Documentary – Page 9 – Bitch Flicks

‘Alias Ruby Blade’: A Story of Love and Revolution, With Not Quite Enough Ruby Blade

Alias Ruby Blade poster

Written by Leigh Kolb

Alias Ruby Blade, which makes its North American debut this week at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, is a documentary about “love and revolution.”

The subject of the film, Kirsty Sword Gusmão, grew up in Australia. She had an “ordinary childhood,” but she says her “parents were very special in that they had their eyes open to the world.”

When she was 4, her father studied Indonesian, and she would study the language with him. She studied Indonesian and began reading Inside Indonesia, which inspired her to get involved in political activism, especially in regard to East Timor.

Watch the trailer here

Sword Gusmão’s story is remarkable, and her life’s work has been driven by her passion for human rights. When she started reading Inside Indonesia, she says “I tried to find out where it was published–how I could get involved.” So she did. She wrote and edited for the publication and met political leaders.

Sword Gusmão, alias Ruby Blade, looks out over East Timor.

She traveled to East Timor, posing as a tourist, and she worked to get messages sent abroad, translating texts into English, taking documentary footage and collecting photographs from the Timorese people. It was then that she was first given photographs of Kay Rala “Xanana” Gusmão, a rebel leader in East Timor who had a jungle hideout and who was “worshipped” by many Timorese people, including her friends. Sword Gusmão next traveled to East Timor as part of a documentary filmmaking team. The team’s footage was the first time worldwide media broadcasted the violence and human rights abuses in East Timor at the hands of their Indonesian occupiers.

Sword Gusmão eventually became a spy and courier in Indonesia between freedom fighters and Timorese political prisoners.

Xanana Gusmão was captured and sentenced to life in prison. “All of a sudden the leader was in the hands of the enemies,” Sword Gusmão remembers. Her alias through all of her covert work? Ruby Blade.

She began playing an active role in taking documents and interviews in and out of the prison. Xanana was still directing the resistance from prison. Sword Gusmão was a “critical link” during this time.

Eventually a relationship between the two grew. She says there was “a sense of shared life together,” although they were clearly in “unorthodox circumstances.” When they finally met face-to-face, she recalls a strong bond.

Through all of this, Sword Gusmão was risking her life for the sake of revolution and, eventually, love.

The film captures these early days of resistance in East Timor and the relationship between Xanana and Sword Gusmão while he was in prison. Sword Gusmão herself had taken a great deal of documentary footage during her work, which provided a backdrop for the chronology of her story.

Sword Gusmão received bonsai trees and tropical fish from Gusmão when he was a prisoner.

The film does an incredible job at documenting the East Timor’s fight for independence from Indonesia. The human rights abuses (almost 200,000 Timorese people died of famine or murder during Indonesia’s rule from 1975 – 1999) and struggle for independence happened just in the last few decades, yet this isn’t a story that is as well-known as it should be.

But Kirsty Sword Gusmão doesn’t seem to be the protagonist in the film, even though her alias is the title, and her photo is on the poster. Of course, director Alex Meillier acknowledged this: “We’re playing with genres in the film, spy story, love story, three-act structure. This isn’t about one hero coming to save the day, but people coming together and throwing their lot in together. There’s a lot to celebrate.”

This is true–there is a lot to celebrate in this story. East Timor votes for independence. The UN helps them transition to be an independent state. Xanana Gusmão is elected president. He and Kirsty Sword get married and have three sons.

There is a happy ending, and the audience sees it all through collected and pieced-together footage.

However, it feels as if there is more to Sword Gusmão’s story. While much of the footage is hers, it makes sense that she reads letters aloud that she received from Xanana, and that she has pictures of herself over the years. Too often, it seems as if her beauty is the subject of her story. Male activists and leaders note how they “used” her for covert operations (they say she was “pretty” and “proper in her manners”; she was “very refined, elegant–who would think she can be mischievous?”). Film footage of her swimming doesn’t seem to fit, except in concert with commentary on her beauty.

Her beauty and femininity likely were key in allowing her access to some of the situations she was able to navigate. True.

But she got there herself. Sword Gusmão begins the documentary speaking about how she’s taken opportunities in her life that have been risky, and how she wants to act with her conscience and truth–she enjoys the risks. This Kirsty seems to be swept away, though, by the revolution and Xanana, so that she’s absorbed by something much larger, and her agency and power in the story fades. The risk that drives her is muted.

Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to celebrate too much and lost some of Ruby Blade in the process.

Sword Gusmão’s activism didn’t end when she became the first lady. She started and runs Alola, a foundation to help women and children in the country, and is active in the educational system. The risks on her and her family’s lives have not ended. Her struggles and her triumphs were not as highlighted as they could have been.

Alias Ruby Blade is a stunning documentary that will do great work in educating people about not only the revolution in East Timor but also the powerful effect that individuals can have when they work toward justice–this, it seems, is definitely the filmmakers’ goal (husband and wife team Alex Meillier and Tanya Ager Meillier say, “… we are even more interested in the power of ordinary people to change the course of history. That’s what this film is really about”).

The film was featured in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in March and the IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam). Tribeca granted it the 2012 Spotlighting Women Documentary Award.

As a feminist film viewer, I would have loved to see “Ruby Blade” herself more–and perhaps this story has the potential to inspire a Hollywood blockbuster with a powerful female protagonist. Let’s hope, at least. It could be Eat, Pray, Love: Bitches Get Shit Done Edition. We need to see what we’re capable of, and Kirsty Sword Gusmão is one strong example.

———-

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

What Peggy Olson From ‘Mad Men’ Teaches Us That Sheryl Sandberg Doesn’t by Michelle Dean via The Nation

‘The Host’: Less Anti-Feminist than Twilight, but Hardly a Sisterhood Manifesta by Natalie Wilson via Ms. Magazine Blog

Five Striking Similarities Between Elisabeth Moss’ Roles on ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Top of the Lake’ by Beth Hanna via Thompson on Hollywood

Why Do “Good Girls” Need To “Go Bad?” by Yoonj Kim via Bitch Magazine Blog

Reel Women: On Inappropriate Reactions from the Audience and Where Responsibility Lies by Britt Hayes via Screen Crush

[Amplify] True Colors: Documentary Film Featuring LGBT Youth of Color in Love, Friendship, and Theater! via QWOC Media

Read Our Review and Watch a Clip of New Documentary ‘Free Angela [Davis] and All Political Prisoners by Randall Jenson via Bitch Media

Are Female-Led Blockbusters Finally Here to Stay? by Mark Harrison via Den of Geek

What have you been reading or writing this week?? Tell us in the coments!

Shut Up and Sing: The Dixie Chicks Controversy Ten Years Later

Movie poster for Shut Up and Sing

This is a guest post by Kerri French.

