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Family, Gender and Sexuality
By Paula Eiselt
93QUEEN follows Rachel "Ruchie" Freier, a no-nonsense Hasidic lawyer and mother of six who is determined to shake up the boys club in her Hasidic community by creating Ezras Nashim, the first all-female ambulance corps in NYC.
In the Hasidic enclave of Borough Park, Brooklyn, EMS corps have long been the province of men. Though the neighborhood is home to the largest volunteer ambulance corps in the world known as Hatzolah, that organization has steadfastly banned women from its ranks. Now Ruchie and an engaging cast of dogged Hasidic women are risking their reputations, and the futures of their children, by taking matters into their own hands to provide dignified emergency medical care to the Hasidic women and girls of Borough Park. In a society where most women don't drive - and a few minutes can mean the difference between life and death - how do female EMTs transport themselves to the scene of an emergency? And how does Ezras Nashim combat a behemoth like Hatzolah, which possesses political clout throughout New York City?
With unprecedented and exclusive access, 93QUEEN follows the formation and launch of Ezras Nashim through the organization's first year on the ground. We witness the highs and lows of creating an organization against incredible odds, as well as the women's struggles to "have it all" as wives and mothers. And in the midst of this already ground-breaking endeavor, Ruchie announces that she had decided to take her burgeoning feminism even further when she enters the race for civil court judge in Brooklyn's 5th Municipal Court District. Through it all, we see Ruchie and the other women grappling to balance their faith with their nascent feminism, even as they are confronted by the patriarchal attitudes that so dominate Hasidic society. As Ruchie observes, while making dinner at 3 a.m., "I sometimes wonder why God created me a woman. If I'd have been born a Hasidic man, I don't think I would have half the problems I have."
DVD (Color) / 2018 / 90 minutes
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By Ann S. Kim & Priya Giri Desai
In India, where marriage is a must but AIDS carries a stigma, what are HIV-positive people to do?
After discovering India's first case of HIV in 1986, Dr. Suniti Solomon left a prestigious academic post to found India's premier HIV/AIDS clinic. Twenty-five years later, India now produces its own anti-retroviral medications, enabling Dr. Solomon's to patients live longer - and face the pressure to marry. At the age if seventy-two, and in the twilight of her bold and unconventional career, Dr. Solomon has taken on a new role: marriage matchmaker. Like other Indian matchmakers, Dr. Solomon matches by religion, education, and income; but she also matches by white blood cell counts and viral loads. For her, this isn't just about romance - it is a way to stem the spread of HIV and fight stigma.
LOVESICK interweaves Dr. Solomon's personal and professional journeys with the lives of two patients: Karthik, a reticent bachelor, and Manu who, like many women in India, was infected by her first husband. As Karthik and Manu search for love, they learn how to survive under the shadow of HIV. Shot over eight years and told with humor and compassion, LOVESICK is a surprising and hopeful story about the universal desire for love.
DVD (English, Tamil, Hindi, Color) / 2018 / 74 minutes
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By Laura Bari
PRIMAS is an evocative and poetic portrait of two Argentine teenage cousins who come of age together as they overcome the heinous acts of violence that interrupted their childhoods.
When Rocio was 10 years old, she was dragged from her bike by a stranger, raped, set on fire and left for dead. Now a teenager, she still grapples with memories of the nightmarish assault that left her body scarred. Together with her cousin Aldana, who was sexually abused for years by her own father, she lives, laughs and shares her story. Traveling through Argentina and Montreal, the two cousins embark upon a program of theater, dance, and circus that helps them process complex emotions. Little by little, they manage to rebuild the lives that were so brutally stolen from them and free themselves from the shadows of their past.
A humanistic exploration of familial love, creativity, and courage in the wake of sexual violence, PRIMAS is a moving tribute to the deep strength of resilient women.
