Director Johnny Symons
Subject Documentary
Language English
Running Time 57 minutes
Distributor New Day
Comments: Daddy & Papa is a one-hour documentary video that opens a candid window on the personal, cultural, and political implications of gay fatherhood. From surrogacy, foster care, and interracial adoption, to the complexities of gay divorce, to the legal battle around gay parenting, Daddy & Papa presents a revealing look at some of the gay dads who are breaking new ground in the ever-changing landscape of the American family.
Subject Collected Shorts
Year 1999 Subject Anthology
Language English
Running Time 62 minutes
Distributor Water Bearer Films
Comments: Six highly original lesbian shorts from the award-winning Frameline collection. In Sleep Come Free Me (Laurie Schmidt, 1998), a disenchanted office worker's dream life is suddenly overwhelmed with unexpected desire. This film won the Audience Award for Best Short at the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. I'm Starving (Yau Ching) is an erotic tale about the love between a woman and the ghost who shares her crammed Chinatown apartment. Adam (Andrea Stoops, 1996) is a clever, animated account of a playground contest directed by a butch baby. Badass Supermama (Etang Inyang 1996) is a playful and personal contemplation of race, gender and sexuality as seen in the image of "blaxploitation" goddess Pam Grier. Blue Diary (Jeni Olson, 1997) is a study of urban love and loss that won the Director's Choice Award at the Black Maria Film Festival. Lastly, Dangerous When Wet (Diane Bender, 1992) is the humorous tale of a woman's first orgasm and her difficulty describing the experience.
Directors Barbara Attie and Martha Goell Lubell
Year 1999
Subject Documentary
Language English
Running Time 57 minutes
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: Why would a young person choose resistance rather than submission during Hitler's reign of terror while her world was collapsing around her? 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 populations. Defying her family's wishes, each girl found an unexpected way of fighting back--as a ballet dancer shuttling Jews to safe houses and distributing resistance newspapers; as a photographer and partisan waging guerrilla war against the Germans; and as a leader in an underground Zionist group smuggling Jews across the border. Enriched by home movies, archival footage, and previously unpublished photographs, the women's varied and vibrant stories provide a unique look at Jewish resistance to Nazism, a subject all too often consigned to history's footnotes.
Director Michelle Citron
Year 1979
Subject Documentary
Language English
Running Time 53 minutes
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: 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." Daughter Rite combines home movies, a dreamlike voice-over and scripted cinema v?rit? sequences to extend the language of feminist documentary.
Director Julie Dash
Year 1991
Subject Feature
Artists Cora Lee Day, Barbara-O, Alva Rogers
Screenplay Julie Dash
Language English
Running Time 113 minutes
Distributor Geeche Girls Productions
Comments: This movie tells the story of a large African-American family as they prepare to move North at the dawn of the 20th century. Using this simple tale, the film brings to life the changing values, conflicts and struggles that confront every family as they leave their homeland for the promise of a new and better future. In addition to this highly charged epic drama, this film explores the unique culture of the Gullah people, descendants of slaves who lived in relative isolation on the Sea Islands off the Georgia coast. As the generations struggle with the decision to leave, their rich Gullah heritage and African roots rise to the surface.
Director Tim Kirkman
Year 1998
Subject Documentary
Language English
Running Time 83 minutes
Distributor New Yorker Video
Comments: Director Tim Kirkman's "open letter" to conservative Senator Jesse Helms is an extremely personal, often quite funny and touching documentary that examines the impact the North Carolina Republican has had on Kirkman's hometown. Talking to friends, neighbors and others, Kirkman tries to find how deep the currents of homophobia run in his community, and he contemplates how Helms' long political career has shaped those feelings.
Director J. Clements
Year 1991
Subject Documentary
Screenplay J Clements
Language English
Running Time 45 minutes
Distributor New Day Films
Comments: Facing the realities of being female in the 90's. A discussion of childhood play, the work place, motherhood, relationships, the "second shift," body image, sexual assault, and self-esteem.