This month marks ten years since Natalie Maines made her infamous statement during a packed Dixie Chicks gig at Shepherd’s Bush in London, acknowledging the recent events pointing to the United States’ imminent invasion of Iraq by saying “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” Two days later, the latter part of her statement was quoted in the British newspaper The Guardian and soon picked up by the Associated Press, grabbing headlines across the US. While the Dixie Chicks initially tried to downplay Maines’ comment in the hopes that the controversy would blow over, it quickly became evident that there was no turning back from the stand they had taken.

Targeted by the right-wing group Free Republic, their number one single quickly fell down the charts, album sales dropped, and radio stations refused to play their music. Faced with boycotts throughout their summer tour and the possibility of losing corporate sponsorships, Maines and sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Robison quickly realized that the issue could not be easily swept away and chose instead to embrace the controversy, framing it as a free speech issue that they would not back down from. They found themselves further faced with harassment, vandalism, and threats of violence, serving as an example to the rest of the country as to what can happen when you choose to express an unpopular opinion.

The Dixie Chicks messing around on stage

Throughout this time and for the three years following, filmmakers Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck documented the band’s reaction and response to the treatment they faced following their 2003 statement. Alternating between footage filmed immediately after the 2003 controversy and two years later as the Dixie Chicks were writing and recording Taking the Long Way, their 2006 album that served as a response to the backlash they experienced throughout their Top of the World tour, Shut Up and Sing highlights the ways in which the band was forced to reconsider not only how they presented themselves as artists but what kind of music they now wanted to create. Maines, Maguire, and Robison take on the task of writing an entire album of songs for the first time, using many of the songs as a way to reflect on and respond to the hostility, threats, and pressure that surrounded them several years prior. As Kopple and Peck show the band preparing to promote the new album, it becomes evident that the 2003 controversy has become a part of the band’s identity, even three years later when Maines’ actual words have been forgotten by most. Refusing to apologize for what they believe in became deeply embedded into who they were, unable to be separated from the discussions of how best to introduce the music industry and fans to the band’s move away from a more straightforward country sound that now incorporated rock and pop influences. Maines in particular seemed hesitant to introduce their new sound and songs too quickly, wanting to be more cautious than Maguire and Robison out of fear of the backlash the band could experience all over again. The documentary offers a very real glimpse into not only how three musicians balance their career with their beliefs, but also how they deal with the emotional aftermath of all that they are up against.

The Dixie Chicks on Entertainment Weekly

What is most impressive, however, is the way Kopple and Peck use the documentary to capture the bond and friendship among three women facing enormous pressure in an industry that refuses to reward women for being true to themselves. Despite countless questioning from the press over how Maguire and Robison feel regarding Maines’ statement, the band continues to think of themselves as a “we” and Maguire and Robison’s support of Maines is unwavering. Indeed, the band doesn’t back away from the controversy that the statement created, refusing to cater to a fan base and industry that showed them so much hostility. The film highlights the band’s anger in conversations filmed backstage during their 2003 tour, with each member arguing with longtime manager Simon Renshaw over what constitutes a radio ban, insisting that they have done nothing wrong and have no reason to show remorse or ask for a second chance. The connection between these three women appears to only grow stronger the more they embrace their newfound political roles as advocates for free speech. In one poignant moment, the documentary shows Maguire tearfully stating that Maines still blames herself for what happened, despite Maguire’s insistence that it was the best thing that could have happened to their careers. She continues, stating that she would give up her career if that is what Maines needs. Their 2006 studio album has, in fact, proven to be their last; despite brief reunions to play a handful of concerts together, the band has headed in different directions, with Robison and Maguire forming the duo Court Yard Hounds while Maines is set to release a solo album with a decidedly more rock focus in May.

The Dixie Chicks singing the National Anthem

Watching the documentary so many years later, it is hard not to wonder why these three women’s actions in particular so enraged the country. The Dixie Chicks were certainly not the most outspoken celebrities to speak out against the war, yet theirs is the controversy that will ultimately be remembered from that time. Was it more shocking that three country musicians could be politically and socially liberal? Admittedly, it probably came as no shock that Sean Penn and Tim Robbins were against the war, but even liberal Americans must have been surprised that it was the Dixie Chicks of all artists who managed to stir up such strong feelings about patriotism and the war.

Still, the question arises whether these three women were punished so harshly because they were country artists whose opinions went against the grain of a large percentage of their fan base or because they were women who dared to have an opinion. Would a male country artist expressing antiwar sentiment have been met with radio bans and death threats? The behavior of male country artists, after all, is often excused or even glorified with their “rebel” persona; it’s all well and good for male musicians to be loud and outspoken but when a woman dares express an opinion outside of what middle America believes, she not only puts her career at risk but exposes herself to harassment and discrimination from fellow musicians, the country music industry, and all of its fans.

Fans unite in support of The Dixie Chicks

And harassment and discrimination is the only way to fairly describe what happened to the Dixie Chicks in the wake of their 2003 statement against the President. Not only did Clear Channel Communications strike the group from country radio station playlists, the uproar from fans wanting all of their CDs bulldozed was nothing short of a modern day witch-hunt. Metal detectors were installed at their shows throughout the summer and a police escort was needed that July when the FBI revealed knowledge of a death threat against Maines in Dallas. Fellow country artist Toby Keith, branding Maines a “big mouth,” began using a doctored photo of Maines with Saddam Hussein as a backdrop at his concerts while singing “You’ll be sorry that you messed with the U. S. of A. / We’ll put a boot in your ass / It’s the American way”—an act that he was never reprimanded for, despite the use of Maines’ image serving as nothing but pure incitement of hatred and violence against a woman who dares hold her own political opinions. The irony, of course, is that it was the Dixie Chicks, not Toby Keith, who had to worry about their tour sponsorship deal falling through when Lipton sent in a PR consultant to discuss whether the company felt they could go forward with the relationship after the band’s “brand” had been tarnished.

The Dixie Chicks sweep the 2007 Grammy Awards

Ten years on, the very conservative demographic who demonized Maines for expressing her disapproval of President Bush and the war are now the ones saying far worse about President Obama. Maines’ statement seems absolutely uneventful in comparison, so much so that the country’s response to her words is near comical when viewed now. Still, the documentary serves as a reminder that the way these three women were treated was anything but comical; it is clear that under the right political circumstances, political groups and corporations can exert enormous pressure on those who choose to express an unpopular opinion. It is especially fitting, then, when the Dixie Chicks return to Shepherd’s Bush in London at the end of the documentary to promote their new album and Maines jokes that she would like to say something the audience hasn’t already heard before and then goes on to say, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” This time around, the comment wasn’t met with protests and boycotts; the band was instead rewarded in early 2007 when they swept the Grammy Awards by winning all five categories for which they were nominated. In the end, the Dixie Chicks committed themselves to remaining true to who they were no matter the professional, financial, or personal cost—something an audience has rarely heard before, indeed.

The Dixie Chicks perform “Not Ready to Make Nice” at the 2007 Grammy Awards Ceremony

Kerri French is a poet whose writing has been featured on Sirius Satellite Radio and published in Barrow Street, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, Sou’wester, Waccamaw, Barrelhouse, Best New Poets 2008, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, among others. A North Carolina native, she currently lives in Cambridge, England.