DVD (Color, Spanish) / 2018 / 95 minutes
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Directors: Jenny Mackenzie, Jared Ruga, Amanda Stoddard
In Salt Lake City, Utah, the religious monoculture severely complicated the AIDS crisis, where patients received no support from-or were cast into exile by-the political, religious, and medical communities. Further, Mormon culture encouraged gay men to marry women and have a family to cure themselves of their "affliction," counsel which led to secret affairs and accidental marital transmissions of HIV. In the entire state and intermountain region there was only one doctor to serve all HIV/AIDS patients. This is the story of her fight to save the lives of a maligned population everyone else seemed willing to just let die.
Dr. Kristen Ries came to Salt Lake City with the hope and ambition to set up a medical practice of her own. By chance, she arrived on the exact same day the CDC released a report about a new infectious disease affecting populations of gay men. This intrigued Dr. Ries and she launched her long career as the premier specialist who treated HIV/AIDS patients. What started as hospice care for highly stigmatized individuals became a model for compassionate care at the height of the AIDS epidemic. She faced stigma and blame in a repressive religious culture and had to find creative ways to serve her patients. She and her Physician's Assistant, Maggie Snyder, developed backdoor patient policies, underground drug markets, and status confidentiality policies to give their patients the best possible chance at prolonging their lives-or at worst, dying comfortably. When their families, their churches and social circles, their politicians, and even other doctors had abandoned them, Kristen Ries and Maggie Snyder created a safe haven amidst a sea of hate and fear for those who had nowhere else to turn.
DVD / 2018 / 68 minutes
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By Michelle Memran
The visionary Cuban-American dramatist and educator Maria Irene Fornes spent her career constructing astonishing worlds onstage and teaching countless students how to connect with their imaginations. When she gradually stops writing due to dementia, an unexpected friendship with filmmaker Michelle Memran reignites her spontaneous creative spirit and triggers a decade-long collaboration that picks up where the pen left off.
The duo travels from New York to Havana, Miami to Seattle, exploring the playwright's remembered past and their shared present. Theater luminaries such as Edward Albee, Ellen Stewart, Lanford Wilson, and others weigh in on Fornes's important contributions. What began as an accidental collaboration becomes a story of love, creativity, and connection that persists even in the face of forgetting.
DVD (Color) / 2018 / 79 minutes
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Director: Richard Yeagley
The Sunday Sessions is an intimate portrait of one man's struggle to reconcile his religious conviction and sexual identity. The feature length documentary follows Nathan Gniewek, a gay man in his late twenties, as he seeks counseling from conversion therapist Christopher Doyle.
Conversion therapy is the controversial, non-scientifically based process which aims to convert an individual's sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual. Although it has been discredited by all major American medical, psychiatric, psychological and professional counseling organizations, some therapists still offer the service for reasons almost exclusively rooted in a conservative religious belief system.
The filmmakers had unfettered access to individual therapy sessions, family sessions, and a collection of weekend camps, and have crafted an emotional and psychological thriller which chronicles two years of Nathan's journey from acceptance to skepticism, all leading to a profound epiphany.
DVD / 2018 / 89 minutes
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Director: Sandra Luckow
What do you do when your brother descends into a black hole of mental instability - starting with falling for a Nigerian email scam but eventually winding up involuntary committed into the hospital made famous by 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'?
Award-winning filmmaker Sandra Luckow unflinchingly turns her camera on her own family as they attempt to navigate the broken mental health system in an effort to save their brother, Duanne, whose iPhone video diary ultimately becomes an unfiltered look at the mind of a man with untreated schizophrenia as well as an indictment of how the system failed.
DVD / 2018 / 101 minutes
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By Sahra Mani
A THOUSAND GIRLS LIKE ME is an awe-inspiring verite documentary that tells the story of a young Afghan woman's fight for justice after experiencing years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father.
Khatera Golzad was brutally raped by her father for thirteen years, resulting in numerous pregnancies, most of which ended in forced abortions. But two reached full term. Despite her many attempts to file charges, neither the Afghan police nor the legal system helped her. In 2014, she appeared on national television to publicly accuse her father, finally succeeding in bringing her case to court despite threats from male relatives and judges who labelled her a liar.