Director John Keitel
Year 1997
Subject Feature Film
Language English
Running Time 93 minutes
Distributor Wolfe Video
Comments: A "coming out" drama set in the sexually conflicted world of a college fraternity, where popular student Griff struggles with being honest about his homosexuality. After a gay-bashing incident, the pressure is on for Griff to come out. Winner, Best Narrative, at the 1997 Austin Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.
Subject Documentary
Language English
Running Time 39 minutes
Distributor Films for the Humanities and Sciences
Comments: Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher credited with launching the Deconstructionist movement, argues his theories on this program. Derrida begins with a frank discussion on the ethical problems of Deconstruction, especially in relation to human rights. He argues that Deconstruction is not a disillusion of the subject, it is first and foremost a historical or genealogical analysis of that subject and an attempt to focus on a universal translation of it. Derrida points out that Deconstruction is mainly an affirmation -- it goes further and changes the nature of the subject -- and is neither "reconstruction" nor "destruction."
Director Shelley Williams
Year 1995
Subject Documentary
Language English
Running Time 45 minutes
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: The idea for this film came from a book called: The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women's Writing and Art. The title of this book came from a poem which questions the idea of a passive, feminine landscape that simply awaits the western conqueror. Williams interviews several of contemporary women artists living in the deserts of the southwestern United States. She explores artistic expressions, ethnicity and place in relation to contemporary women. The viewer is permitted inside the artists' studios, homes or surrounding environment. Each setting forms the backdrop for the artist's "self-portrait." The artists interviewed include: Sandra Cisneros, Harmony Hammond, Pola Lopez de Jaramillo, Pat Mora, Nora Naranjo-Morse, Meridel Rubenstein, Ramona Sakiestewa, Luci Tapahonso, and Emma Whitehorse.
Director Stuart Marshall
Year 1989
Subject Documentary
Language English
Running Time 88 minutes
Distributor Water Bearer Films
Comments: Director Stuart Marshall chronicles the events leading to a crucial chapter in the gay and lesbian movement's history: the imprisonment of homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. His film examines the "discovery" of homosexuality by the medical and psychoanalytic professions in the 1890s, and the subsequent movements in Germany during the early Years of this century demanding recognition of gay and lesbian rights.
Director Robert Hercules & Frank Dina
Language English
Running Time 45 minutes
Distributor Media Process Group
Comments: Chicagoan Bob Hercules' documentary was filmed on location with a crew of four. It concentrates largely on the U.S. media coverage of the Nicaraguan elections. What emerges is not only a sharp piece of alternative news coverage that helps to explain the outcome, but also a revealing and multifaceted (and alternately funny and chilling) look at how the U.S. news about Nicaragua actually gets "created."
Director Richard Spence
Year 1996
Subject Feature Film
Language English
Running Time 101 minutes
Distributor Fox Lorber
Comments: When Paul (Rupert Graves) last saw his old school friend he remembered a boy named Karl. Now, 15 Years later, he unexpectedly runs into him again, but now she is Kim, a post-operative transsexual. Worlds apart in their attitudes toward life, they no longer appear to have anything in common. But as she teaches him to grow up and he teaches her to have fun, they accidentally fall in love. With Steven Mackintosh as Karl/Kim.
Producers Muffie Meyer and Ellen Hovde
Subject WGBH Documentary
Year 1995
Running Time 60 minutes
Distributor Films for the Humanities and Sciences
Comments: Geophysicist Marcia McNutt sees science as a giant jigsaw puzzle. She is conducting a study of a critical juncture beneath Lake Mead, Nevada, where the earth's geological plates are pulling away from each other. Our continent is literally "falling apart before our very eyes," says McNutt, and someday North America may split into two separate continents. The profile follows McNutt as she studies these hidden forces, and it travels with her to Tahiti where she and her colleagues examine xenoliths, rock fragments thrown up from the earth's mysterious interior. The program also shows the human face of a life in science. McNutt is a single parent, widowed five years ago when her husband suddenly died, leaving her with three young daughters. Her life involves a constant balancing of research and teaching at MIT, where she's a tenured professor in the Earth Sciences Department, with children's piano lessons and birthday parties.