#SheDocs Online Film Festival: Watch Acclaimed Documentaries for Free Throughout March

#SheDocs, an online film festival showcasing the “best independent documentaries that tell the stories of women and girls defying odds and rising to leadership positions throughout history,”will be streaming ten online documentaries for free throughout the month of March in celebration of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day.

The public media campaign Women and Girls Lead launched the film festival to educate and inspire audiences.

The following films will be available at #SheDocs through March 31 (synopses from #SheDocs):

MAKERS: Women Who Make America by Dyllan McGee
More than 1000 interviews chronicle the unforgettable women who have shaped America in the fields of arts, politics, business, sports and science over the last 50 years.

Chahinaz: What Rights for Women? by Samia Chala and Patrice Barrat
Chahinaz, a 20-year-old Algerian student, embarks on a voyage of self-discovery as she investigates what life is like for women in other Muslim countries and around the world and why things are slow to change in Algeria.

I Was Worth 50 Sheep by Nima Sarvestani
Sabere was just 10 years old when she was sold to a man in his fifties. For the next six years she was both slave and wife, miscarrying four times. Now 16, she is fighting for her freedom.

Patsy Mink: Ahead of the Majority by Kimberlee Bassford
A look at the life of Patsy Mink, the first Asian American woman and woman of color in the United States Congress.

Solar Mamas by Mona Eldaief and Jehane Noujaim
Jordanian wife and mother Rafea is leaving home for the first time — to attend a college in India that is training rural women to become solar energy engineers.

Strong! by Julie Wyman
Weightlifter Cheryl Haworth struggles to defend her champion status as her lifetime weightlifting career inches towards its inevitable end.

We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân by Anne Makepeace
Indomitable linguist Jessie Little Doe spurs the return of the Wampanoag language, the first time a language with no native speakers for many generations has been revived in this country.

Welcome to the World by Brian Hill
Welcome to the World asks: Is it worse to be born poor than to die poor? This film looks at child and maternal mortality as indicators of poverty in the U.S., Cambodia, and Sierra Leone.

When I Rise by Mat Hames, James Moll, and Michael Rosen
When I Rise is about Barbara Smith Conrad, a gifted University of Texas music student who finds herself at the epicenter of racial controversy, struggling against the odds and ultimately ascending to the heights of international opera.

Women, War & Peace by Abigail Disney, Gini Reticker, and Pamela Hogan
Women, War & Peace, a five-part PBS mini-series, is a global media initiative on the roles of women in peace and conflict.

Read more at Ms. blog, Women and Girls Lead and #SheDocs, where you can watch all of the films.

—

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

2013 Oscar Week: Academy Documentaries: People’s Stories, Men’s Voices

Guest post written by Jo Custer.

The lifecycle of documentaries aspiring to global visibility begins each year at Sundance mid-January and ends in December when Oscar nomination voting begins. Of the five nominated this year, four premiered quietly at Robert Redford’s House of Docs, while The Gatekeepers — a series of interviews with former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s NSA and CIA in one — slipped into the running even more quietly via Telluride, after its Jerusalem debut.

Film writers often tout the launching success of the year’s first Academy qualifying festival and can even present bias which may be attributable to the competition structure, as the Wall Street Journal did when it printed that Kirby Dick’s expose on the treatment of military rape victims, The Invisible War, would be one to watch but overlooked How to Survive a Plague, David France’s long, slow grip on the fight to normalize healthcare for AIDS victims. Both nominees were in the U.S. documentary competition. Only one of the WSJ‘s picks for Sundance-projected success came from the world cinema documentary competition, and it wasn’t Searching for Sugarman, Malik Bendjelloul’s bizarre tale of a Detroit singer/songwriter who recorded two flop albums and then quietly became a demi-god in apartheid-era South Africa. Nor was it 5 Broken Cameras, in which Guy Davidi chronicles Palestinian Emad Burnat’s inability to keep a camera operational in the suffocating presence of the Israeli Army.

Without conflating the already hard to separate issues of press-generated success vs. Oscar-generated success, this year’s most monetarily rewarding mark of honor has drawn five films. That’s five films from a pool that increases yearly at a hard-to-measure growth rate. When Sundance first created the House of Docs in 1999, theatrical releases of non-fiction films represented less than two percent of all releases, according to figures collected from Box Office Mojo. Since 2001 non-fiction theatrical releases have grown, sometimes doubling or tripling in a year until in 2011 documentaries comprised 18% of all films released.

Coinciding with the growing interesting in non-narrative film, there has been a noticeable uptick in women documentarians as well. Dozens can be found in lists of 2012 docs to watch that didn’t make the Oscar list, including Amy Berg (West of Memphis), Alison Klayman (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry), Katie Dellamaggiore (Brooklyn Castle), Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles), Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Detropia, Jesus Camp), Susan Froemke (ESCAPE FIRE: The Fight to Rescue American Health Care), and Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush (Finding North). U.S. women represented fifty percent of documentarians at Sundance last year while international women documentarians were outnumbered eleven to four.

Disregarding for a moment whatever else the relationship between these numbers might suggest, two things continue to happen. First, despite the rise in the number of docs which garner theatrical releases, their box office revenues remain low, short-term. Second, the one body with the power to make a filmmaker’s career in the short term — the Academy — continues to play it safe in its selection of documentaries to bring into the limelight. What makes this year’s lineup incredibly hard to argue against isn’t the documentaries themselves, but rather what they represent: a carefully balanced melange of social justice issues, most of which effect women, but all of which were brought about by the storytelling devices of men.

The Invisible War

The most salient of these to American audiences, Kirby Dick, took on the U.S. military in The Invisible War, in defense of thousands of rape victims across all branches who are silenced far more often than their offenders are brought to justice. Dick began his David vs. Goliath track record with This Film Is Not Yet Rated, taking on the MPAA with an honesty that everyone but the ratings body itself cared about. According to the action kicker just before the credits, Defense Secretary Leon Pannetta disallowed commanding officers to govern processing for rape victims two days after seeing the film, which notes that officers aren’t just getting away with rape but learning how to maneuver the justice system before returning to civilian life with no record of being a sex offender. Hard-hitting and hard to watch, the film seems to have done part of its job. Perhaps more importantly to the Academy, it is the token women’s film this year. Not all victims of military rape are female, of course, but this was the year of the War On Women. Apparently, Kirby Dick’s take on that will serve as our commemoration.

