documentaries about women

The Women Men Rescue (or Choose Not To): ‘The Witness’ and ‘Disorder’

Saving a beautiful woman from danger is such a pervasive male fantasy that right now, no matter where you are you could probably see an example of this trope by randomly flipping through channels or wandering into a multiplex. But what if the man was never able to save the woman? Or what if he has problems of his own that keep him from being a stereotypical hero?

Written by Ren Jender.

[Trigger Warning: discussion of explicit, fatal violence against women and rape]

You’d never know from watching movies that statistically men are much more likely to harm women than rescue them. Saving a beautiful woman from danger is such a pervasive male fantasy that right now, no matter where you are, you could probably see an example of this trope by randomly flipping through channels or wandering into a multiplex. But what if the man was never able to save the woman? Or what if he has problems of his own that keep him from being a stereotypical hero? Two new films, respectively James D. Solomon’s documentary The Witness and Alice Winocour’s French thriller Disorder, attempt to answer these questions.

The Witness tracks Bill Genovese, a Vietnam veteran and a person with an amputation who uses a wheelchair, as he tries to find out 40 to 50 years later (the film took a decade to make) what really happened the night his older sister, Kitty Genovese, was stabbed to death (and although it’s not included in the film also raped by her murderer) in front of her own Queens apartment building in 1964. Kitty Genovese’s killing became the stuff of front page headlines and sociology classes when an apocryphal story in The New York Times stated that 37 (the number was later amended to 38) of her neighbors, awakened by her screams, saw her being stabbed from their bedroom windows but none called the police or offered any other help which might have saved her life.

The truth, uncovered in more recent articles is: although neighbors heard her screams, nearly none of them knew what was going on (some thought she and her killer were a drunk married couple having an argument) especially since the scene was quiet and Kitty was out of sight for some time between her murderer’s initial attack (interrupted when a neighbor shouted at him through the window to get away from her) and when he fatally wounded her (after which a woman neighbor and friend of Kitty’s held her in her arms as she was dying).

The original news story was a manipulation of facts that made a compelling resume builder: Abe Rosenthal, who later became the long-reigning executive editor at The New York Times wrote a sensationalistic book based on the fabricated story. When Bill interviews Rosenthal, he still insists the original account was the correct one. Some other journalists who covered the story when it was still new, like the late Mike Wallace, are more philosophical. “It was a fascinating story,” he says, one that was apparently too good to let the facts get in the way.

What actually happened is more complex. One surviving neighbor Bill interviews on camera says, “I heard someone yelling, ‘Help, help,’ and I called the police,” though no records of her call are on police logs. As Bill explains to us in his narration, we don’t know if the station neglected to write down the call or if the woman is telling this story to make herself feel better about her own actions (or inaction) that night.

We also see, unlike in most narrative films, how uninterested some people are in the truth. Kitty’s killer, Winston Moseley (he has since died) who raped and killed at least one other woman and later, in an escape from prison, raped another and held hostages at gunpoint, refuses to meet with Bill and instead offers in a letter an obviously fictitious story about being framed. Moseley’s son, who was 7 at the time of the murder, is a minister who wears a shiny cross, but seems to believe another of his father’s stories (that contradicts everything we know about the case): that Kitty called him a racial slur and he snapped. The son also seems unwilling to accept that his father was responsible for the other murder (which, like Kitty’s, he confessed to after he was arrested for stealing a television) in which he set fire to his victim while she was still alive. Instead, the son states that, for years, he and the rest of family had believed that Kitty was related to the infamous New York Mafia Genoveses (she was not).

Because most of the memories of Kitty and the analysis of her death come from men, we feel a little removed from her. When one man talks about how his mother (the woman who held Kitty in her arms as she died in the hallway) often had coffee with Kitty and would “talk about whatever women talk about,” it’s as emblematic of the film’s distanced viewpoint, as the blurry, nearly faceless image we see of Kitty in clips from an old home movie which are interspersed throughout the film.

Bill is in nearly every frame of the film’s live action — most of the recreated scenes are rendered in the delicate, evocative animation of The Moth Collective. Even as we see him moving in and out of his wheelchair, wearing gloves to pull himself up the stairs to an otherwise inaccessible apartment and narrating the film, he remains something of a mystery. Why does he wait to find out the real story until 40 years after his sister died? By the time he tracks down the witnesses who testified at the trial, most are long dead. One of the only insights into his mindset comes from his wife: “The choices that he made in his life were all related to the fact that no one helped his sister.”

Bill also has a willful obtuseness when he wonders why Kitty, whom he was close to, never came out to him at a time (she died five years before Stonewall) when people who told their families they were queer were disowned. Kitty being a fairly out queer person (in a highlight, after her partner, Mary Ann Zielonko, tells Bill that the patrons at the bar where she worked didn’t know Kitty was queer, two of them tell Bill everyone at the bar knew and considered her “one of the boys”) makes me wonder if Karl Ross, one of the only witnesses who did see what was happening and was close enough to halt the murder, failed to do so because of homophobia — or a fear of police since he too may have been gay. Mary Ann says of Ross, “He knew us.” He owned the pet shop where Kitty bought a poodle for Mary Ann as an apology after an argument.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4irXjYt_LM”]

In Disorder, co-written and directed by Alice Winocour (the co-writer of Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Oscar-nominated Mustang), the woman in peril is Jessie (Diane Kruger), the wife of a shady and very wealthy businessman, and her protector is a paid bodyguard, Vincent (Matthias Schoenaerts) back from a stint in Afghanistan and suffering from PTSD (as well as some hearing loss, the doctor at the beginning tells him — and us).

We see Vincent try to do work as he deals with the sounds (all the electronic beeps and boops of modern life) and sights that trigger him. Wariness is actually part of his job description, but at first we’re unsure if Vincent’s has more to do with his internal struggles than it does with anything going on around him. Silly us: this film is a thriller. Of course the main guy’s paranoia is justified.

The film manages to squeeze a surprising amount of tension out of a not-terribly-original situation before its first violent incident (which is punctuated, stunningly, by a cracked windshield and a brief blackout) but falls apart soon afterward. The film has lots of overheard conversations and pieces of information that never really come together in coherent form, which might reflect what a paid protector would overhear and understand but doesn’t really engage the audience. The violent aggressors are the opposite of a menace in their cute, black, ninja outfits and masks. No matter what Vincent’s skills as a fighter (never impaired by psychological problems so obvious that Jessie asks his coworker directly, “What’s wrong with him?”) always flatten them, so the action becomes monotonous.

Winocour’s film was apparently influenced by her suffering PTSD from a traumatic childbirth experience (she and her daughter are fine now), a phenomenon women I’ve known have also experienced, but something I have never seen captured on film. I desperately wished Disorder was about women’s trauma instead of the tired cliché of a male soldier’s suffering. The film also doesn’t give us any insight into Jessie’s point of view. She looks great in the backless floral evening dress she wears to a party early in the film, but in every scene she is so much an object she might as well be tied in pink ribbon. This lack of attention to the character is especially shocking and disappointing because Winocour co-wrote Mustang, an instant feminist classic that is flawlessly attuned to its girl protagonists.