Producer David Sutherland
Subject WGBH Documentary
Year 1995
Running Time 60 minutes
Distributor Films for the Humanities and Sciences
Comments: To Melissa Franklin, building a machine that zaps subatomic particles is as much of a kick as staying up all night listening to Frank Zappa albums. She is an eclectic innovator with a quirky sense of humor ? and she's also the first woman to become a tenured professor in Harvard University's physics department. In this profile, Franklin brings the cameras inside the multi-million dollar, 140-particle detector at Chicago's Fermilab. The detector, which Franklin helped build, accelerates "the smallest things in the world," subatomic particles, and then smashes them together to produce data that physicists can record and study. Out of this work, Franklin and her colleagues have produced evidence of the top quark, the final, elusive particle needed to complete the Standard Model of quantum physics. Franklin balances this demanding work with a personal credo ?"One's role in life is to be amusing"? that makes her provocative and funny.
Producer Yvonne Smith
Subject WGBH Documentary
Year 1995
Running Time 60 minutes
Distributor Films for the Humanities and Sciences
Comments: As a teenager growing up in a dangerous, low-income housing project in Boston, Lynda Jordan was, as she puts it, "on the cusp of becoming a delinquent child." Today she's a tenured associate professor in biochemistry, working on an exciting project: unlocking the secrets of a key human enzyme that's vital to one of life's most fundamental processes, giving birth. The inspiring story of Jordan's journey towards that goal, and of her efforts to encourage the next generation of African American scientists like herself, is at the heart of this profile. She talks about the importance of her undergraduate years at an historically black university, a place where she could feel "strong, reinforced, affirmed," in her identity as an African American woman while learning the skills needed to go on to a Ph.D. from MIT and a fellowship at the prestigious Institut Pasteur in Paris.
Producer Deborah Shaffer
Subject WGBH Documentary
Year 1995
Running Time 60 minutes
Distributor Films for the Humanities and Sciences
Comments: 4,500 years ago, barefoot adventurers crawled through dark, narrow passages deep inside the earth, exploring their world with remarkable courage and skill. In this profile, archeologist Patty Jo Watson follows their path and views their footprints with awe. "It's one of the times when you can see the past before you," Watson says. "It's about the closest you can get to a prehistoric person." Watson's work in caves has uncovered intriguing new information about the earliest North Americans, and has led to a re-evaluation of our beliefs about them. Watson also travels to a rural Chinese village and high into the Rocky Mountains as part of her study of early human activity, and she talks about her provocative new theory about gender roles in early societies. But the key to her work lies deep in the caves of Kentucky and Tennessee, where research can often be hazardous. On one trip in this program a fellow caver collapses in hypoglycemic shock, and Watson and her team must scramble to alert rescue forces and guide them in, two miles underground.
Producer James DeVinney
Subject WGBH Documentary
Year 1995
Running Time 60 minutes
Distributor Films for the Humanities and Sciences
Comments: As a child, Misha Mahowald went on a ride at Disneyland where visitors were "shrunk down" into "water molecules." Being only a child, she thought what she was seeing was real. "The world suddenly was much more interesting than I'd been led to believe, because there were all these things that were normally invisible that were really there," she remembers. Today, Mahowald brings the same delighted curiosity to her work as a young scientist in a very young field, computational neuroscience, a combination of computer science and biology. Although she is only 29 years old, she has already played a major part in the development of a silicon retina, a tiny computer chip that reacts to light as the eye's retina does. A ghostly , flickering image of Mahowald as seen by this retina wavers on the computer screen as she works on her next project: building a silicon neuron. It's the next step towards building an entire visual network - and maybe, someday, a human brain - on computer chips.