How to Survive a Plague

Perhaps less salient — if only because memories are short — David France’s long-suffering piecing together of how gay men and lesbians banded together under a retired chemist and housewife to learn about AIDS and how to fight it rings truer to its subjects’ voices. Opening in “Year 6 of the Epidemic” in Greenwich Village, the epicenter of the plague, it tells the story the networks kept from the news each night of Reagan’s presidency. There were no drugs to treat the disease. People were being turned away. It was nearly one hundred percent fatal. People who were dying anyway laid down in the streets to protest and be arrested and went the opposite way of the closet eventually — away from the black market and into the realm of FDA tested, prescribable drugs. Archival footage from dozens of sources make this authentic look at what it means to be an activist layered but also fatiguing, as though France wants the viewer to feel the malaise of too many years of dying and not nearly enough justifying. Just as notable, the camera never gets too close to the women. It’s a men’s story, in the end.

Searching for Sugarman

Another absorbing and visceral man’s story is Searching for Sugarman, which surprises and delights in its juxtaposition of two very different climes — Detroit in 1968 – 1971 and South Africa at the height of apartheid. The “Sugarman” of interest is none other than Rodriguez, whose career never really got out of the studio in North America. But his first album made its way to South Africa and got copied and redistributed and bought in such demand that he became, according to figures in the film, bigger than Elvis or The Rolling Stones. His music inspired a censorship sick society to rally behind music and a movement that eventually won. Filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul left Sweden to globe-trot and stumbled across the Rodriguez story while in South Africa. Considering how uplifting the storytelling is, he chose well.

5 Broken Cameras

In 5 Broken Cameras, Guy Davidi remains the silent silent director while Emad Burnat tells the story of his life in Palestine since the Israelis began encroaching actively upon his community and house and life. Showing footage from each of Emad’s cameras interstitially but linearly, it attempts to avoid the macrocosm argument of whose land it is by focusing on the microcosm but never quite makes it. The Israeli Army demonstrates its displeasure with Palestine time and time again, tearing up olive trees and soil for no other reason than its being there. Its most effective moment comes in a little seen glimpse of Islamic married life, in which Emad’s wife, beyond tired of her husband’s preoccupation with the distance the lens gives him, yells at him to turn off the camera while she performs domestic duties, but he does not. He can’t, not even when he is placed under house arrest. He films himself doing nothing because filming is what he does. Very heavy on the imagery of Emad’s son, it is another man’s story — set on the most unstable ground in the world, and still often seen as the center of it.

The Gatekeepers

Almost as if to be fair to the uprooters of innocent olive trees, the Academy also nominated Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers, which I did not get a chance to see thanks to a limited release and a tight grip on screeners. It features interviews with six former heads (all men) of Shin Bet, the “unseen shield” of Israel — a far more authoritarian point of view than Emad’s.

It seems more than safe to say that the Academy may have been influenced politically to seek a balance in representing both sides of an ongoing conflict. But safety was ever the problem with this year’s documentary lineup: A “women’s issue” delivered by a well-respected man during the War on Women; a pleaser for the LGBTIQ community who showed up a little less strong in this year’s Presidential election, but still showed; a token non-issue entertainment piece that also happens to shine in its unusualness; and two pieces from the Middle East. Under Academy auspices, docs play like little more than complementary copy.

In case you were wondering, Sugarman has my bet for best doc of the year. As does women’s continuation to make social justice documentaries for almost no monetary return, but rather making names for themselves that will last. Hopefully it will rub off in the darker places, too.

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Jo Custer is a New Orleans writer/director/producer, theatre director, blogger and sometimes a journo. She has just finished auditions for her next short film, Sonuvabitch, gearing up to shoot this May and will also be directing The Four of Us for the stage this spring. You can follow her sojourns as a filmmaker/cab driver here: http://jocuster.wordpress.com/

2013 Oscar Week: Searching for Sugar Man Makes Race Invisible

Written by Robin Hitchcock

Rodriguez, the central figure of documentary Searching for Sugar Man

Searching for Sugar Man, considered the front-runner for Best Documentary Feature at the 85th Academy Awards this weekend, shares the unlikely story of Sixto Rodriguez, an obscure failed musician in the United States who became an icon on the other side of the planet in South Africa. Rodriguez is a figure of mystery to his fans, and urban legends bloom about his having committed suicide on stage. A group of fans seek out the truth in the 1990s, and find Rodriguez is alive, still living in poverty in Detroit, completely unaware that to a generation of South Africans, he’s a rock god.

It’s a fascinating stranger-than-fiction story that is heartwarming and inspiring: perfect subject matter for a documentary. And Searching for Sugar Man is undeniably well-crafted, building suspense and mystery in the first half of the film on the hunt for Rodriguez, yielding to a very satisfying emotional catharsis in the second half of the film, where we meet Rodriguez and his daughters and see his triumphant arrival in the land that adores him. The stand-in music videos for Rodriguez’s songs that pepper the film are gorgeous to look at and the songs themselves are a revelation. Searching for Sugar Man is an excellent film that has a huge problem: the invisibility of race.

Searching for Sugar Man is about white South Africans. This is not in of itself a problem. White South Africans have stories that deserve to be told. [I am a white American living in South Africa and I think you should hear me out, for example.] But race is an intrinsic part of any South African story, especially any apartheid-era South African story. And Searching for Sugar Man is barely interested in race. It presents white South Africans as synonymous with South Africans, which is an exceptionally outrageous instance of white cultural hegemony given this country’s very recent history of extreme racial oppression.

Stephen “Sugar” Segerman, one of the South African Rodriguez fans integral to solving the mystery of the musician’s fate, does qualify Rodriguez’s South African fans as the “white, liberal, middle-class,” but it’s a quick aside in one of many descriptions of Rodriguez’s South African ubiquity. We see how the white conservatives in the apartheid government responded to Rodriguez (by censoring his records and banning airplay). But at no point in Searching for Sugar Man do we hear from a black or coloured South African on Rodriguez (with the very small exception of a news broadcaster in archival footage). I wanted to know if Rodriguez’s influence made it outside the white bubble in apartheid-era South Africa, but Searching for Sugar Man wasn’t interested in telling me. Documentaries should not leave glaring questions unanswered.

Another South African blogger had the same curiosity, and asked a black friend about his memories of Rodriguez:

He replied that he had known of the artist, but only because he used to work in broadcasting. This short and interesting answer was essentially all I asked for; a black South African commenting on the fact that Rodriguez was virtually unknown or seemed to not have played a vital role in the lives of black South Africans. Not to prove that Rodriguez did not matter, but to acknowledge that though Rodriguez fan base was mainly white, it does not mean that black South Africans have nothing to contribute with in this particular and fascinating aspect of South Africa during apartheid. A story about Rodriguez would be incomplete without the mentioning of apartheid, and a story that talks about apartheid without including a black South African experience feels incomplete to me.

Searching for Sugar Man‘s treatment of apartheid is also limited to the white middle-class perspective. Rodriguez’s anti-establishment lyrics are said to have ignited political awakening in the white Afrikaner youth in South Africa. The white male Rodriguez fans elaborate: one saying Rodriguez’s song “The Establishment Blues” taught them the very concept of being “anti-establishment”, planting the idea that “it’s OK to protest against our society; to be angry against your society.”

