Documentaries – Bitch Flicks

Tanya Tagaq Voices Inuit Womanhood in ‘Nanook of the North’

Director Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting.

This post written by staff writer Brigit McCone originally appeared at Bitch Flicks and is reposted here as part of our theme week on Indigenous Women.

Nanook of the North is an iconic 1922 drama that recreates traditional Inuit lifeways through the representative struggles of Nanook (“Polar Bear,” played by Allakariallak), his wife Nyla (“The Smiling One,” played by Maggie Nujarluktuk), another woman identified only as “Cunayou,” Nanook’s young son “Allee,” and baby “Rainbow.” However, we are shown older boys, described as “some of Nanook’s children,” eating sea-biscuits and lard at the trading post, adding to the film’s casual, hand-waving vagueness about Nanook’s family relationships. Male helpers pop up for group hunts, as though from nowhere, but Nanook’s family is never placed in a wider community context. Despite describing Nanook as band leader, he is never depicted leading, and is frequently infantilized by director Robert Flaherty. By framing his drama as “documentary,” Flaherty converts Allakariallak and Nujarluktuk from active collaborators into passive subjects.

Flaherty erased the fact that both Maggie Nujarluktuk and, reportedly, the woman playing Cunayou, were his own wives (or “mistresses,” from Flaherty’s cultural perspective). The “morning” scene, in which Nanook, his two women and his son awake naked inside the igloo, therefore closely resembles Flaherty’s own polyamorous living arrangement, exoticized into a symptom of Nanook’s cultural Otherness. The domestic warmth that Flaherty captured in Nanook of the North, through his access to both women, is key to his “documentary’s” charm, but his pretended objectivity converts this intensely personal intimacy into an image of the women’s indiscriminate availability to outsiders. Maggie Nujarluktuk smiles self-consciously and playfully flirts with the camera, because the camera is being operated by her husband, but that husband disowns her smiles and essentializes them as a permanent characteristic of “Nyla the smiling one.”

In her thesis, “Neither Indian Princesses Nor Squaw Drudges,” Janice Acoose examines the pervasive stereotype of the “loose squaw” in literature about Indigenous women, which constructs the Indigenous woman as a disposable sexual convenience. Flaherty’s own concept of Inuit disposability was demonstrated when he abandoned Nujarluktuk after filming, who then bore him a son, Josephie, that he never saw, acknowledged, or materially supported. This adds sinister resonance to Nanook of the North‘s description of Nyla’s baby Rainbow as “her young husky,” jokingly implying that Inuit women view their own children as equivalent to animals. In Acoose’s view, “loose squaw” images “foster cultural attitudes that legitimize rape and other similar kinds of violence against Indigenous women,” whose disappearances often go uninvestigated in Canada, particularly if they are also sex workers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEzGouiy2Q”]

Josephie Flaherty’s family was caught up in the “High Arctic Relocation,” the forced transfer of a community of Inuit to the High Arctic, as “human flagpoles” to support Canada’s territorial claim to the Northwest Passage. It was masterminded by the Department of Northern Affairs, who wished to remove the Inuit from white civilization to free them from “a toxic culture of dependence.” In other words, like Nanook of the North, the “High Arctic Relocation” was an artificially staged, Euro-American vision of uncorrupted Inuit innocence. It is impossible to draw a neat line between Flaherty’s fictional vision and the Department of Northern Affairs’ imposed reality; each was inspired by a toxic culture, not of dependence but of colonial entitlement and the romanticizing of “noble savages”; the Department’s resident romantics may even have been directly inspired by Nanook of the North. The High Arctic Exiles were denied material support from the Canadian government, though that same government intervened to prevent them from hunting on its designated “wildlife preserve.” The Inuit, identified by numbered tags, were taken from a community with a school and nursing station, and transported on a boat with infectious tuberculosis patients. Tuberculosis was also the disease that had previously claimed the life of Flaherty’s star, Allakariallak, a fact that Flaherty covered up by telling audiences that “Nanook” had “starved to death” while hunting deer, yet again erasing Euro-American influence. Several of the High Arctic Exiles’ children were taken from their parents for medical treatment and “misplaced for several years” by bureaucrats, a chilling indifference that echoes Flaherty’s casual attitude to Nanook’s fluctuating number of “young huskies.” For his monument symbolizing victims of the “Relocation,” Inuk sculptor Looty Pijamini chose a life-size Inuk woman and child, carved from a block of granite tinted red like blood.

Her international recording career has made “Inuk punk” Tanya Tagaq into one of the most recognizable cultural ambassadors of the Inuit people. Tagaq’s own mother hailed from Nanook of the North‘s Quebec location before falling victim to the High Arctic “relocation,” informing Tagaq’s complex response to the film’s mixture of colonial ideology and preserved history. In 2012, the Toronto International Film Festival commissioned Tagaq to provide an original soundtrack to the film, drawing from the Inuit art of throat-singing, katajjaq. Discussing the film, Tagaq spotlights Flaherty’s staged scene of Nanook biting a gramophone record, as though unaware of what it is. “Inuit are running the cameras a lot of the time,” Tagaq laughs. Watching this scene closely is revealing. As the gramophone starts up, neither Nanook nor Nyla appears surprised by it, while Nyla rocks her baby to the music. There is an awkward jump cut, Nyla has been removed from the shot, and Nanook is laughing and biting the record. In such scenes, Allakariallak demonstrates the comic ability which gives the film its charm, but is harnessed to create a demeaning image of Inuit childishness, which Flaherty frames as generally representative of “the fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo,” rather than individually representative of the talented comedian, Allakariallak. However, Tanya Tagaq’s soundtrack rejects Flaherty’s impulse to isolate, essentialize, and fossilize Inuit culture into artificial purity. As a confident inheritor of her own culture, she engages with the musical traditions of other nations, harnessing non-Native technology and instruments to enrich her evolving practice of katajjaq.

When the show came to the 2014 Dublin Fringe Festival, I eagerly checked it out, having experienced the masculine tradition of Tuvan khöömei throat-singing in Siberia. Unlike khöömei, katajjaq evolved as a female tradition. Two women, facing each other, would improvise rhythmic motifs, the loser being the first to laugh or run out of breath. These throat-singing games tended to last between one and three minutes. Tagaq’s live performance to Nanook of the North lasts over an hour, an extraordinarily demanding tour-de-force of physical strength and passion.

Katajjaq blends mood, rhythm and the imitation of natural sounds, from wind to howling dogs to crying birds, weaving them into a spiritual whole. By blending the sounds of the natural world with the mind’s vibrations, katajjaq reflects the worldview of animism, the traditional Inuit conception that all objects and beings are endowed with spirit. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Christian missionaries banned throat-singing as a demonic and sexual act. Certainly, Tagaq’s version of katajjaq is strikingly sexual. Her hyperventilations build in intensity and peak with shrieking cries, inducing ecstatic trance. Where “Nyla the smiling one” was crafted as a submissive image of availability, the throat-singer powerfully (perhaps threateningly) voices her own desire. Nina Segalowitz, a survivor of coerced adoption and forced assimilation, found katajjaq an empowering tool for reconnecting to her heritage. Her story recalls the Australian Aboriginal experience of forced assimilation portrayed in Rabbit Proof Fence: “My father thought he was signing hospital admission forms. The next day, he came to take me back, but I was gone. They told him that he had signed release papers and couldn’t get me back.” Evie Mark, raised Inuk but with a white father, also describes the craving for something that will make your identity stronger as a major motivator for katajjaq revival, indicating its importance to national self-esteem. Placed against the imagery of Nanook of the North, katajjaq collapses the distance between spectator and subject, dismantling the subject’s perceived quaintness and giving voice to Inuit experience and perception, from the shrieking killing of a walrus to the grunting effort of igloo construction.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV-YQSQ1_FE”]

Tanya Tagaq’s reclaiming of Nanook of the North, with music that fuses tradition and modernity, may be compared with the work of A Tribe Called Red, a collective of First Nations DJs who have collaborated with Tagaq, that remix traditional chanting and drumming with electronica, dubstep, and spoken word, rejecting the impulse to isolate, essentialize, and fossilize. A Tribe Called Red’s visuals (start two minutes in) remix stereotypes of “Red Indians” from pop culture, with witty juxtapositions that subvert their original associations and assert A Tribe Called Red’s authorship. Genocidal policies of forced assimilation, from prohibitions by Christian missionaries to coerced adoptions and residential schools (whose painful legacy is depicted in Cree director Georgina Lightning’s Older Than America, among other Indigenous filmmakers), interrupt the line of cultural transmission in oral cultures, so that the imperial culture’s anthropological records can become the only source of preserved heritage. In reframing a colonial record of Inuit life into an expression of Inuit experience, Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North can be compared to the art of Jane Ash Poitras (Cree), which reframes anthropological photographs by symbolically visualizing the subject’s own perspective. One of her Inuit artworks, “In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit,” offers multiple symbolic frames for her young Inuk subject. First, he is surrounded with the syllabic writing of his own language, inuktitut, whose flowing edges are contained by a rigid frame bearing the imposed Euro-American label “Copper Eskimo.” The outer frame is looped with blood, suggesting interior flesh, while the Arctic exterior, with ghostly inukshuk, is placed inside this flesh, the body experiencing the environment rather than the environment defining the body. On the lower left, an elder represents connection to cultural tradition through role models, an experience stolen from the victims (and survivors) of Canada’s policy of coerced adoption, as recently as the 1960s and 1970s.

Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting. In reality, Inuit women were hunters, including polar bear hunters, and played strong roles as educators and storytellers, while today’s Inuit women are also lawyers, government ministers, and activists.

Nanook of the North established the Inuk man as the sole icon of Inuit life. It was followed by 1934’s Wedding of Palo, a portrait of Greenland Inuit by Danish filmmakers, in which the Inuk woman is a love object fought over by two rivals. Though brilliantly filmed, and preserving authentic Inuit traditions, the film reinforces perceptions of Indigenous women as natural spoils of war, submissively accepting their role as the victor’s rightful property. The Inuit-made Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) does portray the frustration of its heroine, Atuat, at being promised to villain Oki rather than her beloved Atanarjuat. Nevertheless, the story centers Atanarjuat’s experiences, and it is he must find a way to marry the heroine. The short film Kajutaijuq, co-written and produced by Nyla Innuksuk, also centers a male hunter but, hopefully, the rise of promising female filmmakers like Innuksuk will lead to more representations of Inuit women’s perspectives in future. In the meantime, Tanya Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North is a powerful start.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4kOIzMqso0″]

Brigit McCone is still decolonizing her mind. She writes and directs short films, radio dramas, and “The Erotic Adventures of Vivica” (as Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and telling people to check out the carvings of Susan Point.

Abortion in America: Dawn Porter’s ‘Trapped’

The perspectives many of us are unfamiliar with are the brave abortion providers, lawyers, and clinic workers who fight every single day to try and give (and protect) medical care to the people who need abortions, and the people most often impacted by lack of abortion access: women of color and poor women. This is the narrative that Dawn Porter provides as the backbone to ‘Trapped,’ and it’s astonishing.

This guest post is written by Becky Kukla.

After watching Trapped, I felt incredibly lucky. I felt incredibly lucky that I live in the U.K., a country in which abortion is free, legal, and unrestricted. If I need to have an abortion, I can make an appointment at my local doctor’s surgery or go to a walk-in clinic and (by law) I have to be provided with the procedure within two weeks of my initial appointment. I do not have to undergo an ultrasound. My doctor is not legally obligated to give me any literature on how “unsafe” the abortion procedure is. I almost certainly will not have to walk past hordes of religious protesters outside of the clinic.

It bothers me a lot that I would consider this to be lucky. This should be the norm. Though I thought I understood the struggle between right-wing governors and politicians in states like Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi, watching Trapped made me realize I knew very little at all. It also made me realize just how much I take for granted in my own country — and how the things I take for granted should be the standard for women across the globe.

There is no shortage of documentaries about the constant fight to restrict abortion laws in the U.S., nor is there a lack of reporting around the subject. After Tiller, No Woman No Cry, 12th and Delaware, are just a few documentaries that have been produced on the subject in the last few years. Abortion is a hot topic issue, dividing political parties and voters alike. Every politician is expected to have an opinion on it; so indeed, are the electorate. There are only two sides of the coin in the issue of abortion: pro-choice or pro-life (or more accurately anti-choice). At least, that’s what the media would have us believe. Trapped not only explores the battle between the left and the right — reproductive justice and anti-abortion — but it gives another perspective on the fight. It speaks directly to, and platforms, those who work in the abortion clinics. It tells their stories — from doctors and nurses to clinic owners and administrative staff — the people who are affected daily by the constantly changing laws surrounding abortion.

This is a perspective I had never really given much thought to.

Many of us are familiar with the narrative of abortion clinics being closed down, and consequently people being physically unable to get an abortion, due to the distance needed to travel to the closest clinic, the inability to take time off work for repeat appointments, the expensive costs (which rise due to the further along a person is in their pregnancy), etc. The perspectives many of us are unfamiliar with are the brave abortion providers, lawyers, and clinic workers who fight every single day to try and give (and protect) medical care to the people who need abortions, and the people most often impacted by lack of abortion access: women of color and poor women. This is the narrative that Dawn Porter provides as the backbone to Trapped, and it’s astonishing.

By weaving these different stories together, Porter gives us an image of abortion legislation that we may previously not have seen. Restricting a person’s right to have an abortion by closing the nearest clinic, or insisting on four appointments before the procedure can occur are vicious attacks on all people who need abortions: women, trans men, genderqueer, and non-binary individuals. These are calculated moves designed not just to ensure that women have no power or choice regarding their own bodies and lives, but also to ensure that women explicitly know that they have no power or choice. Abortion restrictions (laws such as HB2) are quite simply modern misogyny in action, masquerading as “medical legislation.”

We meet several abortion providers and clinic workers, including Doctor Dalton Johnson, who has moved to the south to use his skills where they are needed most. He owns the (now) only abortion clinic in Northern Alabama, and works daily to provide treatment to people across the state. He talks at length about the various hoops he and his staff have to jump through every week to ensure that they comply with the barrage of legislation continually being passed, all with the goal of closing clinics.

Marva Sadler, director of clinical services at Whole Women’s Health, discusses the unreasonable requirements for clinics and how they impede abortion access: “Because of these laws, many clinics have a two to three week waiting list for a procedure where time is of the essence.”

Dr. Willie Parker flies from Chicago to Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi to provide abortions; he’s one of only two doctors who perform abortions in Mississippi. He said that he travels because “nobody else would go.” Dr. Parker talks about the danger that abortion providers continually face: “People have been killed doing this work.”

June Ayers, owner of a clinic in Montgomery, Alabama, provides a little (much needed) comedy within the film. Ayers introduces us to the religious preachers who protest her clinic relentlessly, and her tactic of switching the sprinklers on if she feels “the grass is getting a bit too dry out there.” In a film with such a devastating subject, Ayers and her staff provide us with humanity and humor — and remind us all that these are the people at the heart of this legal battleground.

It would have been very easy to focus the documentary solely on the horror stories from the people who live in these states and have little to no access to reproductive health clinics. Their stories are emotive and relatable, and an easy way to make a shocking documentary. Instead of focusing solely on right wing Republicans and repeating well-known narratives, Porter incorporates messages of hope into Trapped. She includes Senator Wendy Davis’ 11-hour filibuster to try and prevent the passage of SB5, an oppressive “omnibus anti-abortion access bill.” Sadly, she succeeded in only delaying it by a few days but nevertheless, Porter champions Davis’ valiant actions and for a few moments, we can feel hopeful for the future.

Ayers, Dalton, Parker, and the other clinic workers, as well as lawyers like Nancy Northup (President and CEO of The Center for Reproductive Rights) are a part of this hopeful narrative that Porter subtly constructs. Of course there is often little to be optimistic about, as we see very clearly, but everyone pushes onward. There is a small glimmer of light in knowing that there are people out there fighting this legislation and advocating for reproductive rights. As Ayers says, “The function of the bill is not to regulate us. It is to regulate us out of business. It is a trap.” That’s why these abortion restrictions are called TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws; they are not created with the intent of making abortion safer (as it is already a safe, routine medical procedure), but to eradicate abortion altogether. The attitudes of the (mostly) male (mostly) Republicans are entrenched in misogyny under the guise of religious scripture. It’s disturbing and scary to listen to them talk about who has the right to a woman’s body (hint: it’s never the woman herself). Porter takes great care to ensure that Trapped doesn’t just show fear-mongering and hate, but reminds us that there are people out there fighting for basic human rights.

Though a difficult subject, Porter’s documentary is strangely uplifting. We have a long way to go, but it’s clear from watching Trapped, that we’ve also come a very, very long way.

Becky Kukla lives in London, works in documentary production/distribution to pay the bills and writes things about feminism, film, and TV online in her spare time. You can find more of her work at her blog femphile or on Twitter @kuklamoo.

The Women of the New York Film Festival 2016

The New York Film Festival (NYFF) wraps up this weekend. Here are the best of films about women or directed by women (or both) that still have NYFF weekend screenings (including some “encore” shows on Sunday) or are streaming or open today in theaters: including Ava DuVernay’s ’13th,’ Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Certain Women,’ and Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Julieta.’

Written by Ren Jender.

Julieta

I wanted to laugh when writer-director Pedro Almodóvar said after the press screening that this film is a “restrained” one. Compared to his other films, Julieta is subdued, but it also shows that even when he tries, Almodóvar can never tamp down his love of bright colors, ’80s fashion, overwhelming emotion and dramatic music — thank God! Julieta is one of his best films, a meditation on secular guilt, focusing on one woman’s life. Julieta (non-Spanish speakers: say, “who’ll-YAY-tah”) has all the little regrets most of us have, but circumstances beyond her control lead to some of those regrets becoming deep sorrow. He and Canadian writer Alice Munro (who wrote the short stories the film is based on) are a perfect, if unlikely, match. And Munro is two for two, so far, in films I’ve seen based on her work: Sarah Polley’s Away From Her (with Julie Christie as the “her” of the title), another very different examination of guilt, was magnificent.

I was a little hesitant about Julieta before I saw it: Almodóvar swings wildly from making films that are my favorites to making ones that bore and offend me at the same time. The trailer shows that its lead actresses spend time in bad wigs (the film spans 30 years and in one amusing scene, we see the covered face of the actress who plays the younger Julieta, Adriana Ugarte, and when she’s uncovered she is Emma Suárez, the actress playing the older Julieta) but the wigs are the only non-outstanding elements in Julieta.

Praising a male director like Almodóvar for putting women characters at the center of his films and making them multilayered, with complicated lives that don’t revolve around men may seem retro. But after sitting through Paterson, with its I Love Lucy wife who has a wildly different ambition every day and plies her husband to fund her far-fetched “dreams,” and the fraudulent Manchester by the Sea, which in spite of some good acting (by Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck — and only those two), has not one main woman character who seems to have a job or much of an identity beyond “wife/mother/girlfriend,” congratulating male directors for not being cavemen is apparently still necessary.