Year 1995
Running Time 51 minutes
Distributor Time-Life Video
Comments: The gender wars we wage today merely echo those fought since the dawn of mankind -- only then the battlefield was called religion. Exciting new evidence sheds light on goddess cults that thrived in an age before men cried heresy at any prayer not uttered to a single masculine God. Two parts: "The Forbidden Goddess" and "Women of Lesbos"
Director Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini
Year 1998
Running Time 80 minutes
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: 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. With the barest of commentary, Longinotto turns her cameras on the court and lets it tell its own story. Dispelling images of Iran as a country of war, hostages, and "fatwas", and Iranian women as passive victims of a terrible system, this film is a subtle, fascinating look at women's lives in a country which is little known to most Americans. Directed by Kim Longinotto, the acclaimed Director of Dream Girls and Hidden Faces, and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, author of Marriage on Trial: A Study of Islamic Family Law.
Director Spike Lee
Year 1989
Subject Feature (Comedy)
Artists Dany Aiello
Language English
Running Time 120 minutes
Distributor Universal City Studios
Comments: This powerful visual feast combines humar and drama with memorable characters while tracing the course of a single day on a block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. It's the hottest day of the year, a scorching 24-hour period that will change the lives of its residents forever. Danny Aiello co-stars in this absorbing tale of inner-city life that heats up with vivid images and unforgettable performances.
Director Mina Shum
Year 1995
Subject Feature Film
Language English
Running Time 87 minutes
Distributor Fine Line Features
Comments: East clashes with West and generations collide in this comedy about a young Chinese woman struggling to appease her old-fashioned father, and at the same time purse her modern dreams. Jade's parents want to see her happily married to a nice successful Chinese man, so they embark on a matchmaking mission. But Jade wants to make up her own mind. The problem is, telling them the truth about her secret romance with a caucasian man, would break their hearts. For Jade, the choice between family and personal happiness is about to change her life forever. "Double Happiness" is a funny and bittersweet comedy that has something for everyone!
Subject Documentary
Running Time 60 minutes
Distributor Films for the Humanities and Sciences
Comments: Rita Dove is a Pulitzer Prize-winner and the youngest poet to have held the post of Poet Laureate of the United States. In this program with Bill Moyers, Dove talks about her life and work, the relationship between poetry and power, and her plans for taking poetry to the people. The program also features Dove reading extensive selections from her works (including her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Thomas and Beulah) and in performance before and audience.
Director Kim Longinotto and Jano Williams
Year 1994
Running Time 50 mins
Distributor Women Make Movies
Comments: Dream Girls opens a door into the spectacular world of the Takarazuka Revue, a highly successful theater company in Japan where all roles are played by women. Thousands of young Japanese women apply to enter the Takarazuka Music School each year . The few that are accepted will endure year s of a highly disciplined and reclusive existence before they can join the Revue. Once on stage these performers create a fantasy world-- a world in which "men" are always handsome and sensitive, women are always glamorous, and love is grand. Millions of Japanese women adore the romantic heros (played by women), idolizing them like heartthrob pop stars "we'll never meet men like this" say two young girls "but it helps you to forget the pain of life for a while". A Japanese Paris is Burning with a twist, Dream Girls offers a compelling insight into gender and sexual identity and the contradictions experienced by Japanese women today.
Year 1991
Running Time 56 minutes
Subject Documentary
Comments: By focusing on one of the most important aspects of popular culture -- music video -- DreamWorlds raises critical questions, and suggests new answers about the effect of music video. DreamWorlds II powerfully illustrates the systematic representations of women in music video, and how these representations tell a dangerous and narrow set of stories about what it means to be female or male; stories which impact how women think about themselves sexually, and how men think sexually about women. Shocking and disturbing, DreamWorlds gives us a critical distance from images which have become so ubiquitous, and normal, they are almost invisible.