Segerman adds, “Because we lived in a society where every means was used to prevent apartheid from coming to and end, this album somehow had in it lyrics that almost set us free, as oppressed peoples. Any revolution needs an anthem, and in South Africa, Cold Fact was the album that gave people permission to free their minds and to start thinking differently.”

South Africans protesting apartheid in the Soweto uprising of 1976.

While there is no doubt that the apartheid government was oppressive to all South Africans, I bristle at hearing a white man refer to himself and his Afrikaner friends as “oppressed peoples” in a film that doesn’t provide the context of how apartheid shaped the lives of people of color in South Africa. The anti-apartheid movement we see in Searching for Sugar Man is one of privileged white youth rebelling against the censorship and control of their ultra-conservative government; when the fight against apartheid was a life-and-death struggle for basic human rights and freedom for millions of black and coloured South Africans.

Searching for Sugar Man‘s narrow white perspective on apartheid-era South Africa is all the more troubling because Sixto Rodriguez is himself a person of color (Mexican and Native American) living in extreme poverty in Detroit. Clarence Avant, an African American record producer who worked with Rodriguez, is the first and only person in the documentary to suggest that Rodriguez’s race may have contributed to his commercial failure in the United States. Rodriguez does not appear to be concerned with material wealth, having given away most of the money he’s earned touring after his rediscovery in the late 1990s (Since the release of this documentary, Rodriguez has embarked on a world tour). But when one compares the urban blight Rodriguez sang about on his albums to the circumstances of many South Africans two decades after the end of apartheid, the omission of their story in this documentary is even more appalling.

I’m delighted that Searching for Sugar Man has helped expose Rodriguez’s fine music to a wider audience (including myself); and as a resident of South Africa it is nice to see this country have a worldwide cultural moment. I just wish that the documentary that achieved all this was more fully and honestly representative of South Africa and its history.

2013 Oscar Week: Acting Up: A Review of ‘How to Survive a Plague’

Guest post written by Diana Suber.

At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, I was a child and only vaguely aware of the crisis as hundreds of people, mostly young gay men at that time, were dying from an unknown virus with no cure in sight. As a teen in the late eighties and early nineties, I do remember seeing the “Silence = Death” posters, t-shirts, and buttons with the iconic pink triangle, but I realize now that I did not know the full scope of what it all meant. So I was intrigued to watch the documentary How to Survive a Plague directed by journalist David France. Nominated this year for an Oscar in the Best Documentary Feature category, How to Survive a Plague chronicles the organization ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and its offshoot TAG (Treatment Action Group) from 1987 to 1996 and these organizations’ dedicated efforts to pressure the United States government and other authorities to prioritize HIV/AIDS research and treatment and to approach the epidemic as a healthcare emergency and not merely an isolated scourge among homosexual men.

“Silence = Death”

The principal setting of the film is Greenwich Village, New York, considered to be “ground zero” of the HIV/AIDS activist movement, where activists meet to organize, having been motivated to stop their friends, family members, lovers, and themselves from dying. The film is rich in archival footage of ACT UP and TAG meetings, protests against the federal and local government and various agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and interviews with ACT UP and TAG activists at the forefront of the movement, including Peter Staley, Mark Harrington, and David Barr, just to name a few. Many of the activists featured in the film are white gay men; yet almost all of them attributed the long-term success of the movement to Dr. Iris Long, a straight woman and chemist, who gave the activists a crash course in drug testing protocols and working through the FDA/NIH bureaucracy. Other women activists featured in the film include Garance Franke-Ruta, Ann Northrop, and Dr. Ellen Cooper.

Director David France, who was a journalist at the time these events were unfolding, has said that his goal as a journalist and then as a filmmaker was to bear witness. Consequently, the film is a very detailed account of the power of grassroots activism. Not only did these activists–gay and straight, young and old, male and female, healthy and dying–use protest in the streets as a means of garnering attention to what activist and playwright Larry Kramer described as a plague that was killing hundreds of thousands, but they educated themselves and became experts on medical research, experts at navigating the bureaucracy of drug testing and drug approval protocols, experts on creating policies for the treatment of HIV/AIDS patients, experts at wrangling the media, and experts at placing pressure on key decision-makers in the FDA and NIH. The activists also partnered with and prodded drug companies to find and manufacture drugs to treat the disease. In fact, ACT UP and TAG’s open dialogue with scientists at pharmaceutical companies like Merck & Co. ultimately lead to the discovery of the combinations of protease inhibitors which have stopped HIV/AIDS from being a death sentence.

Although the movement was very successful, it was not without its drawbacks. Activists interviewed stated great disappointment when drugs for which they had advocated for and invested much time and resources did not ultimately work on the virus or its symptoms. Many activists did not survive to see the fruits of their labor realized. Indeed, a very poignant part of the film is when activists march to the White House, occupied at that time by President George H. W. Bush, and dump the ashes of their loved-ones on the lawn while yelling “Shame!” The documentary also explores some of the internal politics and strife that occurred within ACT-UP over the years as personalities clashed over the direction and focus of the movement. This strife led to a segment of ACT-UP leadership breaking off and forming TAG. Fortunately, neither organization allowed politics to derail their existence or the ultimate goal.

To his credit, France tempers the emotional frustration and urgency that permeates the film with moments of humor. One of my favorite scenes was footage of TAG activists placing a giant condom over the home of the late Senator Jesse Helms. And as I watched other archival footage of protesters with signs saying “Healthcare is a Right” scrolling across the screen, I was struck by how much the echoes of the past tend to reverberate in the present. The activists featured in this film — through their tireless work, their courage, and their deafening lack of silence — saved millions of lives. (The film states that more than 6 million lives have been saved since 1996 when the three-drug combination of protease inhibitors was identified as a viable treatment). But the fight is not over because there is still no cure for HIV/AIDS, the virus is still spreading worldwide especially among communities of color, and millions of people cannot afford and/or have no access to the life-prolonging drugs that are now available. And so the greatest take-away from How to Survive a Plague is the knowledge that silence is still not an option.

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Diana Suber is a movie-loving lawyer who lives in Atlanta. She writes movie reviews and other thoughts on film at her blog http://www.atlflickchick.com/.

2013 Oscar Week: ‘How to Survive a Plague’: When Aging Itself Becomes a Triumph

Guest post written by Ren Jender.

When the late Ed Koch, former mayor of New York City, saw How To Survive a Plague, journalist/director David France’s Oscar-nominated documentary about ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) New York, he wrote a review for his local neighborhood newspaper. The review was not just a rave but recommended the activists profiled receive Presidential Medals of Freedom! Koch didn’t mention those same people and many others spent much time (including a demonstration documented at the beginning of the film) protesting his administration’s criminally inadequate response to the AIDS crisis. Some of the people he praised in his review, including one of the founders of ACT UP, Larry Kramer, have called him a “murderer.”