A THOUSAND GIRLS LIKE ME sheds light on the broken Afghan judicial system and the women it seldom protects. In a country where the systematic abuse of girls is rarely discussed, Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani presents a story of one woman's battle against cultural, familial, and legal pressures as she embarks on a mission to set a positive example for her daughter and other girls like her.
DVD (Color) / 2018 / 52 minutes
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By Irene Lusztig
YOURS IN SISTERHOOD is a performative, participatory documentary inspired by the breadth and complexity of letters that were sent in the 1970s to the editor of Ms.- America's first mainstream feminist magazine. The film documents hundreds of strangers from around the U.S. who were invited to read aloud and respond to these letters written by women, men and children from diverse backgrounds. Collectively, the letters feel like an encyclopedia of both the 70s and the women's movement- an almost literal invocation of the second-wave feminist slogan "the personal is political." The intimate, provocative, and sometimes heartbreaking conversations that emerge from these performances invite viewers to think about the past, present, and future of feminism.
DVD (Color) / 2018 / 101 minutes
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By Andrea Weiss
BONES OF CONTENTION is the first nonfiction feature film to explore the theme of historical memory in Spain, focusing on the repression of lesbians and gays under Franquismo. Lining the roads of Spain, masked by miles and miles of pine trees, are unmarked graves in which over a hundred twenty thousand victims of the Franco regime are buried. Today the families of the desaparecidos lead a grassroots effort to uncover and identify the bones of their loved ones, despite opposition from the Spanish government.
Invisible to the eye but hyper-visible in the mind, these mass graves of Spain's missing persons are an apt metaphor for the historical memory conundrum. How does a country excavate a past that is actively suppressed?
The film weaves together two strands, the historical memory movement's campaign to uncover the past, and the search for the hidden lives of lesbians and gays under Franco. These strands are connected through the figure of Spain's most famous poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, who was killed by a right-wing firing squad in the first few weeks of the Spanish Civil War. The mystery of his missing remains and the debates over their significance provide the narrative spine of the documentary, as he has become the symbol today for both the historical memory movement and the LGBT movement.
The film features interviews with:
Laura Garcia Lorca, President, Garcia Lorca Foundation
Emilio Silva, Founder, Asociacion para la Recuperacion de la Memoria Historica
Antoni Ruiz and Silvia Reyes, imprisoned by the Franco regime due to their sexuality
Isabel Franc and Empar Pineda, lesbian witnesses and activists
Fernando Valverde, poet and Lorca scholar
DVD (English, Spanish, Color, Black and White) / 2017 / 75 minutes
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Director: Meagan Murphy
Real women reveal their breasts and uncover personal truths in this gently provocative documentary exploring embodiment, womanhood, and the power of being seen.
The Breast Archives features nine women's personal stories of empowerment. Baring their breasts and their hearts, the women share the unique journeys they've made with their bodies, from their formative years of hiding, shame, and disconnection to adulthood and the discovery of what it means to be a powerful woman. As the women slowly reconnect with their body-based stories they find a reservoir of strength and wisdom that lies within their breasts.
DVD / 2017 / 57 minutes
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Director: Gail Freedman
Mad Hot Ballroom meets Paris is Burning in this entertaining documentary set in the swinging world of same-sex competitive ballroom dancing.
Hot to Trot goes inside that fascinating but little-known world, which is surging in popularity, remaking lives and bodies, along with popular culture and gender politics. Following four magnetic men and women on and off the dance floor over a four-year period, the film is not only an immersive character study (and an idiosyncratic attack on bigotry) but a rousing, powerful story that unfurls with the rhythms and energy of dramatic cinema.
DVD / 2017 / 88 minutes
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Director: Serena Dykman
Directed by 25 year-old Serena Dykman, NANA documents her journey with her mother Alice as they retrace her grandmother's Auschwitz survival story. Born in Poland, Maryla Michalowski-Dyamant survived Ravensbruck, Malchow and Auschwitz - where she was the forced translator for the "Angel of Death," Josef Mengele. Maryla dedicated her life after the war to publicly speaking about her survival to younger generations.