Additionally the husband and his cohorts are all from the Middle East: the only person of Middle-Eastern descent who doesn’t seem sinister is Ali, Jessie’s Keane-eyed, curly-haired, young son. France’s traditional anti-Arab sentiment and more recent anti-Muslim policies (on the same beaches where Jessie and Ali frolic) make the ethnicity of the bad guys seem not strictly coincidental and more than a little racist. Skip this film and see Mustang (again) instead.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMThvaCTAm0″]

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 Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘Mission Blue’: “No Ocean, No Us”

Audiences have to look to documentaries like ‘Particle Fever,’ about the discovery of the Higgs boson, to see women scientists in prominent roles on film. The Netflix documentary ‘Mission Blue’ focuses on one woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, a former chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pioneering oceanographer and marine biologist who is on a quest to save the world’s oceans from dying.

This (slightly edited) repost by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Women Scientists.

When characters on TV shows or in feature films encounter “a scientist,” that person is usually a man. The rare times when actresses play scientists in mainstream films (besides the obvious recent example of Ghostbusters) they’re more likely to be a punchline than a real character, like Denise Richards in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. Audiences have to look to documentaries like Particle Fever, about the discovery of the Higgs boson, to see women scientists in prominent roles on film. The Netflix documentary Mission Blue focuses on one woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, a former chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pioneering oceanographer and marine biologist who is on a quest to save the world’s oceans from dying.

If that last sentence seems like an exaggeration, you should probably see this film. Earle, (now 80, but 79 when the film was released nearly two years ago) has been scuba diving as part of her research for the past 60 years (where she got her undergrad degree was one of the first places to adopt this “new” technology) and has seen firsthand the destruction that pollution and overfishing have wrought — even in areas “in the middle of nowhere” we (and she) think might be unaffected. She points out plastic bags and bottles she encounters on the ocean floor along with long stretches of dead coral and hardly any fish in places where both previously flourished.

She asks, “How can we use the ocean and not use it up?” She’s not afraid to take on the fishing industry, describing her stint at NOAA: “I went to one meeting of the fisheries council. And I was never allowed to go again.” When she warned of the (still) impending extermination of bluefin tuna (because of overfishing) she earned the nickname, “The Sturgeon General.” She resigned from her government position so she could further ocean conservation without being tethered by politics.

The film isn’t all doom and gloom. We also see, in some stunning underwater cinematography (both reminiscent of the Jacques Cousteau documentaries and surpassing them) places where ocean life is plentiful: huge schools of fish that seem like shimmering silver walls along with harmless whale sharks and sea turtles touchingly unwary of divers. Earle is a great advocate of everyone exploring the ocean in this way, theorizing that people care more about wildlife and its environment if they can see it: if wildflowers, birds, trees and deer were hidden away from us we might not have many protections for them either. Earle points out that even though she’s not “big and muscly,” she’s been diving her entire adult life and was able to convince her own mother, at 81, to give it a try. She loved it.

The film shows us the deep sea animals that Earle first encountered over 30 years ago in a special atmospheric diving suit she, along with her third husband, helped design. The natural flashing luminescence of fish and other sea creature at these depths look like city neon signs and gaudy Christmas displays all at once.

We also hear of Earle’s own journey first as a child allowed to explore, alone and for hours at a time, the wild places around her home (as few children now get the chance to do) and later her career as a scientist. She is careful to include herself when she says repeatedly that no one foresaw the depletion of a resource — the ocean and its inhabitants — that seemed too vast for human beings to impact. But now Earle says, “No ocean, no life. No ocean, no us.”

Earle became a scientist before second-wave feminism, when hardly any women entered that profession and we see in the media coverage of her accomplishments (when she was often the first or only woman but usually called a “girl”), the sexism of the era, which she undoubtedly encountered on the job as well. But the film’s co-director and interviewer Fisher Stevens (yes, the same one who acted in films like Short Circuit — but more recently was a producer for The Cove) doesn’t ask about these instances, only gushes about how “beautiful” she was. Earle is polite to him, but, at 79, she might be wondering when she will finally be excused from the unofficial beauty pageant all women are subjected to.

This film could use more women. We barely see Earle interacting with other women scientists or divers in Blue (except very briefly in Australia and in vintage footage of her time as part of an all-woman team of researchers) though many more women are in the field now than when she started her career. Not enough women are behind the scenes either: the film was directed and written by men. When we consider Earle is not just a scientific pioneer, but also writes books about ocean conservation for the general public (including one released to coincide with this documentary — as well as children’s books) and is an effective enough speaker for lay audiences that she won a substantial monetary award as part of TED Talks, the omission of her from the film’s writing team is baffling. If her own writing had been included, some elements, like a casual mention of the acidification of the ocean (thanks to carbon dioxide emissions) might have been better explained.

I also would have appreciated more of Earle’s take on her personal life. She was married three times and had three children (with the addition, for about a decade, of stepchildren too) but as her daughter (who now runs the deep sea equipment company Earle founded) tells us she “wasn’t June Cleaver.” Earle was taking part in underwater expeditions halfway across the world from her family at a time when wives and mothers were expected to make their homes and their husbands (and their husbands’ careers) their first priority. Her marriages suffered because of her absences, even though each of the husbands shared her interests. In this era of Lean In and “having it all,” I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to hear in more detail about the experience of someone who attempted this balancing act before most of the so-called “experts” were born.

When we see the “Happiness is being in over your head.” sticker (illustrated with a scuba diver) in her office we think Earle may be a lot more interesting than the documentary makes her (an impression that Earle in interviews seems to confirm), but she’s still able to get in some good, informative quotes like, “What we’re doing to the ocean, what we’re doing to the planet as a whole comes back to us in bigger storms, more powerful storms, more frequent storms.”

A better film might have tied in Earle’s past status as an outsider (when she was one of the few women in her field) and rebel (in not conforming to the ’50s and ’60s cultural expectations of what a wife and mother should be) to her current role as an environmentalist. When we see (in graphic footage) gleeful fisherman cutting the fins off living sharks and then dumping their mutilated bodies into the ocean to die, we can’t help thinking that this boys’ club gives its members permission to behave badly — as most boys’ clubs do. Because she’s never been one of the boys, Earle can see their cruelty — and its consequences — more clearly: she even films a fishing boat “vacuuming” up its catch — from the vantage point of the fish.

In spite of its flaws, Blue is well worth seeing — and succeeded in making me want to try scuba diving. Some of the shots in the film seem more magical than the brightly colored, hologram illustrations in my childhood copy of The Little Mermaid. As Stevens accompanies Earle through storybook seascapes I thought, “This is the ‘beauty’ he should be gushing over.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1wp2MQCsfQ”]

‘Amy’: Our Love Didn’t Do Her Any Favors

Mainstream media loves to watch when a famous woman–Courtney Love, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan–breaks down in public. The posts and articles all feign “concern” but what they really do is exploit the problems of these women for clicks. Perhaps the most extreme recent example is Amy Winehouse, whose single “Rehab” was climbing up the charts at the same time that the paparazzi (particularly dogged and shameless in her native England, where tabloids have illegally hacked celebrity phones) captured her worsening alcoholism and addiction.