Ed Koch image via Peter Staley, POZ Blogs

Koch is an extreme example of the mainstream’s counterintuitive embrace of this film in particular and ACT UP in general. Although we see video of hateful, reactionary Jesse Helms spewing venom toward the group from the floor of the U.S. Senate we would never know most mainstream (and even some of the gay press’) coverage of ACT UP actions, like the one disrupting a service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral (to protest the Catholic Church’s stance on safer sex) or the one shutting down the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — archival footage from both actions is part of the film– was far from laudatory.

Still, France’s overview, fortified by his work on AIDS issues in the gay press during the crisis years, is impressive even to those of us who were there. Though I never attended ACT UP meetings I took part in my city’s ACT UP demonstrations (“demos”), did safer sex outreach with ACT UP members and went to the huge Kennebunkport demo, shown in the film, where George H.W. Bush was hung in effigy.

In the beginning of Plague intertitles and footage of people with AIDS close to the end of their lives set the scene, then archival video (including interviews) from ACT UP’s own media collective takes over most of the narrative. We see a loud, crowded meeting of the group where an action is planned and then the action itself, ending with activists being carted off one-by-one, screaming chants all the way to the police wagon. The film captures in this demonstration and the ones it shows later the camaraderie, exuberance and carnival-like atmosphere of ACT UP’s brand of activism, so necessary in an epidemic which devastated everyone in its path.

AIDS decimated the population of gay and bisexual men during the period covered in Plague, and I’m not sure most young queers realize the effect that loss still has on our community. In the film, I noticed the t-shirts many of the activists wore (the film repeatedly captures on many bodies the unisex, activist uniform of: a t-shirt, motorcycle jacket, jeans and Doc Martins) were unmistakably designed by acclaimed artist Keith Haring (which he did as a fundraiser for ACT UP: he also makes a brief, wordless appearance in a demonstration in the film). The music in Plague is by cellist and vocalist Arthur Russell. Both men died of AIDS in the early nineties. They make up one small corner of the heart of queer culture lost during that time period.

France expertly pieces together newsreel footage and present-day interviews, but for most of the story he culled hundreds of hours of ACT UP’s own electrifying videotape, some of which is also included in United in Anger another film released in 2012 about ACT UP New York. Audiences should see both, because at least as many riveting films could be made about the AIDS crisis as have been made about World War II.

I’ve read some blog criticism that How To Survive a Plague is the rich, white, male version of United in Anger. In contrast to Plague,Anger spotlights many more HIV-positive women and women of color in ACT UP as well as men of color. It also makes clear that part of the schism (also documented in Plague) between ACT UP and the Treatment Action Group (which helped develop protocols for drug trials and accelerated drug approval by working with pharmaceutical companies) was because the latter was made up mostly of white, gay men. But since Plague is, in the end, about (spoiler alert) those who survived HIV, its focus on privileged, white, gay men, while not enviable, is inevitable.

How to Survive a Plague

Part of what galvanized these men into action was their outrage that even though they had been bond traders, movie producers, PR executives and Ivy League graduates, because they were gay (or bisexual) and because they were HIV-positive, the medical establishment and the government still treated them as if they were scum. The film documents in interviews with them as well as scientists their tireless work. We see, toward the beginning, a member of the drug buyer’s club rattle off a laundry list of medications before saying, “None of which work, by the way.” Toward the end, years later, we see how the Treatment Action Group helped bring to market the protease inhibitors and combination drug therapies that continue to extend the lives of many people with HIV (at least those with access to these drugs) today.

Those drugs have not eradicated AIDS, but changed it from a virus that killed everyone it infected (we see one man quietly recite the ACT UP chant “ACT UP. Fight back. Fight AIDS,” to end the eulogy he gives at a fellow ACT UP member’s public funeral procession, then see his own obituary in the newspaper) to a disease that many people can now live with for decades.

One of the most moving scenes in the film is close to the end when we see the survivors (many of whom we had seen only in archival footage up to this point) in a series of long, silent close-ups, as they are now, all of those twenty years etched onto their faces and the wrinkles, jowls, grey hair and aging itself becomes a triumph, as it rarely is on American movie screens.

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Ren Jender is a writer/performer and producer whose work appears regularly on xoJane. She is currently soliciting work for a film anthology made up of short films by queer women writers. Follow her on Twitter at @RenJender.

Gender and Food Week: ‘Arresting Ana’: A Short Film about Pro-Anorexia Websites

Arresting Ana (2009)

This post written by Amber Leab originally appeared at Bitch Flicks on April 10, 2012.

In February of this year, Tumblr made news when it announced it would no longer host “self harm” sites–which promote anorexia or bulimia as a lifestyle choice, among other subjects–and would pop up a public service announcement (PSA) whenever someone searches for a keyword associated with self harm.

Recently I participated in a feminist film festival in which Arresting Ana, a short documentary by Lucie Schwartz, was shown. Here’s a synopsis of the film:

“Arresting Ana tells the story of the potential criminalization of the pro-anorexia movement in France. The film follows two women: Sarah, an 18-year-old college student with a ‘pro-Ana’ blog, an online forum on which she shares tips and tricks with other young women on how to become anorexic, and Valerie Boyer, a passionate legislator who is proposing a ground-breaking bill that aims to ban pro-Ana websites by issuing $30,000 fines and 2-year prison sentences to members of this online underground movement.”

The film was made in 2009, and at the time of its completion the proposed bill had stalled in France’s legislature. The issue of censoring pro-ana sites is interesting and controversial for numerous reasons, I think. While Boyer’s intention with the bill seems good and particularly in the interests of young women, there are some major flaws to this kind of legal activism–which essentially criminalizes people who are suffering from a serious illness and expressing themselves in various ways online.

While I would stop short of defending someone who is instructing an audience on how to be a “better anorexic,” the free speech aspect–and the idea of criminalizing certain speech online–has serious ramifications. Though I agree with the idea that one person’s freedom ends when it impinges on another person’s freedom, I question whether pro-ana sites are actually harming or violating their readers’ freedom or personal liberty. Let me be clear: I am not in any way celebrating or defending self-harm sites; rather, they strike me as a cry for help, and maybe a manifestation of an illness, rather than criminal behavior. In the case of Tumblr, the free speech issue is largely avoided, since it is a private company, free to set its own terms of service. To me, this seems a more reasonable response in the battle against promoting self harm and eating disorders.

The question also arises as to why websites written and maintained by people suffering from eating disorders are being targeted at all. There are certainly sites on the web that are just as, if not more, harmful to people–sites that use hate speech, or promote hate or violence. Although I’m no expert, I haven’t heard about legislation–or even private companies’ terms of service–against anti-woman websites. Remember Facebook’s Occupy a Vagina event page? In this context, it seems that young women’s freedom of expression is specifically being targeted–even if the subject is a harmful and even dangerous one. (Note: Men suffer from eating disorders too, and I’m not trying to minimize that; the film focuses entirely on young women.)