Alice and Serena, daughter and granddaughter, explore how Maryla's outspoken activism continues today, in a world where survivors are disappearing, and intolerance, racism and anti-Semitism are on the rise.
"I was inspired to make this documentary after reading my grandmother's memoir a couple of years ago," said director Serana Dykman. "I realized that she was more than a survivor, more than a Polish Jew. The reason she went back to Auschwitz and told her story publicly thousands of times was so that it should never be forgotten, and would never happen to anyone again. Her activism and fight against intolerance lives on today, 14 years after her death, through the thousands of people she touched, and now through NANA."
DVD (French and English subtitles) / 2017 / 100 minutes
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Director: Jonathan Olshefski
Filmed with verite intimacy over the course of nearly a decade, Quest is the moving portrait of the Rainey family living in North Philadelphia. Beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, Quest Rainey and his wife Christine'a raise a family while nurturing a community of hip hop artists in their home music studio - a safe space where all are welcome. But this creative sanctuary can't always shield them from the strife that grips their neighborhood. Epic in scope, Quest is a vivid illumination of race and class in America, and a testament to love, healing and hope.
DVD / 2017 / 105 minutes
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By Su Friedrich
Su Friedrich has taken up the camera again in her ongoing quest to film the battleground of family life. Her mother Lore - who played the lead in The Ties That Bind (1984), a film about her experiences growing up in Germany during the Second World War - plays the lead again, this time kicking and protesting against being moved at the age of 94 from her home in Chicago.
Su and her two siblings fill out the supporting roles, cajoling, comforting, and freaking out, but they cannot deny that their mother is no longer able to care for herself. Lore has severe memory loss and is convinced that her doorman has been robbing her. She often asks Su the same question repeatedly and cannot remember what she ate for breakfast. In an effort for Su and her siblings to be closer to her, they move her from her home of 50 years to an "independent living" facility in Long Island, New York.
I Cannot Tell You How I Feel is heartfelt examination of growing old in today's society, and the responsibility of adult children to their parents.
DVD (Color) / 2016 / 42 minutes
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By Sophia Luvara
In a nondescript lounge somewhere in Shanghai, men and women giggle, eyeing prospective partners, visibly nervous about making the first move. This isn't your average matchmaking event - it's a "fake-marriage fair," where gay men and women meet to make matrimonial deals with members of the opposite sex in order to satisfy social and familial expectations of heterosexual unions. Inside the Chinese Closet is the intricate tale of Andy and Cherry looking for love and happiness in vibrant Shanghai. They are both homosexual but their families demand a (heterosexual) marriage and a baby from them. Because being single and childless would mean an unacceptable loss of face for their rural families, particularly in the remote countryside where they live. Will Andy and Cherry deny their happiness and sexual orientation to satisfy their parents' wishes? The stories of Andy and Cherry mirror the legal and cultural progress that is happening in China against the backdrop of a nation coming to terms with new moral values.
DVD (Color) / 2016 / 70 minutes
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Directed by Jessica Devaney and Geeta Gandbhir
LOVE THE SINNER is a personal documentary exploring the connection between Christianity and homophobia in the wake of the 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
Queer filmmaker Jessica Devaney grew up deeply immersed in Evangelical Christianity in Florida. After breaking with her youth as a nationally recognized activist and leader among conservative Evangelicals, Jessica left Florida and didn't look back. She built a life that took her as far away from home as possible. Over time, her daily life became a progressive echo chamber.
The mass shooting at Pulse was a wakeup call. By avoiding hard conversations with church leadership, had she missed opportunities to challenge homophobia?
LOVE THE SINNER probes our responsibility to face bias in our communities and push for dignity and equality for all.