Karl Marx City

This documentary about the pervasive spying — using ordinary citizens as well as trained professionals — in the former East Germany where the co-director (with Michael Tucker), Petra Epperlein, was born and raised, blends satiny black and white cinematography with clips of vintage surveillance film and video. We follow Epperlein back home as she tries to get some answers about who was an informer and who wasn’t.

Epperlein transcends the divide between personal documentaries and the “talking heads” kind as she interviews everyone, not just her own family, but those in charge of disseminating the files meticulously kept on nearly everyone in the country until that country didn’t exist anymore. One of her best friends in school had parents who were officials who spied on the populace; she gets them to talk about their work (which they now regret). Epperlein explains that in a place where, the joke went, in every gathering of three people, one was an informant, people couldn’t trust one another so, “everyone was the enemy,” including, perhaps, her own father. Epperlein doesn’t just expose this culture of mistrust, she recreates it in this extraordinary film.

13th

At first, I was slightly disappointed with Ava DuVernay’s documentary but she confirmed when she spoke after the press screening something I had suspected: this film is not really meant for those of us who have already heard Bryan Stevenson speak about racism in the justice system or for those who have already seen Angela Davis, in a vintage clip from The Black Power Mixtape, speak about the particular history of violence Black people in this country have faced. 13th is an overview of the oppression of Black people by the U.S. criminal justice system meant for people who haven’t been exposed to this info in other venues — which is the majority of those who will see it on Netflix (the producer of the film, currently streaming it).

Still I can’t help wishing the film had fewer professors and writers explaining events — though one does have a great riff on how Angela Davis, when she was on trial, presented herself differently than other Black defendants would. Much more powerful is the cross cutting of Donald Trump’s incitements of violence, violence against protesters at his rallies, and a clip from the Civil Rights era in which an older man in a suit is attacked by young white men. Also unforgettable are the clips of the original Birth of a Nation with commentary explaining that the burning cross was an invention of the film, becoming a signature of the real Ku Klux Klan after it was reinvigorated by Birth of a Nation’s heroic portrayal. Don’t tell me harmful stereotypes in film don’t foster violence ever again.

Toni Erdmann

I liked this feature from German writer-director Maren Ade, but I’m shocked so many other people like it too. Toni Erdmann has no score, no real laugh-out-loud moments past its first ten minutes, and its “jokes” go on for far too long. But as Ade explained after the press screening, the film is about humor but it’s not a comedy. A bear-like father (Peter Simonischek) puts on a (bad) wig and tells strings of lies in front of his grown, corporate-consultant daughter (Sandra Hüller), but unlike many “jokers,” his impulse doesn’t seem sadistic. As he glances out of the corner of his eye at his daughter Ines, he seems nothing more than a little boy who wants to play. Ines is matter-of-fact about the ruthless nature of her work, but she’s also melancholy and frustrated.

This film isn’t the kind that ends with the daughter giving up her career to start a clown college with her father. The changes the characters go through are small ones, and the connections they make are fleeting. But this lack of an easy resolution and the film’s portrait of the mendacity and absurdity of the corporate world are precisely what resonates with its audience.

Certain Women

I fell asleep during part of writer-director Kelly Reichardt’s new film, and sleep is legitimate criticism: whatever is happening on-screen isn’t engaging the viewer. But Lily Gladstone, the Indigenous actress who plays the young, soft-butch, half-Crow rancher in the film’s last interlude is an actress I could watch all day. Gladstone is the only one of the main cast who is from Montana, where the film takes place (and where Maile Meloy, the author of the collection of short stories the movie is based on, is from). The openness of her smile, her calm voice, and steady gaze make her character, Jamie, stick with us in a way the other characters (including Kristen Stewart’s Beth, the adult ed teacher and lawyer Jamie has a crush on) do not. Gladstone is beautiful wearing little to no makeup, but she looks like a woman who works on a ranch: she’s not as sylphlike as the other actresses in the film, and her hair, even when she’s trying to look “nice” is unstyled. I hope Gladstone becomes the big star she deserves to be, but I also hope she can remain unscathed by Hollywood’s physical expectations for actresses. We’ll see.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH5_4osOZK8″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Village Voice, The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the The Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Best of Enemies’: When Politics Was All About Men

Out queer writer Gore Vidal was prescient in discussing the danger of self-labeled “conservative” Republicans (“reactionary” has always been a better term for them). In 1968, as part of network news coverage of the political conventions Vidal debated William F. Buckley, the loathsome “conservative” stalwart… In their debates, Vidal describes Buckley’s rhetoric as “always to the right and almost always in the wrong.” The debates are the focus of Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s documentary ‘Best of Enemies.’

Written by Ren Jender.

When the media or an individual claims Donald Trump is the Republican presidential candidate who most directly scapegoats marginalized groups, I think of all the decades Republicans have wallowed in their slander of queer and trans people. That slander is a big part of the reason I have no tolerance for hearing or reading that Democrats and Republicans are “just as bad” as one another and why I don’t see people who vote Republican and Republican candidates themselves as adorably quirky, the way white-guy, late-night talk show hosts seem to.

Out queer writer Gore Vidal was prescient in discussing the danger of self-labeled “conservative” Republicans (“reactionary” has always been a better term for them). In 1968, as part of network news coverage of the political conventions Vidal debated William F. Buckley, the loathsome “conservative” stalwart perhaps best known these days for his proposal in The New York Times, during the the peak years of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, that infected people should be forcibly tattooed with their status on their buttocks and forearms. In their debates, Vidal describes Buckley’s rhetoric as “always to the right and almost always in the wrong.”

The debates are the focus of Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s documentary Best of Enemies, released last year and streaming this month on pbs.org, but anyone looking for context on either man’s opinions (like Buckley’s views on people with AIDS) will have to look elsewhere. The curse of gotta-hear-both-sides “balanced” journalism that legitimized the presidential campaign of Donald Trump is very much in evidence in Best of Enemies, as we see white guy after white guy lionize Buckley (so few women are in this documentary that one wonders if the filmmakers counted the woman in archival footage asking Buckley on Laugh-In, “Do you think mini-skirts are in good taste,” or the woman in a white bikini shown from behind on Miami Beach, as part of the film’s gender balance). He employs many of the same methods we see Trump using today, though Trump’s speeches are on a middle-school reading level, so he doesn’t have Buckley’s much vaunted vocabulary (which Vidal points out Buckley uses to distract, not illuminate).

Vidal wrote incisively about the debates and Buckley in an article in Esquire (which stung Buckley enough that he sued the magazine). One of the essay’s many truths leaps out in the wake of current events — and recent debates: “…There is a demagogic strategy in all this. If one is lying, accuse others of lying.”

Vidal came from the same patrician background as Buckley (Vidal was the grandson of a senator and the step-brother of Jackie Onassis) so like native Californian Joan Didion writing on Ronald and Nancy Reagan, he was able to get under the skin of Buckley and look into his corrupt soul:

“…Joe Kennedy’s sons and Senator Gore’s grandson changed as they made their way in the world, learned charity or at least good sense, but not Bill — he is still the schoolboy debater echoing what he heard in his father’s house…”

During a final debate when Vidal angered him, Buckley said in his affected, nails-on-the-blackboard accent, “Now listen you quee-ah, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face.” What most riled Buckley in that Esquire article was Vidal’s implication that he was a closet “quee-ah” himself. Vidal cites two gay publications of the era which outed Buckley, and later writings (including novelist Alexander Chee’s wonderful remembrance of working as part of the coterie of gay cater waiters in the Buckley residence in the ’90s) have implied the same, but those avenues remain unexplored in this film.

The film applies its misguided, “even-handed” approach when portraying both men in later life. We’re supposed to see Vidal as pathetic and mostly forgotten (even as his late biography Palimpsest was one of his best-reviewed books) but hanging out in an Italian villa with a young, cute “friend” seems a much more pleasant old age than the one Buckley evinces in later clips when he tells Charlie Rose he’s ready to stop living. Although the film states the election of Ronald Reagan was a triumph for Buckley, as time progressed more and more of Buckley’s opinions (his support of Joe McCarthy, his view that Martin Luther King belonged “behind bars,” and something he says in the debate “Freedom breeds inequality”) were discredited, so much so that they seem like they could have been written for The Onion.

Buckley died before Vidal did, and Vidal was able to give him the send-off Buckley earned, “RIP WFB — in hell.” But really Vidal had written Buckley’s obituary years before in Esquire, when he described Buckley’s on-air homophobia during their debate:

“…In full view of ten million people, the little door in William F. Buckley Jr.’s forehead suddenly opened and out sprang that wild cuckoo which I had always known was there but had wanted so much for others, preferably millions of others, to get a good look at.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzgfQvB2dvA”]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing on Bitch Flicks has also been published in The Village Voice, The Toast, Rewire, xoJane and The Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Making a DVD for Your Independent Film: It’s Not What it Seems!

Making a DVD is fairly easy! I’ve done this loads of times before! All you need is a menu, a ProRes file, and DVD Studio Pro. Then you burn to your heart’s desire. Shouldn’t take me more than a few weeks to get these all finished, right? Wrong. I was so wrong! But now I’m a pro, and I’m going to tell you how to be one too.

This guest post written by Jillian Corsie is an edited version that originally appeared at Trichster.com. It is cross-posted with permission.