Because media covered Winehouse so relentlessly we have plenty of video of her during her bright, burning fame. She was young enough that even during her early teenage years–before she was famous–friends shot plenty of video of her (“Amy, give us a smile, then we can turn the camera off”) as well. In the new documentary Amy (which opens tomorrow, Friday, July 3) director Asif Kapadia doesn’t need to use “re-enactments” or the other types of visual filler we see in most documentaries. Instead, as audio interviews with her colleagues, friends, and family play we see Amy herself, first at 14, during a friend’s party, singing “Happy Birthday” like a torch song. Two years later we hear her sing an American songbook standard with the National Youth Orchestra, already sounding like an adult with a couple of albums under her belt. She signed her first major record deal when she was still a teenager and put out that prize-winning album when she was 20.

Winehouse was charming, opinionated, and funny: we see and hear her throw some epic shade on the singer Dido, fellow Grammy-nominee Justin Timberlake (Amy was the winner), and the company that put out her first album. But we also learn that even as a child she was very troubled. We hear her voice in an interview saying that when she was 9 years old, her father left the family and she decided no one could stop her from doing anything–including wearing makeup and other activities not usually associated with 9-year-olds. Her mother says that Amy chastised her later for not being tougher with her while she was growing up. Amy also told her mother early on about her bulimia, but in what would be a theme in Winehouse’s short life, no one thought fit to intervene.

Winehouse, who was as transparent in her interviews as she was in her songs (we find out that as in the famous lyric from the song “Rehab” she ended up not going to detox because her father didn’t think she needed it) also tells a journalist that she suffers from depression. Although she alludes to being on medication at one point, we don’t see any evidence that she ever saw a therapist.

A fiction that follows artists of all types is that somehow emotional turmoil is good for them, helping them to create great art and that the creation itself acts as a kind of therapy. One look at the number of acclaimed artists who have killed themselves should disabuse people of the notion that an artist’s work is “therapy,” any more than bookkeeping is “therapy” for an accountant.

We see Winehouse working on the album that will make her, at 23, world-famous, Back To Black. She looks chipper and healthy as she remarks after recording the vocal for the title track, “Oh it’s a bit upsetting at the end, isn’t it?” She wrote the songs on the record about her breakup with boyfriend (and eventual husband) Blake Fielder-Civil (referred to as Blake Fielder in the film) telling an interviewer, “I fell in love with someone I would have died for.”

Fielder-Civil admits he introduced her to heroin. But Winehouse talks about spending her days drinking and smoking weed before they ever met. Savvy enough to get a major label contract at 18, she probably knew that involvement with Fielder-Civil, who worked at a club that was a hangout for notorious addicts like musician (and one-time Kate Moss boyfriend) Pete Doherty, might lead to more drugs. Fielder-Civil’s addiction (and easy access to substances) might have been part of the attraction (because we certainly don’t see any other attractive qualities about him in the film). Once reunited the two were in a me-and-you-against-the-world relationship that addiction often fosters. A drug counselor who saw the couple says that he thought Fielder-Civil was holding Winehouse back from getting clean and sober; Fielder-Civil realized the relationship would end if the two of them no longer had drugs as a bond.

As Winehouse became more successful she, like Nina Simone, had more and more people financially dependent on her and fewer friends (at least two of the people closest to her had given her ultimatums over her drug and alcohol use–so-called “tough love” which, as with most addicts, didn’t work). She was also isolated because an army of photographers and film crews stalked her whenever she left her North London home; the white flashes and camera lights plus the cacophony of cameras and shouts that greet her whenever she opens a door seem like a bomb blast. We become complicit in this coverage as we see, from a paparazzo camera zooming in on the window of her home, her husband being arrested. Later we see footage of her, looking emotionally and physically devastated, still wearing her trademark beehive hairstyle, visiting the prison where he is held. After she becomes tabloid fodder, the same talk show hosts who applauded her when she sang “Rehab” on their shows make cheap jokes about her addiction in their opening monologues. In one of the last scenes we see paparazzi footage of family and friends sobbing outside her funeral.

amyFather — Amy Winehouse and her father

Her manager at the time of her death, like the other people who made their livelihood from her (including, sadly, her father, who visits her in St. Lucia with a reality camera crew in tow) always shrugged off confronting her about her deterioration (which included the bulimia, a factor in her death from alcohol poisoning). We see the police remove a body bag from the same home the paparazzi stalked and hear fans who loved her cry, but that love, as she says about Fielder-Civil’s “didn’t do me any favors.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za3lZcrzzcM” iv_load_policy=”3″]

___________________________________________________

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

‘Peace Pilgrim’: A Tribute to an American Heroine of Non-Violence

We need more documentaries and movies about the lives of pilgrims and activists of non-violence. We also need to be reminded of their power and diversity.

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Countless movies have been made about the military but very few about peace activists. Yes, there have been exceptions, such as Gandhi (1982) and Selma (2014), but the stories of soldiers- mostly white and male, of course- and their experiences of war have always been considered more worthy and thrilling than those of people struggling for peace. This has been a constant throughout the history of American cinema. From Wings (1927), the first movie to win a Best Picture Oscar, to American Sniper (2014), Hollywood filmmakers have demonstrated an abiding interest in telling and selling war tales. There is the dramatic, aesthetic argument, of course: cinematic story-tellers are naturally drawn to conflict and war is the ultimate expression of human conflict. War is, also, understood as an historical fact and war stories aim to address this unbroken feature of humanity. Obviously, human conflict should be explored by filmmakers but it must be understood that there is no such thing as an apolitical war story.

Although there have been American anti-war movies, most have been either confused in their messages, ideologically fraudulent, or downright militarist. It’s not just the obviously right-wing, propagandist products that promote a militarist culture and ethos. The lives of soldiers at war are generally understood as dramatically appealing and full of meaning, while military men are commonly portrayed as fascinating, charismatic figures. American mainstream cinema has not only provided a mirror to U.S. militarism; it has also reinforced it. Hollywood, it must be said, has never found peacemakers very interesting. Generally speaking, you have to go to independent and documentary films to learn about advocates of non-violence and pacificist philosophy.

The documentary Peace Pilgrim: An American Sage Who Walked Her Talk (2002) celebrates Mildred Norman (1908-1981), a remarkable woman who walked for peace for nearly 30 years. Calling herself Peace Pilgrim, New Jersey-born Norman travelled the United States from 1953 to 1981. Mahatma Gandhi said, “My Life is my message.” For Mildred Norman, her journey was her message. She was motivated by faith, namely a belief in “universal spirituality” and the “divine law of love.” In an old interview, Norman describes a spiritual awakening she had some years some years before her peace pilgrimage. Walking alone in the woods at night, she experienced, she says, a desire to surrender herself, and a calling “to give my life to something beyond myself.” Her life before had not been particularly unusual–she had been a fashionable young woman and had married. But she and her husband, Stanley Ryder, divorced after 13 years. Ryder says in an interview that she did not visit him when he was in the service and showed little interest in being a homemaker. Mildred Norman’s pacifist principles and independent spirit were already challenging convention. She was destined for another life.