DVD (Color) / 2016 / 17 minutes
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By Mimi Chakarova
After spending nearly a decade as a journalist documenting young women sold as slaves into the sex trade, award winning filmmaker Mimi Chakarova (THE PRICE OF SEX) sets out on a journey across the United States to explore how men feel about women and love. Piecing together a rich tapestry of vignettes, woven from stories shared by men of different races, ages, and socio-economic backgrounds, Chakarova weaves a stunningly honest and unapologetic portrayal of masculinity in America. With a diverse set of subjects from tiny blues bars of the Deep South to hedge funds of Manhattan and from ranchers in New Mexico to farmers in the Midwest, MEN: A LOVE STORY is a poignant and at times unforgettable dark comedy that reveals a deeper multilayered understanding of maleness, sexuality and gender performance in America today.
DVD (Color) / 2016 / 80 minutes
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By Olga Delane
In rural Siberia, romantic expectations are traditional and practical. The man is the head of the household. The woman takes care of the housekeeping and the children. But filmmaker Olga Delane doesn't agree. While she was born in this small Siberian village, as a teenager she migrated to Berlin with her family, and 20 years of living in Germany has changed her expectations. SIBERIAN LOVE follows Delane home to her community of birth, where she interviews family and neighbors about their lives and relationships. Amusing and moving, this elegant film paints a picture of a world completely outside of technology, a hard-farming community where life is hard and marriage is sometimes unhappy - but where there are also unexpected paths to joy and family togetherness. Through clashing ideals of modern and traditional womanhood, SIBERIAN LOVE is a fascinating study of a country little known in the US and of a rural community that raises questions about domesticity, gender expectations, domestic abuse, childcare, and romance. Excellent for anthropology, women's studies, sociology, Russian and Eastern European Studies.
DVD (Color) / 2016 / 82 minutes
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By Hillevi Loven, Susan Sarandon
DEEP RUN is a powerful verite portrait of trans life in rural North Carolina. Exiled by her family and rejected by an ex-partner, 17-year-old Spazz has no one to lean on for support. But when Spazz falls in love again and summons up the courage to become Cole, a strong-willed trans-man, his candid humor and steadfast, all-inclusive Christian beliefs counter the bigotry he experiences daily.
This deeply personal documentary reveals rebirth and courage within America's deeply conservative Bible Belt as Cole struggles to find a church that will affirm his identity and the couple's relationship. With a small group of supportive friends, relatives, and his girlfriend, Ashley, Cole's search for love and belonging leads him to a radical revision of what faith and church can be. An intimate study of young outsiders in an insular Christian community, DEEP RUN explores the intersection of modern identity and faith in the American South. Essential viewing for LGBTQIA Audiences, Queer and Gender studies classes.
DVD (Color) / 2015 / 75 minutes
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Directed by Sharon Shattuck
Tells the story of a love, and family, that survived the most intimate of transformations.
With her own wedding just around the corner, filmmaker Sharon Shattuck returns home to examine the mystery at the heart of her upbringing: How her transgender father Trisha and her straight-identified mother Marcia stayed together against all odds. From This Day Forward is a moving portrayal of an American family coping with the most intimate of transformations.
As the film evolves into a conversation about love and acceptance in a modern American family, it raises questions relevant to all of us. As individuals how do we adapt to sustain long-term love and relationships? Where do sexuality and gender intersect? And how do families stay together, when external forces are pulling them apart?
DVD / 2015 / (Grades 6-12, College, Adults) / 76 minutes
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By Laurie Kahn
Romance novels comprise over a billion dollars a year in book sales, outselling science fiction, fantasy, and mystery combined. So why is the genre so often dismissed as frivolous "scribble" rather than elevated as a radical literary form that pushes the envelope on gender, race, and diversity? The heroic characters, prolific writers, and voracious readers that dominate romantic fiction are primarily women. Witty and intelligent, these lovers of the written word form a collaborative, supportive, and dynamic community where readers and writers inspire one another. Emmy Award Winning director Laurie Kahn (Tupperware!) takes a comprehensive look at what goes into publishing a romantic novel, from the author's inspiration and writing process to the photo shoots for those distinctive cover designs. Speaking with literary scholars, romance fanatics, aspiring writers, and award-winning authors, including Nora Roberts, Eloisa James, Beverly Jenkins, and Radclyffe, this documentary offers fascinating insights into this female-centric literary world.