Fighting eating disorders is important work, and the fact that the subject is being discussed at all in France’s legislature is a good thing. However, criminalizing illness isn’t. Better reforms seem to be the ones directed at body image: banning excessive photoshop use in magazines and advertisements, requiring models to be at a healthy weight, and speaking out against body policing and shaming–whether it happens in media or in our private conversations.

Watch the trailer for Arresting Ana:

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Amber Leab is a Co-Founder and Editor of Bitch Flicks. She is a writer living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a Master’s degree in English & Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati and a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature & Creative Writing from Miami University. Outside of Bitch Flicks, her work has appeared in The Georgetown Review, on the blogs Shakesville, The Opinioness of the World, and I Will Not Diet, and at True Theatre.

Women in Politics Week: Women, War & Peace: The Roundup

The Women, War & Peace Documentary Series on PBS

This post by Megan Kearns originally appeared at Bitch Flicks on January 9, 2012.

Over the course of the past two months, Megan Kearns of The Opinioness of the World reviewed all five parts of the PBS series Women, War & Peace. We’ve rounded them up here, with excerpts from each review. Be sure to check them out if you missed any! (You can also watch the full episodes online here.)

In ‘Women, War & Peace’s ‘I Came to Testify’ Brave Bosnian Women Speak Out About Surviving Rape as a Weapon of War:

While rape had been charged as a crime before, it usually falls under the umbrella of hate crimes. With this groundbreaking tribunal, for the first time rape was charged as “a crime against humanity.” The case wouldn’t prevent all rapes. But Kuo said that even though they couldn’t prosecute every rape, it was a significant statement to acknowledge what happens to women during war. The case “transformed the definition of wartime slavery,” laying the “foundation of trials involving violence against women in international courts.”

War leaves devastation in its wake. Yet historically, when we talk about war, we talk about it in terms of soldiers and casualties; too often from a male perspective, forgetting that it equally destroys women’s lives.

‘Pray the Devil Back to Hell’ Portrays How the Women of Liberia, United in Peace, Changed a Nation:

In the 2nd installment of the Women, War & Peace series, director Gini Reticker and producer Abigail E. Disney, and WWP series executive producers and co-creators, create a Tribeca Film Festival-winning documentary. Pray the Devil Back to Hell tells the powerful and uplifting story of the Liberian women, including activist and social worker Leymah Gbowee, who joined together and peacefully protested, helping end the civil war ravaging their country.

For almost 15 years, beginning on Christmas Eve in 1989, two civil wars plagued Liberia. Warlord and former president Charles Taylor resided at the center of both. He overthrew the regime during the first civil war and committed war crimes and human rights atrocities while president during the second civil war. Taylor recruited soldiers as young as 9-15 years old. With his private army, the dictator controlled the finances and terrorized the country.

Afghan Women Fight to Not Have Their Rights Bargained Away in ‘Peace Unveiled’ in ‘Women, War & Peace’ Series:

Hasina Safi, one of the 3,000 members of the Afghan Women’s Network (AWN), a non-partisan NGO working to empower women, visits villages to monitor the programs she coordinates for illiterate women. Classes for women could not be held openly with the Taliban in power. Almost 90% of Afghan women cannot read or write. Through classes, many women are just learning Islam encourages women’s education.

But working women like Safi risk their lives. They receive death threats via horrific letters in the night, telling them they must stop working or else their children will be killed and their homes burned.

Afro-Colombian Female Leaders Defy Death Threats to Hold Onto Their Land in ‘Women, War & Peace’s ‘The War We Are Living’:

Over the course of the last two decades, at least 16 million acres of land have been violently taken from Colombians. In the last 8 years, over 2 million have been displaced. Colombia has the second largest number of internally displaced people in the world after Sudan. With no jobs and contaminated water, displacement traumatizes civilians and rips families apart. Under international law,internally displaced citizens don’t receive the same protections that refugees do. Their government is supposed to address their rights. But in this case, how are Colombians supposed to obtain justice when their own government condemns them?

Afro-Colombians make up one quarter of Colombia’s population. In May 2010, coinciding with Afro-Colombian Day, which commemorates the end of slavery in Colombia, Sarria’s eviction was set to commence. People took to the streets, barricading the road to halt the eviction.

‘War Redefined’ Challenges War as a Male Domain and Examines How Violent Conflict Impacts Women:

When we think of war, we often think of soldiers, tanks, weapons and battlefields. But most wars breach boundaries, affecting civilians, mostly women and children. Soldiers, guerillas and paramilitaries use tactics such as rape, fear, murder and pushing people off their land. We need to shift our paradigm of war and look at how it affects women’s lives.

War Redefined, the 5th and final installment in Women, War & Peace (WWP), is the capstone of the groundbreaking series featuring politicians, military personnel, scholars and activists discussing how women play a vital role in war and peace-keeping. Narrated by actor Geena Davis, a phenomenal women’s media activist, written and produced by Peter Bull, co-produced by Nina Chaudry, this powerful film threads stories told in the other parts of the series: Bosnian women surviving rape camps, Liberian women protesting for peace, Afghan women demanding their rights in negotiations and Afro-Colombian women contending with internal displacement. War Redefined, and the entire WWP series, challenges the assumption that war and peace belong to men’s domain.

Women in Politics Week: Documentary ‘Gloria: In Her Own Words’ Gives Insight to a Feminist Icon

Gloria Steinem in HBO’s Gloria: In Her Own Words

This post by Megan Kearns originally appeared at Bitch Flicks on March 28, 2012.

If I were to ask you to name a famous feminist, who would you say? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that most of you would probably say Gloria Steinem. And with good reason. A pioneering feminist icon, she’s been the face of feminism for nearly 50 years. Many people have admired and judged her, putting their own perceptions on who she is. In the documentary Gloria: In Her Own Words, Steinem tells her own story.

Directed by Peter Kunhardt and produced by Kunhardt and Sheila Nevins, the HBO documentary which also aired at this year’s Athena Film Fest, “recounts her transformation from reporter to feminist icon.” It explores Steinem’s life through intimate interviews and impressive historical footage, focusing on the tumultuous 60s and 70s, the core of the Women’s Liberation Movement. It’s an intriguing and thought-provoking introduction to feminism and insight of a feminist activist.

Gloria: In Her Own Words covers Steinem’s childhood in a working-class neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio and her early career as a journalist. One of her assignments involved going undercover doing an expose on the Playboy Club. Through the unfolding of her history, she discusses gender disparity in wages and sexual harassment. In 1970, women earned half of what men earned. Women were told that they couldn’t handle responsibility or couldn’t maintain the same level of concentration as men. And of course, women were told their place was in the home. She said that if you were pretty, people assumed you got assignments based on your looks. Of course it couldn’t be due to a woman’s intelligence or work ethic. Silly me. Steinem also revealed that her boss sexually harassed her at the Sunday Times. She said:

“There was no word for sexual harassment. It was just called life. So you had to find your own individual way around it.”