It would be a while before she could realize her purpose, but in 1953, during the Korean War, Peace Pilgrim finally began her extraordinary journey. She took no money with her and carried only a comb, toothbrush, map, and pen. Peace Pilgrim says she experienced generosity and hospitality on her travels but on occasions when she did not get shelter and food from others, she fasted and slept outdoors. She spoke of both inner peace and peace for humankind. Her observations are often powerful. Consider the following statement: “What we basically suffer from in the world is immaturity. If we were a mature people, peace would be assured.” Many–on the left as well as the right–mock pacifists as strange, romantic creatures but whether you are a pacifist or not, there is no denying Peace Pilgrim’s strength of commitment to peace. Although she tragically died in a car crash in 1981, her message was kept alive by Friends of Peace Pilgrim who brought together her writings in Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words.

Mildred Norman’s pilgrimage can be read as both politically and culturally subversive. To forsake money and possessions, and advocate peace in a militarist, materialistic society is a profoundly non-conformist act. Further, her pilgrimage denotes a rejection of social norms of post-war American femininity. Although she did not have a child and husband, Norman’s pilgrimage still represents a refusal of the domestic space and personal relationships for the life of the road. There persists a belief that women are more conservative in their lifestyle than the average man but Mildred Norman’s story is a reminder of the long, rich tradition of female radicalism and non-conformism.

Peace Pilgrim features period news footage, stills of newspaper clippings and old photos, as well as deeply felt commentary by cultural and religious figures inspired by her example. Maya Angelou, the Dalai Lama and actor Dennis Weaver all underscore that Norman literally embodied her message of peace. But the film aims, above all, to give voice to the woman herself and honor her pacifist teaching. We see Peace Pilgrim walking through the countryside and towns of America, lecturing in schools as well as being interviewed by reporters around the country. Produced by the Friends of Peace Pilgrim, and scripted and edited by Sharon Janis of Night Lotus Productions, Peace Pilgrim is a modestly made but valuable film.

We need more documentaries and movies about the lives of pilgrims and activists of non-violence. We also need to be reminded of their power and diversity. Incidentally, isn’t it time someone somewhere made a big, bold documentary about Code Pink, the colorful, dynamic, in-your-face American peace activists of today? Watching them disrupt the meetings of war criminals like Henry Kissinger is surely the stuff of great drama.

‘Dreamcatcher’: Bringing Kindness to the Conversation About Sex Work

Because Myers-Powell spent 25 years as a “prostitute” (she does not use the term “sex worker” or “sex work,” perhaps because the women we see don’t use these terms either) on the same streets where she now does outreach, she understands the complexity of these women’s lives. She tells one young woman (one of the few white women she encounters) on a deserted-looking stretch of road, “This is one of the most dangerous spots,” and that even though she liked to think of herself as tough back in the day she never would have been there at night.

Written by Ren Jender.

“I used to be right out here too,” says Brenda Myers-Powell, the focus of the new documentary, Dreamcatcher (directed by Kim Loginotto, who won an award at the most recent Sundance for the film) as she and her coworker wind their vehicle through parts of their native Chicago that no tourist guide includes.

Over 20 years ago I was doing similar work to Myers-Powell’s, distributing condoms and talking with sex workers who worked the streets in my city. The emphasis at that job was safer sex education and HIV testing, but sometimes our clients needed more. One woman asked for and received a ride to detox (though we found out she left the next morning) and after we handed a scared-looking, visibly pregnant woman our condoms and information the driver did a U-turn and put a card for a treatment center (where our outreach van had its office) into her hand. Months afterward we saw that she had become one of the clients there.

When I hear debates about sex work and human trafficking these days I think of that woman and realize neither side would have done her much good. Some “empowered” sex workers would have thought her exploitation and drug addiction–along with the homelessness and violence she might have faced after leaving sex work, weren’t any of their concern. And worldwide efforts to stop “human trafficking” often assume no woman would willingly choose to do sex work; though people have no trouble understanding the difference in other kinds of human trafficking–a woman who works for wages as a maid and is free to quit is different from a maid who never receives her pay and is beaten if she tries to leave. They also ignore the danger law enforcement poses to sex workers themselves. Raids and arrests are, unsurprisingly, not very effective forms of outreach.

“That’s why I hardly ever come out here,” says the young woman, not entirely convincingly.

Myers-Powell asks her to have coffee, and we see the two, throughout the film, develop a relationship. When I saw Dreamcatcher at the opening night of the recent Athena Film Festival, Myers-Powell told the audience after the screening, “The first time I ask them: what do they want? And probably nobody has ever asked them that before.”

We see the cycle of sexual exploitation of some of these women starts in childhood. In a school-based “at-risk” group of girls that Myers-Powell facilitates, every girl in the room includes rape at an early age, often by someone in her own household, as part of her history, just as Myers-Powell does. When we see her speaking to another group she says, “I’m here to tell each and every one of you today,” and here her face softens, “it is not your fault.”

Myers-Powell has also worked to clear her own criminal record, as well as that of other women, successfully arguing that trafficking shouldn’t result in its survivors being charged with breaking the law. When she announces to the group that she no longer has a record she does a little dance in celebration.

Dreamcatcher is the foundation Myers-Powell’s co-founded; she told the audience at Athena that she started it in 2000, with no money, doing the outreach with her friend in a Ford Focus. Myers-Powell is glamorous (at one point she shows off her impressive wig collection), perceptive, and witty (at Athena she mentioned being directed to “‘social services,’ who are never very social”), but most striking is her unfailing kindness to the women and girls she encounters in the film, including parents we in the audience might judge more harshly. Even when she finds out one girl is making the mistake she herself has made, becoming pregnant at a very young age, Myers-Powell, without a wig or makeup, talking on the phone from her bedroom, is more resigned and sad than angry, but still not defeated.

DreamcatcherMothers — Brenda and the biological mother of her young son

When I worked in human services, many of the people who worked alongside me were, after their own troubled histories, trying to “give back,” but most of them couldn’t hide their frustration and disappointment with clients, like a mother who is hardest on the child who reminds her of herself at that age. Myers-Powell seems to bring none of this baggage to her work . When she speaks to an obviously impaired in-law (whose young son she is raising) and tells her how much she enjoys talking together when the woman is not high, she doesn’t have any edge in her voice. She means it.

In her remarks after the film, Myers-Powell said that she uses her experience to help others by asking herself, “What would’ve saved me?” She credited the people who had been kind to her when she was hospitalized (after a john beat her up and dragged her body from a car, scraping the skin off her face): “A lady doctor…would kick it with me every day. She said, ‘You’re funny. You’re smart. You’re beautiful,’ And I knew I wasn’t beautiful.”