DVD (Color) / 2015 / 84 minutes
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By Chantal Akerman
"At the center of Chantal Akerman's enormous body of work is her mother, a Holocaust survivor who married and raised a family in Brussels. In recent years, the filmmaker has explicitly depicted, in videos, books, and installation works, her mother's life and their own intense connection to each other. No Home Movie is a portrait by Akerman, the daughter, of Akerman, the mother, in the last years of her life. It is an extremely intimate film but also one of great formal precision and beauty, one of the rare works of art that is both personal and universal, and as much a masterpiece as her 1975 career-defining Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles." - New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center
DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2015 / 115 minutes
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By Nneka Onuorah
THE SAME DIFFERENCE is a compelling documentary about lesbians who discriminate against other lesbians based on gender roles. Director Nneka Onuorah takes an in-depth look at the internalized hetero-normative gender roles that have become all too familiar within the African American lesbian and bisexual community. Onuorah shows how these behaviors reproduce the homophobic oppression and masculine privilege of the straight world, while looking for solutions in compelling discussions with community members. Self-identified studs - and the women who love them - discuss hypocrisy in terms of gender roles, performative expectations, and the silent disciplining that occurs between community members. This film features many queer celebrities, including actress Felicia "Snoop" Pearson from the critically acclaimed HBO drama The Wire, and Lea DeLaria from Netflix's Orange Is the New Black, living daily with opinions about how identity should be portrayed. Onuorah's engaging documentary shines a light on the relationships and experiences within the queer black female community, intersecting race, gender and sexuality. Required viewing for Women's, Gender and Queer Studies.
DVD (Color) / 2015 / 78 minutes
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By June Cross
In much of America, progress in HIV/AIDS treatment suggests the worst is behind us, but every year 50,000 Americans are still diagnosed with the virus that causes AIDS. Astonishingly, it's one of the leading causes of death of African American women. And nearly half of the Americans with HIV live in the South, where the AIDS epidemic has taken root in rural communities. WILHEMINA'S WAR is an intimate, personal narrative that tells the story of one family's struggle with HIV over the course of five years. Despite facing institutional and personal obstacles every step of the way, 62-year-old Wilhemina Dixon works tirelessly to combat the stigma and care for her daughter and granddaughter, both HIV-positive.
Emmy award winning journalist and Professor June Cross finds Wilhemina, a one woman army fighting against a systemic dehumanization that's the result of centuries of racism, and lack of access to drugs and treatment. Her story touches upon many of the structural issues that contribute to the alarming rising trend of HIV-positive women in the South: lack of education, lack of access to quality healthcare, lack of transportation, and silence and stigma in the local church congregations. This urgent documentary lays bare the intersection of poverty, race and politics with women's health and security in the rural south, while showing determination in the face of adversity, and the triumph of the human spirit. Essential viewing for African-American Studies and Public Health courses.
DVD (Color) / 2015 / 53 minutes
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By Sheona McDonald
While we live in a highly sexualized society, the messaging around female sexuality is distorted and rife with shame. What women should look like, who women should want, what women should desire...in fact, who women should be, is dictated to us from screens and pages and people. INSIDE HER SEX is a thought-provoking, feature-length documentary that explores female sexuality and shame through the eyes and experiences of three women from different walks of life, each brave enough to chart her own course of sexual discovery: Elle Chase, a popular sex blogger, Candida Royalle, the creator of Femme Productions Inc., a feminist, adult film company designed to speak with a woman's voice and Samantha Allen, the ex-devout Mormon and current gender, sex, and tech writer for The Daily Beast. Through varied, candid and intensely personal interviews, INSIDE HER SEX will delve to the core of these three women and their sexuality, beginning a much needed conversation around female sexuality and shame. Essential viewing for Gender and Sexuality Studies.
DVD (Color) / 2014 / 69 minutes
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Directed by Debra Granik
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Debra Granik ("Winter's Bone") returns to SW Missouri for her first documentary, looking at the life of Vietnam vet, Ron "Stray Dog" Hall, and shattering some stereotypes.