When my production team and I first started crowdfunding our feature documentary, Trichster, in the summer of 2012, we offered DVDs as one of our incentives. We figured that since our film was going to be small, it would be no big deal to burn a handful and send them to our supporters. Little did we know that first campaign would gain international attention, that our film would end up on ABC’s 20/20, or that we’d soon be winning awards for a documentary we were all making in our spare time.

Once we finished the film (two years later than we thought), it was time to fulfill our crowdfunding rewards. At this point, my producers and I started questioning whether or not people would even want a DVD. Who watches DVDs anymore? Now it’s all about streaming sites like Amazon and Netflix. We had already released the film on iTunes and VHX and sent our supporters their digital downloads. Maybe we didn’t need to make DVDs after all! Once we released Trichster, the emails from fans started pouring in. People wanted to know when and how they could buy their DVDs. As it turns out, Trichster has a wide range of audiences. A lot of people don’t have iTunes accounts or find VOD platforms like VHX confusing and difficult to navigate. We knew that we needed to make DVDs. I figured the process wouldn’t be all that difficult. But what I thought was going to take me 3 weeks ended up taking 4 months.

SUBTITLES: They’re not what they seem

First I needed to gather my assets. I have one 73 minute feature film and 4 bonus feature clips to include. I also needed English and Spanish subtitles for the film, since we have a large Spanish speaking following. I’m about to get really technical here so bear with me!

I had already had an English SRT file made (total cost: $500) for our online closed caption delivery. I needed to find a place that could convert the file into a STL file in order to make the DVDs. I’m no genius when it comes to subtitle file types, so this was an incredible learning experience. I tried downloading some software which would allow me to edit my SRT file and do the conversion myself. After 4 days of frustration and wasted time, I gave up and decided it’s best left to the professionals. I got quotes from a few different caption houses and settled on one that was reasonably priced and in my area. They wanted $657 for the Spanish subtitles and $25 for the SRT to STL conversion.

Here’s where frame rates come into play. My film was shot and finished at 23.98fps. Our NTSC DVD needed to be 29.97fps, and we needed to make a PAL DVD for our international community at 25fps. 3 different frame rates equals 6 different subtitle files. I asked my subtitle house to do a blind conversion, meaning they don’t manually sync up the text to the picture. Seems like it would work anyway right? Wrong. So I spent $175 for a conversion that didn’t work before having to have them manually sync the English and Spanish titles for a cool $643.86. Finally, I had my titles ready to send to my DVD author. Total cost of digital closed captioning and DVD subtitles: $1,975.86.

MENU DESIGN: It pays to have talented friends

It dawned on me that I had better have my DVD menu artwork all figured out before I sent my assets over to my DVD author. Luckily, I have an extremely talented friend who is a whiz at Photoshop who volunteered to design all of my assets for me. She designed the disk artwork, DVD case artwork, and all 4 pages of the DVD menu. After a week of printing out tests and trying different things, we finalized the artwork. Now, let’s get those DVD’s made!

DVD AUTHORING: NTSC and PAL and what region now?

After putting my feelers out to my network of independent filmmaker friends, I picked a guy who cut me a break because I was an independent documentarian trying to do work that helped people. He explained to me the different file types that he’d need from me and talked to me about converting all 5 of my video files from 23.98fps to NTSC 29.97fps and PAL 25fps (10 files total!). PAL is optimized for TVs in Europe, Thailand, Russia, Australia, Singapore, China, and the Middle East while NTSC is optimized for TVs in the USA, Canada, and Japan. He said he’d also make all DVDs region 0 so that they would play in DVD players in all countries. He did the conversions and worked with me to send my subtitle house the correct transcodes so that my titles lined up. I send him a timecode list of where our chapter makers should be. After some back and forth, he sent me my preview disks for me to approve before making the final masters.

PANIC ENSUES: Is this DVD in sync?

I held onto my test DVDs for about a month. I watched them at home on my DVD player. I watched them at work. I had my friends who work in post-production watch them. I was convinced something was wrong with them. I couldn’t tell if the film was in sync, if it was drifting out of sync, or if I had just seen the film so many times that I couldn’t think clearly. Most of my friends said it was fine and that I was being ridiculous. Finally, after sleepless nights and panicked phone calls to my producer, a friend in IT told me something that calmed my nerves right away: all DVDs are highly compressed and all DVD players are doing their own frame rate conversion in order to play on whatever monitor it’s being played on. Some monitors playback at 59.97fps, some are 23.98fps, etc. These things are not, and will never be, in my control. I was released of my worry! Onto the mass printing of the DVDs.

DUPLICATION v. REPLICATION: Isn’t that the same thing?

As it turns out, a DVD author is not the same thing as a DVD printer. Once I had my final DVDs ready to go, I needed to get them printed. We wanted 500 NTSC DVDs and 100 PAL DVDs. Our choice was to either duplicate or replicate them. Which to me sounded like the exact same thing. Except it’s not, and one is more expensive. A DVD duplicator extracts data from the master disc and writes it to a blank disc, like making a copy, whereas the replication process is essentially cloning a master disk. Duplication can be done much faster, and at a higher price, while replication is more time consuming but less costly. We chose to replicate our DVD since it would save us about $500. After 2 weeks, I got the call that my DVDs were ready! I went and picked up 6 boxes of shiny, plastic-wrapped, DVDs. I’ll admit, seeing it for the first time was pretty cool. Total cost of DVD printing: $1591.42

SHIPPING 200 DVDs: Or, how to be the most annoying person at the post office

So I had 6 boxes of DVDs sitting in my living room. Time to email our supporters and get their addresses so I can ship. I know there are easy ways to ship mass quantities of DVDs, but when you are without a printer it makes it difficult. So, one Saturday, I put on Friends re-runs and I started hand writing the 200 envelopes and stuffing the DVDs into the packages. I then made 4 separate trips to the post office to use the self-serve machine. I had to go to the counter to mail the international envelopes which created a big line and made people behind me a tad irritated! As it turns out, it costs $13.25 to ship each international envelope! Note to self: consider this when choosing crowdfunding incentives.

WHAT I LEARNED: DVDs are cool, but do we need them today?

I have to say, it was an amazing feeling to send out our DVDs. It was really the last hurdle I had to jump for Trichster, and it felt like closing a chapter on a wild 4 ½ year period of my young life. I’m really proud that we even made it this far and that we were able to send our supporters what they were promised. I feel like we’ve made a difference and I’ve learned so much about the entire filmmaking process. It’s so fun to see fans excited about receiving their DVDs on social media. That being said, next time around I would not make DVDs. The world is changing and people don’t consume media the same way they used to. Most of us plop down on the couch and head to Netflix or iTunes to watch our favorite content. At a whopping total of $3,567.28 to make our DVDs, I think it’s better to put funding into marketing than to put so much time and effort into such an expensive process! That being said, it’s an incredible feeling to hold your professionally printed DVD in your hands. Best of luck indie filmmakers!

Jillian Corsie is a freelance editor and award-winning filmmaker based in the Los Angeles area who specializes in post-production. She has worked on a wide range of projects varying from commercial work to film trailers to feature documentary. She recently finished touring the film festival circuit with her debut feature documentary, Trichster, which launched on the iTunes “New and Noteworthy” best-seller list just days after it’s release in the Spring of 2016. Jillian was awarded “Best Young Filmmaker 2015” from Los Angeles Center Studios. She looks forward to making more films!

‘Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten’: Rock ‘n’ Roll, the ’60s and Genocide

Because no archival photos and footage of most of the Pol Pot era exists, films about the Cambodian genocide have had to use creative ways to tell what happened. The Oscar-nominated documentary ‘The Missing Picture’ from a couple of years ago used clay figurines as a visual complement to the narration. John Pirozzi’s ‘Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten’ uses the popular music of Cambodia in the ’60s and ’70s (and the artists who made it) to detail the country’s trajectory.

Do we need to see atrocities to fully absorb their horror? It’s a question I ask whenever a new video turns up showing a police officer killing an unarmed person. The answer for me is no: I don’t need to see suffering and death to believe they happen. But I know I’m not in the majority. A year ago the photos of Mike Brown’s body lying in the street and video of police gassing participants in the peaceful protests afterward were the catalyst for many to join protests of their own–though a much smaller band of activists had been exposing and protesting police violence, especially that against Black people, for decades.

The same way many police departments want to keep dashboard and body cameras far from their officers, The Pol Pot regime in Cambodia kept cameras–and “outsiders”–out of the country so that their slaughter of their own people (an estimated 3 million, over 25 percent of the population) could escape the notice of much of the rest of the world. Because no archival photos and footage of most of the Pol Pot era exists, films about the Cambodian genocide have had to use creative ways to tell what happened. The Oscar-nominated documentary The Missing Picture from a couple of years ago used clay figurines as a visual complement to the narration. John Pirozzi’s Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten uses the popular music of Cambodia in the ’60s and ’70s (and the artists who made it) to detail the country’s trajectory.

MadMenInCambodia — “Mad Men”–and women–in Cambodia.

We see a woman with high teased hair in a tight, tight dress singing as couples dance in the early ’60s (a lot of the pristine film footage is from the estate of King Sihanouk, Cambodia’s leader from when it first broke free from French colonial rule in 1955 to 1970), which could be a scene from the early seasons of Mad Men, except the people dancing are all Cambodian and even though they move their bodies like Westerners, their hands move more freely in graceful swooping gestures. The music seems familiar too: the way one of the main male stars Sinn Sisamouth, is posed (always wearing a suit or tux) on his records’ cover art and the type of songs he sang (and his lasting popularity) bring to mind Frank Sinatra–especially his later efforts to seem more relevant by collaborating with younger performers.