When she got out of the hospital she went to Genesis House, of which she said, “It was a home…And I hadn’t had a home in years…I spent two years there and when I left I was a diva. I was ready for the world.” Now she’s trying to give others the same chance.

In a lot of ways the women and girls Myers-Powell does outreach to are the ones we, as a culture, pay the least attention to: they’re poor, often victims of abuse and usually Black or Latina. I couldn’t help noticing at the fancy, opening-night screening how many people around me, mostly men, tried to distract themselves from the women and girls in the film, either by talking loudly or, in one extreme case, showing a video on his phone to his seatmates, even after I told him more than once, through gritted teeth, to stop doing so. Let’s hope this film encourages others to not just look the other way.

Dreamcatcher will be on Showtime next Friday, March 27, 9 p.m. ET/PT and will be On Demand March 28 – May 22

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMPXhevhw0U” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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

‘Regarding Susan Sontag’: An Intimate but Incomplete Portrait of an Icon

Directed by Nancy Kates, the HBO documentary ‘Regarding Susan Sontag’ (2014) chronicles the intellectual icon’s private and public life. Sontag came of age in conservative post-war America but did not conform to its rigid sexual and gender norms. She was told by her step-father that too much reading meant no husband. She ignored him, of course, and went on to study at Berkeley and the University of Chicago.

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was a writer, political activist and filmmaker as well as an immensely influential critic. She wrote and spoke about almost everything. Her interests included high and popular culture, photography, politics, and illness. Her essays “Against Interpretation” (1966) and “Notes on Camp” (1964), are rightly recognized as pioneering works of cultural criticism. Although Sontag was a better cultural critic than novelist, her works of fiction demonstrated a certain creative ambition. She was also politically active. In the 60s, she campaigned against the Vietnam War and in the 90s, she directed Waiting for Godot during the Siege of Sarajevo. Sontag challenged and provoked. Her piece in the New Yorker characterizing 9/11 as “an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower” was hugely controversial.

Directed by Nancy Kates, the HBO documentary Regarding Susan Sontag (2014) chronicles the intellectual icon’s private and public life. Sontag came of age in conservative post-war America but did not conform to its rigid sexual and gender norms. She was told by her step-father that too much reading meant no husband. She ignored him, of course, and went on to study at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Strangely enough, she married the sociologist Philip Rieff at 17, and had a child at 19. Although the marriage lasted eight years, her life soon took another turn when she left the States to study in Paris. Sontag was bisexual, and had affairs with men and women throughout her life, although she did not come out in her younger years. The documentary also covers her activism–her trips to North Vietnam and Sarajevo as well as involvement with PEN American center.

Featuring commentary by former lovers, friends and family, Regarding Susan Sontag offers a very personal portrait of its subject. Acknowledging both her strengths and flaws, the documentary cannot be accused of hagiography. Armed with arresting looks and a penetrating intelligence, Sontag was a glamorous cultural icon. She was, however, sometimes knocked as self-absorbed and self-important. Some interviewees testify that she was not always an easy person to be around. A friend and former lover confides, “She was never able to know what goes on inside another person.” Still, Sontag loved life, and the accounts of the suffering she endured during her illness–she had two bouts of cancer–move the viewer.

The documentary does not, however, engage with Sontag’s ideas sufficiently, and more time could also have been spent on her politics. The first part of the film, in particular, focuses too much on her private life. This is, of course, quite typical of British and American profiles of cultural and political figures. You also don’t get the sense of just how provocative Sontag often was for an American public intellectual. At the beginning of the documentary, we see a clip of the writer on television defending the essay she wrote after 9/11, but we don’t return to the debate. Sontag also delivered another polemic when she stated that “the white race is the cancer of human history.” Kates touches on this but there is no discussion about the piece.

The documentary also does not examine her film on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Promised Lands (1974). Time constraints factor in here as well, of course. The documentary simply needs to be bigger, and longer. Nevertheless, we should be thankful for Regarding Susan Sontag. God knows there aren’t that many documentaries about public intellectuals out there–male or female. It’s certainly not dull. Sontag led a colorful, ground-breaking life, and her contemporaries offer interesting observations regarding the private woman. While not being a particularly erudite contribution to our understanding of the intellectual icon, Kates acknowledges her subject’s individualistic spirit.

‘She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’: An Incomplete Portrait of The Women’s Movement

When the young, hippie-ish movie star Shailene Woodley said in an interview that she wasn’t a feminist, many women pointed out that she didn’t seem to know what feminism was. Perhaps Woodley and other women of her generation (she is 22) don’t know what feminism is for the same reason fish don’t know what water is–because it’s all around them and has been for the entirety of their lives.

The following is a slightly modified repost.

But looking at contemporary movies and television series (especially those written by men) that take place in the 1960s and early 70s when “the women’s movement,” as it was then called, flourished, one would be hard-pressed to see any evidence of feminist thought, protest or even the untenable circumstances that led women of the era to become feminists. On Mad Men, two women in the late 1960s work in top positions in a not particularly progressive advertising firm. Sexual harassment there is barely a factor: Joan’s “date” with the guy from Jaguar was just a one-time thing–and she became a partner because of it, so in this alternate universe of the 1960s powerful men exploiting the women they work with for sex is unusual and for the women, choosing to acquiesce is a really great career move. Also women in these positions get substantial raises without even asking for them, when in reality women had to sue (or threaten legal action) both to be able to work in a “man’s job” and then to take home anything that resembled a man’s salary (women’s salaries for the same work are lower, even to this day).

Mary Dore’s Kickstarter-funded She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry looks to correct this revisionist history in one of the first documentaries (along with PBS’s Makers which aired last year) to try to offer a comprehensive view of the early days of the women’s movement using archival footage and interviewing the women who were on the frontlines. We don’t see Gloria Steinem, but we do see and hear from an array of (mostly white) other women with varying degrees of fame, from Kate Millett (who along with Steinem was all over the media as a spokesperson for feminism in the early 70s) to less well-known names like Village Voice writer Ellen Willis, former SNCC organizer Fran Beal and early reproductive rights activist Heather Booth. Seeing footage of the women from 40 years ago and then seeing them comment today (or sometime in the 2000s as Willis does, since she died in 2006), we see that the women have, in some ways, broken away from the strict feminist hard-line (which they may never have fully subscribed to, but was very much at the forefront of the early 70s feminism) of no makeup, no hair dye, and no plastic surgery. At least one of the talking heads (Against Our Will writer Susan Brownmiller) has written at length about these personal choices (remember: one of the catchphrases of the movement was “The personal is political”) and the film could use more women talking about themselves and their ideologies shifting through the years, underneath their identity as principled feminists.