Ron "Stray Dog" Hall lives in Southern Missouri where he owns and operates the At Ease RV Park. After years of living alone with his dogs, he is adjusting to life with his wife, Alicia, who is newly arrived from Mexico. Anchored by his small dogs and big bikes, Stray Dog seeks to strike a balance between his commitment to his family, neighbors, biker brotherhood, and fellow veterans. As part of the legacy of fighting in the Vietnam War, he wrestles with the everlasting puzzle of conscience, remorse, and forgiveness.
With Stray Dog as our guide, we experience the restlessness of ex-warriors as he tries to make peace with what he can't change and weathers the incomprehension of those who have never been to war. Stray Dog navigates the pressures of everyday life including the economic survival of his grandchildren and the increasing poverty of his community. The arrival of Alicia's twin sons from Mexico throws into harsh relief the current state of opportunity that newcomers seek and that America can or cannot offer.
Stray Dog continues to tally the cost of war, bearing witness to the soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan: both the dead and the living. The questions of contemporary American life loom larger and thornier, leaving us to wonder what is next for Stray Dog and his blended, multi-ethnic family.
DVD / 2014 / (Grades 8-12, College, Adults) / 102 minutes
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By Marlo Poras
A tale of two sisters living in the shadow of two Chinas, this documentary by award-winning filmmaker Marlo Poras (Mai's America; Run Grany Run) follows Juma and Latso, young women from one of the world's last remaining matriarchal societies. Thrust into the worldwide economic downturn after losing jobs in Beijing and left with few options, they return to their remote Himalayan village. But growing exposure to modernity has irreparably altered traditions of the Mosuo, their tiny ethnic miniority, and home is not the same. Determined to keep their family out of poverty, one sister sacrifices her educational dreams and stays home to farm, while the other leaves, trying her luck in the city. The changes test them in unexpected ways. This visually stunning film highlights today's realities of women's lives and China's vast cultural and economic divides while offering rare views of a surviving matriarchy.
DVD (Mandarin/Mosuo/Tibetan, Color) / 2013 / 80 minutes
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Directed by David Sieveking
An astonishingly candid, loving and revelatory chronicle of the changes his mother's Alzheimer's disease has on the filmmaker's family.
Leading documentary filmmaker David Sieveking (David Wants to Fly) weaves an astonishingly candid, loving and revelatory chronicle of the changes his mother's Alzheimer's has on his family.
Although dealing with his mother's disease is painful, caring for her does offer Sieveking a chance to reconnect with his family and immerses himself in the secrets and passions of his parents long and fascinating life. Some stories are heroic, while others have left a painful legacy in the couple's long marriage.
Throughout, Sieveking's delicate handling of these revelations moves the focus of the story away from his mother's irreversible mental decline to that of a loving tribute to his mother as a human being with a remarkable life story. What emerges is a poignant and rich study of family ties, the delicate nature of marriage, and the unexpected rewards that come from living life to the fullest.
DVD (German with English subtitles) / 2012 / (Grades 10-12) / 88 minutes
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Director: Wang Xiaoshuai
One of China's foremost Sixth Generation directors, Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle, Shanghai Dreams) tells a striking, autobiographical coming-of-age tale set in the final days of China's Cultural Revolution in his new film 11 Flowers.
Eleven-year-old Wang Han lives with his family in a remote village in Guizhou province. Life is tough, but they make the most of what little they have. When Wang is selected to lead his school through their daily gymnastic regimen, his teacher recommends that he wear a clean, new shirt in honor of this important position a request that forces his family to make a great sacrifice. But one afternoon, soon after Wang is given the precious shirt, he encounters a desperate, wounded man, who takes it from him. The man is on the run, wanted by the authorities for murder. In no time the fates of Wang and the fugitive are intertwined.
Beautifully performed by a troupe of child actors, and vividly creating a sense of time and place, 11 Flowers is a delicate and moving film about growing up in a time of great upheaval.
DVD (Mandarin, Shanghainese with English Subtitles) / 2011 / 115 minutes
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