Musicians of the time tell us the capital, Phnom Penh “was the hub where bands from the countryside met.” The film spends as much time documenting the careers of women musicians as it does male ones–and the most knowlegable “fan” of the music interviewed (who was a teenager in Phnom Penh when the music was new) is also a woman, which should not be a rarity in films about contemporary, popular music, but is.

gogobootsForgotten — The film includes as many women as men in its story.

She tells us, “I was not a shy kid. I was like, ‘Just give me the music. I’ll dance.'” She shares with us details about the most popular woman singers of the time that a male fan might have left out. When she talks about the biggest woman star, Ros Serey Sothea she notes that she was a farm girl (her father had abandoned the family and she sang to support her mother and siblings) and that she was “dark-skinned” (which is not always apparent in early cover art for her records).

Like music from the ’60s in Britain and the US we see and hear (the film is chock full of songs from the era) the scene evolve with time, from kicky cocktail and Afro-Cuban style music in the early ’60s to poppy guitar bands with pretty boys in matching suits a few years later. Members of one of the first of these bands tell us they copied the choreographed moves of Cliff Richard and his band in the 1961 British film The Young Ones which we see confirmed as scenes of the Cambodian band’s live performances and scenes of performances in the film are intercut. Later in the ’60s and into the early ’70s we see Cambodian bands adopted more free-form fashions and dancing along with a harder rock sound. We hear a version of Santana’s “Oye Como Va” sung in Khmer that sounds as good if not better than the original.

Some of politics of the time we notice in subtext: early ’60s street footage shows children living in abject poverty: most of the musicians, besides Serey Sothea, were from wealthy families. We also hear explicitly from an American commentator that Cambodia was not a democracy and see Sihanouk, during an interview, coolly defend his execution of communists. But he apparently didn’t kill enough of them to satisfy the American government’s tastes (the US was fighting Communists just over the border in Vietnam) and Sihanouk was overthrown in a military coup, the leadership of which openly allied itself with the US (Sihanouk had declared Cambodia “neutral” in the Cold War). During this time the US relentlessly bombed Cambodia in a badly thought-out effort to destroy Communist strongholds: instead the bombing (which killed an estimated one million people) galvanized most of the people in the countryside to join the anti-Western communists, The Khmer Rouge (and Sihanouk in exile had, in desperation, allied himself with them too, in hopes of returning to power).

ForgottenRecordCoverArt — Ros Serey Sothea and Sinn Sisamouth,

The military leadership used singers Sisamouth and Serey Sothea in propaganda (we see Serey Sothea in military fatigues parachuting from a plane) but their popularity couldn’t counteract the devastation the bombing brought. Phnom Penh, the last holdout against Communists was eventually “liberated” by The Khmer Rouge and its leader Pol Pot. At first, the residents, including musicians, celebrated. But as a surviving member of the royal family tells us (in translated French) “If you want to eliminate values from past societies you have to eliminate the artists, because artists are influential.” The Western-influenced capital was evacuated and everyone who had lived there, including musicians, were put to work in rice fields and other manual labor in the countryside, much as we see the “decadent” gay men of Fidel Castro’s 1960s Cuba were put to work in the sugar cane fields in Before Night Falls.

I was hoping the film would employ a similar technique to How To Survive a Plague and show us musicians who survived the genocide but whom we had not yet seen in contemporary interviews. But the vast majority of musicians we come to know in the film (and sometimes even their children) were either killed for not following orders, for being affiliated with the previous government or for simply being a “bad” (counter-revolutionary) influence. Some, though they succeeded in escaping detection, died of starvation. One woman, whom we see dancing wildly and joyfully onstage as a member of a popular late ’60s band cries as she tells us that during Pol Pot’s reign when anyone asked about her past in the city, “I told them I was a banana seller… I lied to them. That saved my life.”

The musicians who survived thought they would be killed too, but when Vietnamese forces invaded the country in 1979, the genocide stopped. But because no records were kept, no one knows how most of those killed, including the most famous musicians, died or where their bodies are buried. Now not just the surviving musicians but the fans–as well as those of us in the audience–hear something deeper and more resonant than nostalgia in the music that came before Pol Pot (and which was banned under his regime). As the dedicated Phnom Penh fan tells us, when she and others worked the rice fields and no Khmer Rouge official could hear them, “We would sing.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipq4FefX5Ps” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘An Open Secret’ Many Don’t Want To Know

This time Berg focuses on sexual abuse of children in Hollywood, perpetrated specifically by managers and other adults in positions of authority over male child actors. The 13-year-old girl Polanski raped was an an aspiring model, who believed that he was going to put her photo in French ‘Vogue.’ The boys–now all grown men–interviewed in ‘Secret’ believed that their managers and other adults who abused them were key to their careers and would blackball them if they spoke up, so kept quiet.

Rape denialism is such a pervasive force that even those of us who consider ourselves informed feminists forget that Bill Cosby was the subject of rape charges (and paid settlements to victims) for many years before his actions had any effect on his career or reputation. Meanwhile, no actor in Hollywood seems to turn down an offer to be in the latest Woody Allen film, even though his daughter, Dylan Farrow has come forward as an adult to write that her father did indeed rape her when she was 7. Two decades ago, tabloids closely followed this police investigation until its conclusion, in which the State of Connecticut said they had probable cause but would not charge Allen. Acclaimed director Roman Polanski is a convicted rapist of a 13-year-old girl, whom he plied with alcohol and drugs beforehand. After he fled the US to avoid serving prison time he worked freely in Europe and even won an Academy Award, eventually spending a short time under “house arrest” in luxurious Swiss digs–but never extradited to the US to serve real prison time.

The last example is the one that is perhaps the most relevant to the new documentary, An Open Secret by Amy Berg, who was nominated for an Oscar for 2006’s Deliver Us From Evil about sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church. This time Berg focuses on sexual abuse of children in Hollywood, perpetrated specifically by managers and other adults in positions of authority over male child actors. The 13-year-old girl Polanski raped was an an aspiring model, who believed that he was going to put her photo in French Vogue. The boys–now all grown men–interviewed in Secret believed that their managers and other adults who abused them were key to their careers and would blackball them if they spoke up, so kept quiet.

OpenSecretMichaelHarrah — Michael Harrah

About child sexual abuse, Hollywood stalwart and, until recently, the chair of The Young Performers Committee for SAG/AFTRA (the union all performers in major Hollywood commercials, television productions and films have to belong to) Michael Harrah (who managed child actors–some quite successful) says, “It wasn’t uncommon,” of his own time as a child actor. Harrah has also always had some of his underage clients live at his house and late in the film is confronted by one, now an adult, who says, “I hated when you had me sleep in your bed and tried to touch me,” which Harrah tellingly does not deny (though later when confronted in an interview says he doesn’t remember the incident and says he’s “not particularly” attracted to young boys). Another one-time child actor confronts his former manager Marty Weiss (now a convicted child rapist, but who served very little prison time) on tape about his abuse. Like Harrah, Weiss brushes off the severity of what he did, saying the conversation he and his client (identified as Evan H. in the film, but articles about the film and case use his full name: Evan Henzi) had before he first abused him let him know that Evan was “interested.” Evan shoots back, “I was not interested at 12.”

If you think, in spite of its important subject matter, the film I’ve described so far seems at least a little exploitative and lurid, you’d be right. And structurally this film is a mess. Maybe because I’ve seen carefully crafted documentaries recently like (T)ERROR and Out in the Night, which combine multiple viewpoints into compelling and easily comprehensible story lines, I was frustrated at the muddle An Open Secret makes of its overlapping stories. I understood only after reading articles to follow up that Henzi was the main impetus behind Weiss’s conviction and that another interviewee, Michael Egan, was close friends and “coworkers” with Mark Ryan (who was a young adult at the time) at the estate where underage boys who wanted to succeed in show business were preyed on by rich and powerful men (which again is not just a rumor or “allegation”: the adult who owned the mansion is now a convicted child rapist–though he too fled to Europe to avoid prison time).

Egan’s presence in the film complicates it and may be one reason for its disjointedness. Egan sued director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, X-Men) for sexual abuse and apparently an earlier cut of the film included many more mentions of Singer’s name and presence at the mansion. Now we just hear a few random mentions and see some footage of Singer promoting the business the adults at the estate ran: an online video production company whose “shows,” shot at the estate, featured underage boys. The clips we see of the shows are so bad the well-known investors–not just Singer but Michael Huffington and others–were likely paying for access to the young actors (Huffington as well as Singer spent time visiting the estate) rather than making a prudent business investment.

Some people have referred to Egan, who has had legal troubles of his own, as “discredited” but I would urge those people to watch the excellent The Boys of St. Vincent (originally a miniseries, based on Catholic priests’ sexual abuse of children in Canada and their subsequent trials) to see that victims of sexual abuse are often very troubled adults who can easily cross into illegal activity themselves, including perpetuating the cycle of abuse–which is not the crime Egan is accused of, but does seem to be what Harrah is confessing in the phone call with a former client.

Secret uses clips from a “very special” episode of Diff’rent Strokes to intersperse with an interview of co-star Todd Bridges talking about his experience of abuse at the hands of adults in power when he was a child actor. The film could do with an infusion of other narrative clips about sexual abuse of children. When the film in voiceover described the process of grooming I thought back to Brian Cox’s character in the great L.I.E. and his interplay with his potential victim (who is the main character of the film) played by a young Paul Dano. What that film got right is something missing from Berg’s: that even if Dano’s character was gay (as he seemed to be) and willingly spent time with Cox’s character what Cox was trying to do with him was still wrong. None of the grown men in Secret out themselves as queer, which leaves the film open to perceptions of homophobia (which I don’t share) since Huffington and Singer (along with some other men alleged to consort with the young boys at the estate) are some of the most powerful out gay men in Southern California.