We hear very little, beyond the familiar narrative of how-I-discovered-I-needed-feminism, of the ways in which the women’s goals and ideals have changed from their 20s to their 60s or 70s (and beyond), when those of us (especially activists) who are no longer in our 20s know such change is, for most people, inevitable. The closest the film comes to exploring these issues is when Willis tells us that without the feminist movement she doesn’t think she would have been able to both have her career (which, from an early age, she was determined to make happen) and her daughter–and she considers choosing to be a parent one of the best decisions of her life.

Although it’s similar in its conventional structure (the film makes a few passes at experimentalism–actresses reciting feminist writing in front of archival backdrops–which fall flat), Angry is more thorough and less forgettable than Makers (just a few months after seeing it, the only image from the PBS series that sticks with me is a woman in a construction hat), but still seems to put the same, big happy-face sticker–perfectly acceptable to the most middle-of-the-road feminists of today–on what was, like The Black Power Movement, The Young Lords, AIM, and the original Stonewall uprising a revolutionary movement. Popular feminist writers of the time like Shulamith Firestone (whom we see and hear briefly in archival footage) weren’t early prototypes of Sheryl Sandberg offering tips on how to combine a corporate career with raising a family, but true radicals, who called for the destruction of both the nuclear family and capitalism.

The aftermath, when the revolution didn’t come (as it also didn’t for Black, Latino, Indian, and queer radicals), left many activists devastated and depressed: women in feminist groups turned to “trashing” each other (a phenomenon briefly touched on in the film, but more thoroughly explored in this essay by Susan Faludi) and less well-known activists denounced (and even forcibly ejected) some of the early feminist “leaders” (like the Occupy movement, feminism was supposed to be “leaderless”).

While some women, like Marilyn Webb, are philosophical about being “trashed,” Shulamith Firestone (and undoubtedly many other less well-known women) never recovered from her “sisters'” betrayal. Firestone didn’t participate in feminist activism again (though she lived to be in her 60s), eventually developed severe mental illness, spent much time in psychiatric hospitals (documented in her novel Airless Spaces) and died alone and, for many days, undiscovered, in her cluttered apartment.

Angry makes us think that, except for a few isolated incidents like the one that Webb describes, and generational differences (which are mentioned only in passing), along with the tensions between queer women and straight ones in the movement (queer, white feminist activists Karla Jay and Rita Mae Brown narrate that conflict), feminism was one, big, happy family. In fact, even straight, white women who were bestselling superstars like Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique) and Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch) (though she is mainly known today as a transphobe, Greer was, at one time, a fascinating and provocative writer and thinker) had conflicts both in personality (dishily recorded in Greer’s later writing) and in their approach to feminism. In the film’s archival footage of the infamous Town Hall debate with literary blowhard and unrepentant anti-feminist Norman Mailer, Greer gets a laugh when, asked about “the sexual revolution,” she references the quote Gandhi gave when asked his thoughts on Western civilization: “‘I think it would be a good idea’.”

Also largely unexplored are tensions between women of color and white women in the movement, even though (or maybe because) those tensions still exist today. Although a few women of color are interviewed and featured in archival footage in Angry, their inclusion seems perfunctory. In the Q and A after the screening I attended the filmmakers were careful to emphasize that they could tell only so much of the story of early days of feminism (and that they wanted to mostly focus on the work of organizers), but the film seems to go out of its way not to mention prominent women of color of the time: Shirley Chisholm, the first woman, Black or white, to seek the Democratic nomination for US presidency (in 1972, right in the middle of other actions noted in the film); Angela Davis, then a leader in the Black Power movement; Dolores Huerta, leader (and organizer) of the mostly Latino farm workers union; and Alice Walker, one of the first women (of any color) to write bestselling and acclaimed works of fiction that were unapologetically womanist/feminist. Even if the filmmakers were trying to avoid material more thoroughly covered in other documentaries, the omission of these women–along with that of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer at the beginning, when white women speak about their own experiences in the civil rights movement and how “inspiring” they found the Black women within it–risks flinging this film into irrelevance. Keeping these women out of the discussion is as careless and puzzling as omitting mention of bell hooks, Roxane Gay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and even Beyoncé in an overview of feminism today.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry won an audience award for “Best Documentary” at The Independent Film Festival of Boston (where I saw it), but for the standing ovation I kept my butt in the seat. Although I see the importance of the film, and understand that we need many more films about second-wave feminism (what we really need is a detailed and multi-part series which covers these events, like the great Eyes on the Prize covered the civil rights movement), I was also a little bored and sleepy in parts, even though I’m interested–to the point of obsession–in the subject matter. The filmmakers said in the Q and A that they wanted to show, among other things, how to organize around issues, but we could learn as much about activism and organizing from the failures of the women’s movement as we can from its successes: a film with a less sunny outlook would have been a better one. “This is what a feminist looks like,” a crowd chants as we see examples of many different kinds of feminists in a present-day march. Next to those women, She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’s portrait of “This is what feminism looked like,” seems lacking.

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry opened in New York on Dec.5, will open in Los Angeles on Dec. 12 and will be open in other US cities from the rest of December through March. See http://www.shesbeautifulwhenshesangry.com/findascreening/ for more info.

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

___________________________________________________

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

‘It’s A Girl’: The Importance of the Reproductive Justice Framework

The framework of reproductive justice was conceptualized by Black women to be a much broader, more sophisticated analysis of the various factors beyond individual choice, encompassing race, socioeconomic status, disability, and other intersections of oppression and marginalization. A very clear illustration of the necessity for replacing the choice framework with the reproductive justice framework lies in the issue of sex-selective abortions.

Written by Max Thornton.

It’s easy to be seduced by the rhetoric of choice. We all want to believe we’re free agents, exercising our will with maximum autonomy. Who wants to be the product of social forces and discursive systems that circumscribe the very possibilities of your existence before you’re even born?

The reality is, though, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, every choice a person makes is radically delineated by a vast web of socioeconomic, political, cultural, and material influences. Systemic change, then, isn’t simply a matter of individuals making different choices; nuanced, contextually-sensitive analysis of the many forces at play is crucial.

Reproductive justice isn’t as simple as choice and can’t be reduced to being “pro-choice.” The framework of reproductive justice was conceptualized by Black women to be a much broader, more sophisticated analysis of the various factors beyond individual choice, encompassing race, socioeconomic status, disability, and other intersections of oppression and marginalization. A very clear illustration of the necessity for replacing the choice framework with the reproductive justice framework lies in the issue of sex-selective abortions.

Evan Grae Davis’ 2012 documentary, It’s A Girl, attempts to analyze some of the factors at work in the issue of sex-selective abortions in India and China. The film’s great strength is its clear divide of focus, to examine in turn the different contexts of India and China, showing how the same issue in both countries has a quite distinct matrix of causes.

Fun fact: if you google this movie, you find pro-life websites love it. Sigh. — Fun fact: if you Google this movie, you find pro-life websites love it. Sigh.

