing criticism on black males. In this specially adapted Phil Donahue program, Alice Walker, Michelle Wallace, Ntosake Shange, Angela Davis, and Maya Angelou argue that the criticism is a reflection of the problem of self-image these men have.
Director Xiao-Yen Wang
Year 1991
Subject Documentary
Language English
Running Time 57 minutes
Distributor The Beijing-San Francisco Film Group
Comments: The Blank Point: What is Transsexualism? focuses on two male-to-female transsexuals and one female-to-male transsexual who talk about their psychological and physical changes during their transition. They talk about adjusting to a new identity, about family and societal rejection, about their sexuality, about their hopes and feelings.
Director Ngozi Onwurah
Year 1991
Running Time 23 mins
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: 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.
Director Sonali Fernando
Year 1999
Running Time 29 minutes
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: An imaginary biopic, The Body of a Poet centers on the efforts of a group of young lesbians of color to devise a fitting tribute to one of this century's great visionaries. Its genre-bending celebration of the life and work of Audre Lorde, black lesbian poet and political activist, daringly meshes diverse media conventions and techniques as it explores Lorde's trajectory from birth to death. Refreshing and visually stunning, this brave film features assured acting by a dedicated cast and a taut script comprising the work of contemporary African American lesbian poets.
Director Lizzie Borden
Year 1983
Language English
Running Time 90 minutes
Distributor First Run Features
Comments: Set in America ten years after the Second American Revolution, Born in Flames is a comic fantasy of female rebellion. When Adelaide Norris, the black radical founder of the Woman's Army, is mysteriously killed, a seemingly impossible coalition of women -- across all lines of race, class, and sexual preference -- emerges to blow the System apart.
Director James Ivory
Year 1984
Subject Feature Film
Language English
Running Time 120 minutes
Distributor Merchant Ivory Productions
Comments: "Nineteenth-century passions are ignited when young feminist Varena Tarrant (Madeleine Potter) takes Boston by storm. Her outspokenness touches Olive Chancellor (Vanessa Redgrave), a wealthy suffragette, and her cousin Basil Ransom (Christopher Reeve), who finds Varena's beauty irresistible. Olive tries to shield Varena while molding her into a leader for the women's movement, but a part of Varena's heart belongs to Basil, who seeks her hand in marriage. Nominated for 2 Academy Awards, including Vanessa Redgrave for best actress, Merchant Ivory Productions' film adaptation of this classic Henry James novel is abolutely breathtaking (From the makers of Academy Award winners Howard's End and A Room With A View)."
Director Julie Wyman
Year 2000
Running Time 57 mins
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: 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.
Director Kimberly Peirce
Year 1999
Subject Feature Film
Language English
Running Time 118 minutes
Distributor 20th Century Fox
Comments: A true story about hope, fear, and the courage it takes to be yourself, Boys Don't Cry is "the kind of movie that can reach and touch anyone" (Roger Ebet, Chicago Sun-Times). Newcomers Hilary Swank and Chloe Sevigny star in this powerful film inspired by the life of young Teena Brandon, who decides to live as a man named Brandon Teena until her secret is exposed with shocking consequences.
Director Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdotte
Year 1998
Subject Documentary
Running Time 88 minutes
Distributor Bless Bless Productions
Comments: To his girlfriends, he was the perfect boyfriend. To his killers, he was a freak. In the end, Brandon Teena became an American tragedy. Winner of Best Documentary awards at the Berlin and Vancouver film festivals and the true story upon which the critically acclaimed Boys Don't Cry is based, The Brandon Teena Story reveals how sparks from sexual ambiguity and individuality can ignite incomprehensible violence. By the time Teena Brandon was 21, she was living in Falls City, Nebraska, and assuming the identity of a man. There, Brandon dated several women, showering them with flowers, gifts and compliments. Forged checks to pay for the courtship landed him in jail, and his true gender was revealed and so began the events that led to Teena Brandon's end.
Director Andrea K., Elovson
Year 1997
Running Time 35 minutes
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: Combining powerful interviews with documentary footage, this timely and compelling videotape takes a comprehensive look at the issues still confronting battered women twenty years after the beginning of the domestic violence movement. Featuring the stories of three women - one a police officer - who went through the Philadelphia family courts to ensure their safety, Breaking the Rule of Thumb examines contemporary domestic violence in terms of changing historical definitions of abuse. Incorporating individual stories into a strong argument for legal reform, filmmaker Andrea Elovson exposes how domestic violence's seemingly personal gender issues are inextricably tied to flawed ideas of civil justice.
Director Meema Spadola
Year 1996
Running Time 50 minutes
Distributor HBO
Comments: From a breast-feeding mother to a 420 pound comedienne; from a transsexual and a stripper--both with implants -- to a 24 year old woman with a breast reduction; from two mother/daughter teams to two women with mastectomies. Twenty-two everyday women -- most of them topless -- introduce you to the secrets, the sensations, the surprises and the stories that lie hidden in their anatomy. It will change the way you see the world -- or at least one part of it.
Director Chrissie Stansfield
Year 1987
Subject Educational Documentary
Language English
Running Time 48 minutes
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: This fascinating documentary analyzes how the patterns of international capital investment and the exploitation of Third World women workers in free trade zones are being brought home to the First World. Issues discussed include: the internationalization of our local economies, the growing schism between the rich and poor and the changing nature of women's work.
Year 2002
Subject Interview
Language English
Year 2002
Subject Interview
Language English
Comments
Final project for GLBT 47 by John Ashworth ?03 and Sara Baron Œ03