Although all the victims in this film are boys (now grown men), I was not surprised to see the advocates for them in this film are women; BizParentz’ Anne Henry, the prosecutor in the Weiss case and Berg herself–because most women are very familiar with the attempts to “discredit” survivors of child sexual abuse and other forms of rape. Still I would have liked to have seen at least one girl (now a grown woman) survivor, though maybe they were all afraid of the same notoriety that has followed the now grown woman Polanski raped. As with most of the survivors of sexual abuse Berg interviews she “left the business,” never to appear as herself (as opposed to a much talked about rape survivor) in a magazine, a film, or on TV ever again.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JpHUaMBARU” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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‘One Cut, One Life’: Love, Death, and Jealousy

First person documentary filmmakers Ed Pincus and Lucia Small are no strangers to letting an audience in on their family “secrets”: Small in ‘My Father, The Genius,’ a film about her own father and their ambivalent relationship, and Pincus in ‘Diaries,’ in which he filmed both his girlfriend and wife in 1970s Cambridge, the latter–in one scene that seems to sum up the post-hippie atmosphere of the time and place–nude and playing a flute.

The following is a slightly modified repost by Ren Jender.

Artists who use their own lives as the subject matter for their art always have to make a decision about how much revelation is too much. David Rakoff, whom many know from his work on This American Life, wrote frankly and transcendentally about his declining health (including an inability in his last years to use one of his arms) after he was diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually kill him. But Rakoff didn’t have to worry that his revelations would hurt those closest to him; he lived alone, without a partner or children.

When they reveal “everything,” those artists who are in relationships aren’t just exposing their own lives to the public–they can’t help also exposing intimate details about their loved ones. Author Ayelet Waldman has received criticism for revelations about both her husband (author Michael Chabon) and her kids in her work. Sex writer and essayist Susie Bright swore off using her personal life as fodder for her work years ago and though she seems to be in a successful decades-long relationship (and sometimes collaborates with her now adult daughter), her writing doesn’t have the same spark as it did earlier in her career.

First person documentary filmmakers Ed Pincus and Lucia Small are no strangers to letting an audience in on their family “secrets”: Small in My Father, The Genius, a film about her own father and their ambivalent relationship, and Pincus in Diaries, in which he filmed both his girlfriend and wife in 1970s Cambridge, the latter–in one scene that seems to sum up the post-hippie atmosphere of the time and place–nude and playing a flute.

Near the beginning of their excellent documentary One Cut, One Life (which will be in theaters starting Wednesday, May 13), Small and Pincus, each seeming to take a turn behind the camera, discuss plans to collaborate on their final film together (they had previously worked on the post-Katrina documentary The Axe In The Attic). Ed has been diagnosed with a fatal disease which would eventually turn into leukemia. Lucia is working through her grief over the deaths of two of her close friends, one from a hit-and-run driver, the other murdered by an ex-boyfriend.

Ed, who is over 70, has other health issues (he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s some years before and speaks slowly and carefully), but they agree that they can probably work around them. The problem is Ed’s wife, Jane, who is adamant that she doesn’t want them to film what might be the last months of his life. We’re so used to wives being a drag on “great” men in film (Pauline Kael referred to this role as the “‘please don’t go up to break the sound barrier tonight, dear’ type”) that we’re ready to think of Jane as the villain until she tells us, “I have enough to deal with in my life right now. My husband has received a death sentence, and I don’t see why I have to give him over to anybody else.”

Jane, who was filmed over five years in Diaries, is familiar with the intrusion a camera is in one’s day-to-day life and has no desire to relive it. She’s also insecure about Ed’s feelings for Lucia.

Ed documented his and Jane’s open marriage in the 70s, but after Diaries was completed they moved to Vermont to run a flower farm. When they made an appearance at a screening of Diaries in the 90s, with matching glasses and grey hair, their arms around each other, they seemed to have become a more conventional couple.

In the 2000s, Ed’s introduction to Lucia reignited his interest in filmmaking (though he still kept the farm). Lucia tells us that she became close to both Ed and Jane (who was a member of the feminist health collective that wrote the original Our Bodies Ourselves) during the making of Axe, but then they, by mutual agreement, distanced themselves when the film was finished. Lucia tells us that aside from a few “flings” she hasn’t been in a relationship in years and that working together for as many hours as a film takes, mixes up her feelings of love and intimacy, though she clarifies that her relationship with Ed is platonic.

Ed seems less intent on keeping boundaries clear. He tells Lucia he loves her and at one point Jane catches them alone in a situation that sets off alarm bells for her–and like photographers in a war zone, Ed and Lucia immediately pick up their cameras and start shooting the conflict. Whenever we see Lucia talking to the camera, she looks drained; the elements in her life that might distract her from her grief instead serve as reminders. Her big, black dog originally belonged to the woman who was murdered. Her cute New York apartment was the one she shared with the woman who was killed in the hit-and-run. But when Jane looks at Lucia she sees a blonde 25 years younger than she is, whom her husband seems to adore.

Mixed up in all of this drama is Ed’s worsening health. Receiving bad news on camera he simply says, ” Well, that’s sobering.” In stunning cinematography we see the seasons at the farm: fall, winter, spring, summer and then spring again, when a newly cue-ball-bald Ed tells the camera that the doctor had said he probably wouldn’t live past March, so he’s grateful. Ed lived two seasons longer and died in November of 2013. When I saw the film last year as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston, Small did a poignant Q & A after the screening. One of the first things she told us was Jane had chosen not to attend.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maC94kPWbQI”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

A Portrait of Tragedy and Promise: ‘God Sleeps in Rwanda’

Over a 100-day period between April and July 1994, the world stood by while Rwanda’s extremist Hutu government instructed its supporters to massacre 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

God Sleeps in Rwanda poster — *God Sleeps in Rwanda* poster

Written by Rachael Johnson.

2014 has been an awful year teeming with its own appalling tragedies, but it should also be a time of sober reflection for the international community. Twenty years ago, the unspeakable occurred in one of the world’s most beautiful countries. I’m talking about the Rwandan genocide, of course. Over a 100-day period between April and July 1994, the world stood by while Rwanda’s extremist Hutu government instructed its supporters to massacre 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

There have been narrative and documentary films about the Rwandan genocide, but I think the most important have yet to be made. Nevertheless, I’d like to call attention to an unpretentious, compassionate documentary short released a decade after the genocide called God Sleeps in Rwanda (2004). The title comes from a Rwandan proverb: “They say my country is so beautiful that although God may wander the world during the day He returns at night to sleep in Rwanda.” Directed by Kimberlee Acquaro and Stacy Sherman, the 28-minute Oscar-nominated film examines the impact of the Rwandan genocide on the lives of five women. Narrated in an unshowy fashion by actor and women’s rights advocate, Rosario Dawson, God Sleeps in Rwanda features powerful testimony by survivors.

As the filmmakers explain, Rwanda’s population was a little less than 70 percent female by the end of the genocide. Although the vast majority of victims were men, Tutsi women–and children–were also massacred. We are told: “Their bodies were targeted because they symbolized the future of an entire people”. Women, additionally, were victims of another atrocious aspect of the Hutu extremists’ genocidal program–systematic sexual violence. Rape was, in fact, a dominant strategy. The filmmakers cite an appalling UN statistic: 250,000 women–at least–were raped during the genocide. They also draw attention to the unexpected, unsettling truth that a woman played a central role in inciting rape–Minister for Family Welfare and the Advancement of Woman, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko. Along with her son, Nyiramasuhuko was indicted for rape as a war crime. (She was convicted of genocidal rape in 2011). God Sleeps in Rwanda, however, focuses on the victims of the genocide. Their stories are harrowing and heart-breaking. One survivor of sexual violence, Severa Mukakinani, calmly relates that she suffered multiple rapes after witnessing her family’s murder. “I cannot count the men who came to rape me,” she says. Attacked with machetes, she was thrown in the river Nyabarongo and left for dead. Somehow she survived. Severa became pregnant by rape and we see her caring for her nine-year-old daughter. At first she did not want the child but she now sees her as hers alone. Her name, Akimana, means “Child of God.” Other women contracted AIDS through rape. The story of Fifi and Chantal is an intensely moving one. Their bond was forged in tragedy- they were gang-raped together. We see Chantal visit Fifi in hospital to comfort and care for her. Sadly, Fifi died of AIDS during the making of the film. Parentless households have been another feature of post-genocide Rwanda and the documentary features interviews with Delphine, a young woman bringing up, and supporting siblings alone.

The film shines a light on many of the enormous challenges facing Rwandan women in the post-genocide era: widowhood, parentless households, poverty, the psychological impact of sexual violence, children born of rape and AIDS. It also, however, makes the case that the position of women in Rwanda has greatly improved since 1994. As the filmmakers state, the predominantly female make-up of the population “handed Rwanda’s women an extraordinary burden and unprecedented opportunity.” Increased political participation is an essential part of that change and the story of Joseline personifies the promise of a new Rwanda. Joseline is a community organizer and development head in her village. Modest and motivated, she is dedicated to implementing vital projects such as road-building. The film features interviews with other strong, gracious women committed to transforming Rwandan society, such as widowed HIV-positive police officer Odette Mukakabera. Odette is an extraordinary woman. Not only does she serve her community; she also supports her children and orphaned niece, while studying to be a lawyer in the evening. The story of Chantal, mentioned earlier, is also one of promise and purpose. She found love after the tragedy, married and had three children.