In India, a heteropatriarchal tradition has united with rampant capitalism to produce a context in which sons are financially valuable while daughters are an economic drain. The payment of dowries is technically illegal, but that hasn’t put an end to the cultural practice of the bride’s family paying the groom’s, sometimes quite extravagantly. Consequently there is immense social, cultural, and economic pressure on women to provide sons.

The limitations of the choice framework are abundantly clear when the film shows a rural Indian woman talking openly and unrepentantly about killing her own female newborns: it’s a choice she made, sure, but this choice was circumscribed by so many discursive and material circumstances, the combination of poverty and patriarchy that keeps women wholly dependent on their husbands, the entrenched devaluing of female life, the failure of law and government authorities to enforce the laws that exist… I can’t help comparing the many women in the US who abort fetuses because they would be born with disabilities. Again, this is a choice they make, and it is (or should be) absolutely the pregnant person’s decision whether or not to continue being pregnant; however, it is a choice enacted in a cultural milieu that considers disabled lives not worth living, an economic milieu that treats disabled lives as a burden, a political milieu in which healthcare is so precarious that many families lack the resources to care for children with disabilities.

Similarly, in India there are very many factors at play, and the film might have benefited from engaging a critique of a few more of them, such as the compulsory heterosexuality and cissexism of treating every infant as though its birth-assigned sex will dictate its entire life course, and the unchecked capitalism that exacerbates the issue.

In China, the situation is quite different. The end result – sons are valuable, daughters are a drain – is the same, but the equation that leads to this result is not heteropatriarchal tradition plus capitalism, but heteropatriarchal tradition plus government control of reproduction. The one-child policy has been in place since 1979, with an exception for rural families whose first child is female – they can try again for a boy. Women who are found to be pregnant illegally face forced abortion and forced sterilization. (Again, I found myself irresistibly drawing comparisons closer to home, this time to the anti-abortion lobby in the US and its campaign to recriminalize abortion, perhaps willfully ignorant of the fact that forced birth is just as dystopian a violation as forced abortion.)

It’s A Girl is particularly strong in its analysis of China’s situation, both its roots and its ramifications. For example, the “gendercide” against female infants has resulted in a generation whose males vastly outnumber its women, and this has led to a spike in sex trafficking and the kidnapping of child brides. Concurrently, there is a young sub-society of undocumented children, who were born illegally and have no official existence and thus no access to healthcare, schooling, passports, and other benefits of citizenship.

Special mention of this supercool woman, who rescued an abandoned infant and who I want to be friends with.

A perfect film would perhaps have committed to a fuller analysis. At 64 minutes, this documentary runs a little short, and could easily have found time for a discussion of, say, the impact of globalization – which might have mitigated the occasional moment of awful hypocrisy and paternalism, such as the one interviewee who outright indicts these countries by comparison with (I paraphrase slightly) “countries where women are fully equal.” (Tell us more, Sam Harris.) Nonetheless, overall It’s A Girl is a solid popular introduction to a fraught topic, and not a bad entrypoint into thinking through reproductive justice issues with nuance and complexity.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax. The event where he saw this film was kind of weird, but he made a cool new friend. Hi, Lillian!

‘Mission Blue’: “No Ocean, No Us”

When characters on TV shows or in feature films encounter “a scientist,” that person is usually a man. The rare times when actresses play scientists in mainstream films, they’re more likely to be a punchline than a real character, like Denise Richards in the James Bond film ‘The World Is Not Enough.’ Audiences have to look to documentaries like ‘Particle Fever’ (released earlier this year) about the discovery of the Higgs boson, to see women scientists in prominent roles on film. The new Netflix documentary ‘Mission Blue’ focuses on one woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, a former chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pioneering oceanographer and marine biologist who is on a quest to save the world’s oceans from dying.

When characters on TV shows or in feature films encounter “a scientist,” that person is usually a man. The rare times when actresses play scientists in mainstream films, they’re more likely to be a punchline than a real character, like Denise Richards in the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough. Audiences have to look to documentaries like Particle Fever (released earlier this year), about the discovery of the Higgs boson, to see women scientists in prominent roles on film. The new Netflix documentary Mission Blue focuses on one woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, a former chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pioneering oceanographer and marine biologist who is on a quest to save the world’s oceans from dying.

If that last sentence seems like an exaggeration, you should probably see this film. Earle, now 79, has been scuba diving as part of her research for the past 60 years (where she got her undergrad degree was one of the first places to adopt this “new” technology) and has seen firsthand the destruction that pollution and overfishing have wrought–even in areas “in the middle of nowhere” we (and she) think might be unaffected. She points out plastic bags and bottles she encounters on the ocean floor along with long stretches of dead coral and hardly any fish in places where both previously flourished.

She asks, “”How can we use the ocean and not use it up?” She’s not afraid to take on the fishing industry, describing her stint at NOAA: “I went to one meeting of the fisheries council. And I was never allowed to go again.” When she warned of the (still) impending extermination of bluefin tuna (because of overfishing) she earned the nickname, “The Sturgeon General.” She resigned from her government position so she could further ocean conservation without being tethered by politics.

SylviaWhaleSharkBlue — Sylvia with a whale shark

We also hear of Earle’s own journey first as a child allowed to explore, alone and for hours at a time, the wild places around her home (as few children now get the chance to do) and later her career as a scientist. She is careful to include herself when she says repeatedly that no one foresaw the depletion of a resource–the ocean and its inhabitants–that seemed too vast for human beings to impact. But now Earle says, “No ocean, no life. No ocean, no us.”

MissionBlueFish — We see the ocean in this film as a living thing.

Earle became a scientist before second-wave feminism, when hardly any women entered that profession and we see in the media coverage of her accomplishments (when she was often the first or only woman but usually called a “girl”), the sexism of the era, which she undoubtedly encountered on the job as well. But the film’s co-director and interviewer Fisher Stevens (yes, the same one who acted in films like Short Circuit–but more recently was a producer for The Cove) doesn’t ask about these instances, only gushes about how “beautiful” she was. Earle is polite to him, but, at 79, she might be wondering when she will finally be excused from the unofficial beauty pageant all women are subjected to.

This film could use more women. We barely see Earle interacting with other women scientists or divers in Blue (except very briefly in Australia and in vintage footage of her time as part of an all-woman team of researchers) though many more women are in the field now than when she started her career. Not enough women are behind the scenes either: the film was directed and written by men. When we consider Earle is not just a scientific pioneer, but also writes books about ocean conservation for the general public (including one released to coincide with this documentary—as well as children’s books) and is an effective enough speaker for lay audiences that she won a substantial monetary award as part of TED Talks, the omission of her from the film’s writing team is baffling. If her own writing had been included some elements, like a casual mention of the acidification of the ocean (thanks to carbon dioxide emissions) might have been better explained.

A better film might have tied in Earle’s past status as an outsider (when she was one of the few women in her field) and rebel (in not conforming to the ’50s and ’60s cultural expectations of what a wife and mother should be) to her current role as an environmentalist. When we see (in graphic footage) gleeful fisherman cutting the fins off living sharks and then dumping their mutilated bodies into the ocean to die, we can’t help thinking that this boys’ club gives its members permission to behave badly–as most boys’ clubs do. Because she’s never been one of the boys, Earle can see their cruelty–and its consequences–more clearly: she even films a fishing boat “vacuuming” up its catch–from the vantage point of the fish.