Steinem found that she wasn’t alone. Many, MANY other women faced this same barrage of sexism and misogyny. She said she “wasn’t crazy, it was the system that was crazy.” This echoes something badass feminist poet and activist Staceyann Chin said when I attended Feminist Winter Term in NYC last year. Some young women feel like they’re losing their minds, that they see something wrong with society but so many others don’t. I know this is how I felt for a long time. But there’s nothing wrong or weird or abnormal about wanting to be treated equitably. Steinem says:

“I began to understand that my experience was an almost universal female experience.”

Is there a “universal female experience?” I disagree. Yes, many women face the same gendered oppressions and stigmas. But this ignores the intersectionality of sexism, racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. that play pivotal roles in women’s lives. But Steinem asserts:

“Women really do have a community of interest because we are relegated to menial and dehumanized positions simply because we’re women.”

While the film glosses over some parts some parts of Steinem’s life I was absolutely thrilled it showcased abortion and reproductive justice. Steinem revealed how she had an abortion when she was 22 which she kept secret. When she covered an abortion hearing in New York in 1969, she realized the importance of reproductive justice. And that was her “click” moment in becoming a feminist:

“Women were standing up and sharing their abortion experiences…I listened to these women testify about all that they had to go through, the injury, the danger, the infection, the sexual humiliation, you know to get an illegal abortion. And I suddenly realized why is it a secret, you know? If 1 in 3 women has needed an abortion in her lifetime in this country, why is it a secret and why is it criminal and why is it dangerous?

“And that was the big click. It transformed me and I began to seek out everything I could find on what was then the burgeoning women’s movement.”

It’s interesting that abortion can be a catalyzing force in declaring a feminist identity. But it makes sense. When the government tries to take away your reproductive rights, to make choices about your own body, you realize the importance your voice and standing up for your rights. And Steinem’s absolutely right; an abortion stigma of shame should not exist. There’s nothing shameful in making a choice about your reproductive health. With the passage of Roe v. Wade and the legalization of abortion in 1973, “reproductive freedom” was established “as a basic right like freedom of speech or freedom of assembly.” Sadly, it’s a war we’re still fighting to win.

For Steinem, becoming a feminist meant becoming part of a group, something she had never felt before. She also discussed the “demonization” of “the word ‘feminist’”:

“I think that being a feminist means that you see the world whole instead of half…It shouldn’t need a name. One day it won’t…

“Feminism starts out being very simple. It starts out being the instinct of a little child who says it’s not fair and you are not the boss of me…and it ends up being a worldview that questions hierarchy altogether.”

As she “realized there was nothing for women to read that was controlled by women,” Steinem recognized the crucial need for feminist media. This sparked the creation of Ms. Magazine, the first feminist publication in 1972, which Steinem co-founded and edited. She said that while they didn’t invent the term “Ms,” it was “the exact parallel to “Mr.” and it had a great, obvious political use.” Marital status doesn’t affect male identity, so why should it affect women’s? Men in the media predicted its rapid demise. Yet it sold out in a week. Thankfully, it’s still in print as it’s one of my fave magazines!

Gloria: In Her Own Words shows footage of Steinem in interviews, rallies, marches and conferences such as the 1977 National Women’s Conference and the 2005 March for Women’s Lives in DC. At a rally for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), Steinem declared:

“We’ve been much too law-abiding and docile for too long but I think that period is about over. So I only want to remind you and me tonight that what we are talking about is a revolution, and not a reform…

“We are the women that our parents warned us about and we are proud.”

Throughout the film, Steinem talks about anger:

“A woman who aspires to something is called a bitch…There’s such huge punishment in the culture for an angry woman…I learned to use anger constructively.”

Society tells us women are meant to be docile and agreeable, not righteous and angry. As an angry child who grew up to be an angry woman, it was refreshing to hear Steinem discuss this stigma. She also talks about the need to advocate and fight for your rights as “nobody hands you equality.”

Steinem frankly shares her triumphs and her pain. She discussed her friction with feminist Betty Friedan, her admiration for her friend U.S. Representative Bella Abzug, a feminist pioneer, and her alliance with activist Angela Davis. She talks about her regret at distancing herself from her mother and her choice not to have children saying “having children should not be such a deep part of a woman’s identity.” She discussed her marriage to husband David Bale, whom she called “an irresistible force” and who sometimes introduced himself as Mr. Steinem, much to her chagrin. She survived breast cancer, depression and faced her own lack of self-esteem.

While the documentary alludes to Steinem’s other social justice passions, one for me, is glaringly omitted: her passion for animal rights. As a feminist vegan, I often see the two movements bifurcated, despite some of the parallel struggles. So it would have been great to see that here.

Throughout the film, I get the sense that Steinem is intelligent, kind, witty and passionate. When asked if she feels just as strongly today as she did when she started out as an activist, Steinem says:

“Oh much more, god much more, much much more. And it’s a world view. Once you start looking at us all as human beings, you no longer are likely to accept economic differences and racial differences and ethnic differences. So you have to uproot racism and sexism at the same time otherwise it just doesn’t work.”

I love this holistic view of abolishing kyriarchy and multiple systems of oppression.

Feminist writer Amanda Marcotte critiqued the documentary as “fun” and “worthy” yet “incomplete” and “far too upbeat.” I see her point. Yes, some events, particularly the ERA, were glossed over and some viewers might not understand the full scope of the struggles and sacrifices made during the women’s rights movement. But I’m glad it was hopeful. This is a documentary about Gloria Steinem, her views and her experiences; not a documentary on the history of feminism.

Sheila Nevis, the president of HBO’s documentary film division, views Gloria: In Her Own Words not as a biography but rather “an inspirational film” for young people “who didn’t know who she was.” For seasoned feminists who feel distraught over the plethora of incessant struggles, it’s nice to be buoyed by optimism. And for those who don’t call themselves feminists or don’t know much about the women’s movement, this might pique their curiosity to explore feminism. Inspiration is a powerful and sometimes underrated thing.

When someone leads a life in the spotlight, many myths and misconceptions may swirl around their public persona. But Steinem lays out her life: her triumphs, accomplishments, woes and heartbreak. It’s time you got to know the person you might think you knew, the woman who helped catalyze feminism in the U.S. I didn’t think it was possible to be even more inspired by Steinem than I already was…but I am.

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Megan Kearns is a Bitch Flicks Editor and Staff Writer. She’s a feminist vegan blogger and freelance writer living in Boston. Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World, a feminist vegan site she founded. She writes about gender, media and reproductive justice as a Regular Blogger at Fem2pt0. She’s also a podcast contributor to Feminist Magazine on KPFK radio where she writes and performs her monthly “Feminist Films” segment. Megan’s work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Feministing’s Community Blog, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, A Safe World for Women and Women and Hollywood. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology from UMass Amherst and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy from UMass Boston. You can follow all of Megan’s unapologetically opinionated thoughts — Leslie Knope’s awesomeness, the idiocy of anti-choice legislation, and where to find the best vegan doughnuts — on Twitter at @OpinionessWorld.