Although God Sleeps in Rwanda contains haunting glimpses of those immeasurably dark days, it tells an encouraging story of courage and survival. Crucially, it respects its subjects and lets the women speak for themselves.

Mariel Hemingway: ‘Running From Crazy’

Most of us, to some extent, want to get away from the families we grew up in, to not be reminded of the people we were at 5, 10, or 15. Actress Mariel Hemingway had more reason than most: not only did her famous grandfather, Ernest, kill himself in his home, not too far from the house where she grew up, but her parents had their own problems, spending their nights drinking in the kitchen, then fighting, sometimes breaking glass and drawing blood, which Mariel, when she was still a child, would clean up.

Read ahead for an interview with the director, Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple.

In the documentary Running From Crazy, we see Hemingway reminisce about her growing up and also witness her current life, speaking to groups about suicide (her sister, the model and sometime actress, Margaux, also killed herself, and Mariel begins one talk with, “I come from seven suicides, perhaps more”), exercising with her partner Bobby, and spreading the word about holistic ways of staying physically and mentally healthy.

Thanks to archival footage the director, two-time Oscar winner (for Best Documentary feature) Barbara Kopple, discovered, we also see Margaux, in film shot for her own documentary (which you can see on Youtube) 30 years before, which retraces the steps of Ernest Hemingway, but also captures Margaux’s interaction with the rest of her family, including her parents (who are both now dead) and her other sister Joan (also known as Muffet) who, after a lifetime struggle with mental illness, is now, we see later, in assisted living (after Mariel’s grown daughter chides her into visiting).

The Margaux we see in the kitchen of the old family home (which Mariel later tells us was torn down after her parents’ deaths) seems nothing like the woman with the blonde hair and big smile we see in a white 70s jumpsuit, singing alongside a piano, in archival tape from “The Mike Douglas” show (the host declares her a “star”). Instead, she seems to physically shrink in the presence of her mother and father and even her sister, whose manner reminded me of girls I knew in high school: fun to have at a party but with personas that were a cover for troubled lives. She even has the same hairstyle.

Mariel later reveals that her father sexually abused her sisters (she would share a bed with her mother to stay safe), and the family dynamic then seems to make more sense, especially to those of us who have stood by a partner who tried to make nice with abusive family members–and seen all the old roles come into play.

Kopple combines the vintage footage with gorgeous current shots of Mariel hiking in the wilds near her hometown. She says of her childhood, “I knew if I didn’t get outside I’d just want to cry.” We also see her in other wilderness, climbing steep cliffs (after fighting with her partner) and dipping herself in a river, all of which, along with her public speaking and outreach, seems like a catharsis to break with the past.

In one of the many scenes in which she speaks to the camera (some of which are a little too much like one-sided therapy sessions), Mariel says, “We were good WASPs, you know. You don’t speak about your problems,” but she does seem to be breaking the cycle as she tries to involve her adult daughters in this work and talk to them about the family’s history of mental illness (which the daughters have, to a lesser degree, also grappled with). She tells us, “They say in spirituality you’re done with something when it doesn’t affect you anymore. I’m not there yet.”

Interview With The Director, Barbara Kopple

I was able to talk by phone to the director Barbara Kopple (who not only has won two Academy Awards but has had a career that started in the ’70s and hasn’t stopped since) about the film a couple of weeks ago. We started by discussing the footage of Margaux. (The following was edited for concision and clarity.)

Barbara Kopple: She (Mariel) didn’t even know it existed.

Bitch Flicks: So how did you find that then?

Barbara Kopple: It was really pretty wild. We not only found the documentary which was an hour, we found 43 hours of Margaux material. I never told Mariel that we had it because I didn’t want her to feel, “My God, what do they have?” I wanted her to be free to really talk. She never knew it (documentary footage of Margaux, Joan and her parents) existed.

The way we found out about it is the sound person named Alan Barker whom I’ve known for years was in Ketchum for our first shoot. And he said, “You know Barbara when I first (started out) I was a camera person and I did some filming here in Ketchum with Margaux.”

I said (about the documentary), “Where is it?” He didn’t know. I said, “Did it ever come out?'”

He said, “I think they had a little hour thing. But if four people saw it, that was a lot. It was called Winner Take Nothing.”

We finally found some footage at an archival house in Minnesota the footage had been given to. When we called them they said, “My God, we have tons of it but nobody has ever asked for it. We’ll have to go and blow the dust off for you.”

We said,”We will pay anything to get a screening copy made.”

“Well that’s going to take a really long time” he said

(Well) when you do some, just send them to us,” so they sent it to us little by little and we would get these Fedex packages that would be like Christmas. (We were) so excited to see what was on them. I just knew that the film would have sort of a richer context because we had that. From that we were really able to step inside the Hemingway family. Otherwise it would be Mariel’s reflections which were extraordinary, but this way you saw. You saw Margaux with her father, interviewing him. You saw how she was treated. You saw how she played tennis with Joan. We thought that all of these wonderful, extraordinary things that made, for me at least, the piece so intimate and so real. And when I showed it to Mariel, I still hadn’t told her until we were in final cut, we were just about to lock it, and I just wanted to have her look at it, so she wouldn’t have any surprises.

(About the part of the film in which Margaux appears) Mariel just sat straight up in her seat, she was like, “Oh my God, this is the first time I’ve seen my parents on film. And I didn’t know if the kitchen was really yellow and blue. I didn’t know. I was just trying to remember. And there’s my mother sitting on the sink, exactly as I described it.”She said, “This is going to be so amazing for my girls to see.” And it was just, it was just wonderful…She didn’t even know it existed.

Bitch Flicks: The documentary does have in it, if the rest of us were having documentaries made about our lives, things we wouldn’t want included–when Mariel was fighting with her partner and the scene where her daughter scolds her a little bit about Muffet (Joan) and tells her she should visit. And I’m wondering if you and Mariel talked at all about those scenes afterward or even during…

Barbara Kopple: No.

Bitch Flicks: So basically she just let you film whatever.

Barbara Kopple: She agreed. Yes. She just let me do the film, no holds barred. That was the deal. I mean she wanted to talk. She never said, “Don’t use that.”

Bitch Flicks: I’m wondering if there have ever been times in your long career when people have said, “Don’t film that,” or “don’t show that” and what has been your policy about that?

Barbara Kopple: It’s happened, but things have been so little and so inconsequential to the story of the film. (She gave a couple of off-the-record examples which seemed really trivial, things that no one else watching would have any objection to or would even notice.) I think that little things that don’t hurt your story or do anything, of course you’ll take them out.

Bitch Flicks: I’m wondering how much time you spent with Mariel and her family; was it in short spurts or an extended period?

Barbara Kopple: Short spurts. I wasn’t there every single day because every single day she was living her life, doing yoga or going for a walk or watching the sun rise. There’s only so many shots…

Bitch Flicks: I’m very interested in this framework that the film has, that Mariel said, “Just film me.”

Barbara Kopple: How it all happened was a really good friend of Mariel’s who worked at the OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) who said, “Hey Mariel, I think we should do a film about your life.”

Mariel said, “Let’s just make a reality series.”

And her friend said…”I have an idea. I want you to talk to this woman, Barbara Kopple.”

And I guess Mariel had heard my name and she said, “Well, OK, alright.”

I said, “I’d love to,” and then Mariel and I got together and we talked about three hours or more and she just promised that she would tell me whatever I needed to know. She said whatever I asked her she would answer to the best of her ability and not hold anything back. Because she felt that it was important to sort of see the light of day, the bad things in her life. She just did it and kept her promise.

Bitch Flicks: Were you surprised that Mariel’s daughters have never read Hemingway?

Barbara Kopple:. No, because I don’t think Mariel read very much of it until she got married to Steve (her daughters’ father). I mean, it was a family that never really talked. They didn’t talk about books. They (Margaux and Mariel) were bullied because they went to the Hemingway school that was named after him. He had committed suicide. That was something that you just didn’t talk about. I wasn’t, but probably the audience who sees it (are surprised). It’s just who they were. People in the house were very dysfunctional–fights all the time. There wasn’t much time for fuzzy, cozy stuff. Her mother had cancer and Mariel took care of her mother. If you wanted to get close to the father you went fly-fishing or hunting with him.

Bitch Flicks: Is there anything else that you really would like to add?

Barbara Kopple: I guess if there was anything else I wanted to say, it was that I learned a lot. I learned that, in a sense, all of us are touched by mental illness, or by suicide, or we know somebody that is and it’s really important to talk about it. And that it’s really important to help each other and in the end I think what we really need to have is more love and more compassion for each other and that’s hugely important. I think that this film, if by getting out there, can convince people that they’re not alone and that there are people out there who love them and care about them and will help them, then we’ve done something very special.

Running From Crazy will be on Netflix starting on Nov. 25. For more information go to Facebook.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfGYqdTAxEk”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

The Gifted Girls of Bekoji: A Review of ‘Town of Runners’

Directed by Jerry Rothwell, ‘Town of Runners’ is a 2012 documentary about promising young athletes from the highland town of Bekoji in Ethiopia. It’s a very special place, Bekoji. A remarkably high number of world-class runners have been trained there, including the great 10,000 and 5,000 meter Olympic champion, Tirunesh Dibaba, and 10,000 meter sporting pioneer, Derartu Tulu, the first African woman to win an Olympic gold medal.