In spite of its flaws, Blue is well worth seeing–and succeeded in making me want to try scuba diving. Some of the shots in the film seem more magical than the brightly colored, hologram illustrations in my childhood copy of The Little Mermaid. As Stevens accompanies Earle through storybook seascapes I thought, “This is the ‘beauty’ he should be gushing over.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1wp2MQCsfQ”]

___________________________________

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.

‘She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry’: An Incomplete Portrait of The Women’s Movement

When the young, hippie-ish movie star Shailene Woodley said in an interview that she wasn’t a feminist, a lot of women pointed out that she didn’t seem to know what feminism was. Perhaps Woodley and other women of her generation (she is 22) don’t know what feminism is for the same reason fish don’t know what water is–because it’s all around them and has been for the entirety of their lives.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LweMAgcY1Pw”]

___________________________________________________

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

“I Believe ‘Anita'”

Women and girl characters in film (and the plays and works of literature films are based on) lie a lot. I don’t mean that they tell an occasional (or not so occasional) untruth, the way male characters often do. I mean that the role of a woman or girl in the movie can many times be summed up as “the liar.” The student in ‘The Children’s Hour’, the girl in ‘Atonement’, the girl in ‘The Hunt’, the two teenagers in ‘Wild Things’ the Demi Moore character in ‘Disclosure’ are all liars who disrupt the lives of those around them, usually men, whom they falsely accuse of sexual misconduct or abuse. The men are, of course, always completely innocent of the charges.

Women and girl characters in film (and the plays and works of literature films are based on) lie a lot. I don’t mean that they tell an occasional (or not so occasional) untruth, the way male characters often do. I mean that the role of a woman or girl in a movie can many times be summed up as “the liar.” The student in The Children’s Hour, the girl in Atonement, the girl in The Hunt, the two teenagers in Wild Things, the Demi Moore character in Disclosure are all liars who disrupt the lives of those around them, usually men, whom they falsely accuse of sexual misconduct or abuse. The men are, of course, always completely innocent of the charges.

This scenario is the opposite of the common real life situation, in which a woman or girl lies (or pretends nothing is wrong) when she has been raped, sexually abused or sexually harassed. She doesn’t bring charges. She tries to function as if the rape, abuse or harassment hasn’t occurred and decides not to disrupt her own family or career by calling public attention to what has happened to her. Those stories we pretty much never see played out in film.

Unless that film is Anita, the new documentary from Oscar-winner Freida Lee Mock about Anita Hill, the woman who came forward during the confirmation hearings, over 20 years ago, for Clarence Thomas as Supreme Court Justice. Thomas had sexually harassed Hill when he was her boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency that is supposed to implement Federal laws against discrimination, including sexual harassment. She had never pressed charges and had even kept a professional relationship with Thomas (for the sake of her career) after moving on from the EEOC. But when officials were interviewing his former coworkers and assistants for a background check, Hill felt she had to tell the truth.

The FBI file that contained Hill’s private interview was leaked to the press. Women politicians and reporters were outraged that the Senate had been prepared to confirm Thomas without looking into his past conduct, so hearings were called in which Hill was subpoenaed to testify in person. We see the media following her with cameras and lights even before her appearance in the Senate, as she makes her way across the University of Oklahoma campus where she was a tenured law professor. “I just want to teach my class,” she tells them. In a humorous moment that didn’t make it into the news stories of the time she mentions what was then her legal specialty. “I can answer any questions you have about contracts.”

The Senate committee grilled her for hours at a time over the course of days, but Hill never lost her composure in spite of being forced to repeat, on national live television, the explicit details of Thomas’s harassment, which included references to pornography and his own anatomy. The excerpts of the hearing are the most striking part of the film, and the documentary could use more of them.

ThomasHillAnita — Thomas and Hill when they worked at the EEOC

The Republicans on the committee (we see some particularly despicable moments from Alan Simpson and Arlen Spector), eager to confirm Thomas, portray Hill as a liar. These old white men do their best to denigrate her, and although the footage of the hearings shows that they never succeeded in diminishing her clear-eyed, precise testimony, they did succeed, in the off-camera arena, in diminishing her reputation.

The film shows, so we don’t forget, that Hill’s testimony was confirmed by four others whom she had told about the harassment at the time it was occurring. They gave their sworn testimony in front of live national television and one of them, another African American woman even mentions why Hill had kept in touch with Thomas, “My mother always told me, as I’m sure her mother told her, that wherever you leave, make sure you leave friends there, because you never know when you will need them.” She goes on to detail that for this very reason she exchanges Christmas cards with former colleagues she can’t stand.

The film also includes the information that Thomas had harassed other women in the workplace, at least one of whom was also subpoenaed, but mysteriously never called to testify. In the live question and answer period after the showing I attended, Hill explicitly blamed now Vice President, then Judiciary Committee Chair, Joe Biden, for this decision. She explained the “he said, she said” narrative the committee wanted to put forth would have been disrupted if more than one woman had offered testimony of how Thomas had harassed her.

Because of the all-white membership of the committee, Thomas could get away, in his own testimony, with labeling the hearings “a high tech lynching” (the folly of that description is pointed out in the film by the male African American corporate lawyer whose testimony confirmed Hill’s) while ignoring that Hill too was African American. Hill sums up this narrative as “I had a gender. He had a race.”

Hill always had the support of her large (she is one of 13 children), close family. In another clip that never made its way into the news stories of the time, we see her 79-year-old mother giving her a hug at the Senate hearing witness table and stand beside her outside of her family home back in Oklahoma, when the media ask for a statement on Thomas’s confirmation. Dignified as always, Hill tells them that she hopes her testimony will encourage other women to speak up about harassment in their own workplaces.

In spite of her tenured position at The University of Oklahoma, Hill felt the pressure from local Republican politicians (who targeted not just her, but also went after the Dean and the institution itself) to resign and eventually moved across the country to a position at Brandeis University where she is now at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She also travels around the country lecturing on sexual harassment, which, she points out, she wouldn’t have felt free to do if she had stayed at the University of Oklahoma. We see that Hill even has a supportive, long term boyfriend. Although the footage of this part of her life is less dramatic than that of the testimony I understand why the director includes it. After people in her own hometown angrily confronted Hill on the street about her testimony, after famously being called “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” (by a writer who later recanted though the slander lives on), in spite of Thomas being confirmed and sitting on the court to this day when even Hill’s lawyer’s 12-year-old daughter told her Dad, “I believe Anita,” and in spite of politicians and courts still explicitly or implicitly labeling women as liars when they seek justice against powerful men, we need to see at least one happy ending–to give the rest of us the fortitude to continue fighting.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGrWaCCVfq0″]

___________________________________________________

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