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Directed by Jerry Rothwell, Town of Runners is a 2012 documentary about promising young athletes from the highland town of Bekoji in Ethiopia. It’s a very special place, Bekoji. A remarkably high number of world-class runners have been trained there, including the great 10,000 and 5,000 meter Olympic champion, Tirunesh Dibaba, and 10,000 meter sporting pioneer, Derartu Tulu, the first African woman to win an Olympic gold medal.

Distance runners are greatly celebrated in Ethiopia. Running is bound up with national identity and pride. A scene at the beginning of Town of Runners, showing a group of young people watching the Olympics on television, movingly illustrates the romantic hold the sport has in the country.

Town of Runners follows the careers of two talented teenaged girls from Bekoji who are seeking to emulate their famous compatriots, best friends Hawii Megersa and Alemi Tsegaye. Their story is charmingly narrated by an ambitious young boy called Biruk Fikadu. The girls are both competitive and good-natured. Their equally engaging coach, Sentayehu Eshetu, is a hugely supportive, down-to-earth man with an extraordinarily successful record in training Olympic gold winners. Encouraged by Eshetu, the girls are offered places on training programs in another part of the country. Their farming families do not prevent them from pursuing their dreams. Running offers a life of independence as well as an escape from poverty. It’s not easy road though. The specter of unfulfilled promise, of course, shadows young athletes all around the world but those in poorer countries face extra challenges such as lack of funding, poor lodging and neglect. But the girls’ dedication to the track never wavers. Greatness is born on overgrown tracks in Ethiopia.

Town of Runners is not, it must be said, an expose of exploitation in African sport. It is not an overtly political documentary. Rothwell does not tell a tragic tale. Nor does he provide the viewer with a socio-cultural analysis of the role of athletics in Ethiopia. He takes an observational rather than polemical approach. There are shortcomings. Although Town of Runners records signs of change, while offering glimpses into enduring aspects of Ethiopian culture, such as faith, and family, the viewer is not given much historical context. The documentary, moreover, does not provide in-depth analysis of why the town has produced so many sensational runners. Nevertheless, it paints an empathetic portrait of female talent while paying homage to a blessed place. What’s more, it’s refreshing to see a Western film-maker tell a largely positive story about contemporary Africa. Town of Runners is a compassionate, beautifully made documentary with universal appeal.

Ten Documentaries About Political Women

A pioneering advocate for gender equality, co-founder of Ms. Magazine, and cultural icon, Gloria Steinem has played a prominent role in modern American history. The HBO-produced profile ‘In Her Own Words’ features thoughtful interviews with the woman herself as well as fascinating archival footage. Steinem comes across as sincere and engaging while clips of central moments in 70s women’s history capture the energy and spirit of feminist activism.

Written by Rachael Johnson.

1. Gloria: In Her Own Words (Peter W. Kunhardt, 2011)

A pioneering advocate for gender equality, co-founder of Ms. Magazine, and cultural icon, Gloria Steinem has played a prominent role in modern American history. The HBO-produced profile In Her Own Words features thoughtful interviews with the woman herself as well as fascinating archival footage. Steinem comes across as sincere and engaging while clips of central moments in 70s women’s history capture the energy and spirit of feminist activism. Other illuminating footage, exposing the mind-blowing sexism of the US media, clearly indicates what women were up against. In Her Own Words offers, too, a fairly intimate profile of Steinem. Addressing family and romantic relationships, as well as Steinem’s feminist awakening, the documentary marries the personal and political.

2. Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai (Lisa Merton and Alan Dater, 2008)

The late, great Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) remains one of the moral figures of our age. Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, a tree-planting organization benefiting rural women facing firewood and food scarcity on environmentally degraded land. In 2004, she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for her contributions to sustainable development. A strong, energizing figure brimming with personality, Maathai also confronted sexism and political oppression. Taking Root tells the story of an eco-feminist crusader who empowered her fellow women and citizens. It’s both a stirring study of singular courage and a story of people power.

3. Free Angela and All Political Prisoners (Shola Lynch, 2013)

Free Angela and All Political Prisoners chronicles the extraordinary life of an extraordinary woman, activist, and academic, Angela Davis. Directed with style and verve, it addresses a particular episode in the radical icon’s life, her arrest and trial following the 1970 kidnapping of, and killing in a shootout, of a Californian judge. The incident occurred during an escape attempt at the trial of one of the Soledad Brothers, three men accused of killing a white prison guard after the killing of several Black inmates. As the guns were registered to Davis, she was accused of involvement. Fleeing arrest, she was put on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitive List. Davis was acquitted of all charges in 1972 after spending 18 months in prison. The historical context is hugely important, of course. Davis was seen by many in the United States, and globally, as a victim of a racist legal justice system and society that actively persecuted people of color. A left-wing philosophy philosopher at UCLA with close links to the Black Panthers, Davis posed a threat to the right-wing white establishment. She had, previous to the Marin County incident, been fired from her teaching post. Although one documentary feature cannot hope to fully capture the woman and her life’s work- -her writing encompasses gender, race, class, and the US “prison industrial complex”- Shola Lynch’s documentary vividly portrays her uncanny intelligence and charisma. The archival footage and funk soundtrack are electrifying and the director provides an evocative portrait of those turbulent times.

4. Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (Ken Burns, 1999)

Focusing on the lives and careers of two key figures of the 19^th century women’s movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Not for Ourselves Alone examines the long, hard struggle for women’s suffrage in the United States. It’s a hugely informative, richly detailed and beautifully made film. It is highly recommended.

5. Union Maids (Julia Reichert, James Klein, Miles Mogulescu, 1976)

The Oscar-nominated documentary, Union Maids, is a little gem. Blending extraordinary archival footage, and stills, with compelling, contemporary interviews with three labor activists–Kate Hyndman, Stella Nowicki and Sylvia Woods–it is a powerful tribute to the politically engaged, working-class woman of 30s America. It is an invaluable historical resource.

6. Ukraine is Not A Brothel (Kitty Green, 2013)

Ukraine is Not A Brothel is an intelligent documentary about the controversial feminist movement Femen. Founded in the Ukraine in 2008, the group privileges the female body as a site of liberation and resistance. Wearing crowns of flowers, activists use their bare breasts to protest patriarchy, religious authority, and sexual exploitation. Green mixes interviews with footage of the women’s protests. Their methods invite scepticism and accusations of hypocrisy- the typical Femen activist seems to be tall, blonde and beautiful- but the women do lay themselves on the line. Members relate distressing incidents of abuse. The documentary reveals, however, that their leader is a man, a certain Victor Svyatski. But that’s not the end of this complex tale. Members like Sasha have distanced themselves from Victor and Femen is now based in Paris. Embedded with the women for more than year, Green provides the viewer with an authentic, in-depth portrait of the organization.

7. Pray the Devil Back to Hell (Gini Reticker, 2008).

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is a powerful ode to non-violent resistance. It documents an awe-inspiring episode in Liberia’s recent, war-scarred history when an inter-generational, inter-faith movement, comprised of ordinary women, successfully petitioned for peace. The film gives voice to the members as it acknowledges and honors their courageous, creative efforts. One remarkable woman featured in the film, movement organizer, Leymah Gbowee, jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 with the current President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Pray The Devil Back to Hell is a unique contribution to peace studies.

8. Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed (Shola Lynch, 2004)

Chisholm ’72 chronicles the political career of American’s first Black Congresswoman, Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005) focusing on her unsuccessful yet trail-blazing 1972 presidential bid. Blending interviews with contemporaries with captivating archival footage, it’s an absorbing documentary about a genuine, progressive figure who personified the promise of a more democratic, socially inclusive America. Chisholm promoted voting and greater political engagement, and her example remains an inspiration for candidates today. Shola Lynch’s film is a vital tribute to the uncommon resolve of a candidate who set out to transform the system.

9. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (Mike Lerner, Maxim Pozdorovkin, 2013)

This British-Russian documentary chronicles the political career of the anti-authoritarian, anti-clerical feminist punk band, Pussy Riot. It’s both a colorful and disturbing tale. Pussy Riot, of course, gained world attention in 2012 when they performed a “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in multi-hued balaclavas. As the film makes clear, the jokey, subversive stunt was politically motivated. It was a finger-to-the-father protest against the Orthodox Church’s backing of Putin as well as misogynist religious ideology. Three of the band members- Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich- were put on trial and given lengthy prison sentences for hooliganism and inciting religious hatred offences although Samutsevich latter would soon have her sentence suspended. The severe punishment the women received was condemned by Western human rights organizations such as Amnesty International. (Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were finally released under Russia’s amnesty law at the end of 2013). The Sundance award-winning documentary is an engrossing account of one of the most fascinating feminist stories of our time.

10. We: Arundhati Roy (Anonymous, 2006)

We does not offer a conventional profile of Arundhati Roy. As its underground filmmakers promise from the very start: “This film is not about her. It is about her words.” The viewer is solely informed that the Indian writer and activist won the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things and the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004. A formally inventive film, it mixes commentary and clips from Roy’s compelling 2002 “Come September” speech with powerful illustrative footage. The wide-ranging speech covers corporate globalisation, the legacy of colonialism, imperialism, the war on terror, civil unrest, and resistance. Roy’s lyrical voice hypnotizes while her words pack a punch. The soundtrack, featuring the likes of Massive Attack and Nine Inch Nails, is equally mesmerizing. Giving voice to an eloquent, courageous woman, We speaks truth to power.