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Women's Studies

ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS

By WANG Qiong

In ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS, 22-year-old Wang Qiong boldly explores how her family's troubled relationships intersect with the ongoing consequences of China's one-child policy.

Having given birth to two girls, Qiong's mother was desperate for a boy. Pregnant with Jin, her third daughter, she had a late-term abortion - but baby Jin survived. Jin's parents abandoned her in the town and later in the woods, where she survived for a week, in the desperate hope another family could take her in. Jin's paternal grandmother exhorted her son-in-law, Jin's uncle, to bring her home and raise her on his farm. Years later, as a teenager, Jin returned to live with her birth family.

Not surprisingly, Jin's relationships - with her parents, her sisters, her husband, and her own young son - are troubled. She is never at ease, never sure what she wants, never quite at home. Speaking to Qiong, Jin refers to their parents as "your parents" and to her siblings as "your family." ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS observes the life of the family at a critical time: Jin and her husband launch a new business after going bankrupt; Li, the eldest daughter, is pregnant and will likely have an abortion if she learns she's carrying another girl; and Sifan, the son Jin's parents finally had, is failing at school while feeling guilty about Jin's troubled dynamic with her birth family.

Qiong set out to make ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS as a way to investigate family trauma. Her intimate, powerful interviews with her parents and siblings, and her steadfast eye for detail and telling moments, elevate the film from family history to a meditation on the brutal ramifications of the one-child policy at its peak.

DVD (Mandarin With English Subtitles, Color) / 2021 / 175 minutes

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DAUGHTER OF A LOST BIRD

Directed by Brooke Pepion Swaney

Kendra Mylnechuk Potter, a Native woman adopted into a white family, reconnects with her Native identity and begins to view herself as a living legacy of U.S. assimilationist policy.

"Lost birds" - a term for Native children adopted out of their tribal communities. Right after the Indian Welfare Act of 1978 became the law of the land, Kendra Mylnechuk Potter was adopted into a white family and raised with no knowledge of her Native parentage. This beautiful and intimate film follows Kendra on her journey to find her birth mother April, also a Native adoptee, and return to her Lummi homelands in Washington State. With a sensitive yet unflinching lens, director Brooke Swaney (Blackfeet/Salish) documents Kendra and April as they connect with relatives and navigate what it means to be Native, and to belong to a tribe from the outside looking in. Along the way, Kendra uncovers generations of emotional and spiritual beauty and pain and comes to the startling realization that she is a living legacy of U. S. assimilationist policy. By sharing a deeply personal experience of inherited cultural trauma, the film opens the door to broader and more complicated conversations about the erasure of Native culture and the ethics of transracial adoption.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2021 / 66 minutes

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DELPHINE'S PRAYERS

By Rosine Mbakam

Delphine reclines on a daybed in her bright apartment in Belgium, an empty crib beside her. "I started to work the streets like crazy," she says, matter-of-factly recounting her life story. "Selling my body."
Delphine, who is only identified by her first name, is quick-witted, engaging, passionate, and intense. Born and raised in Cameroon, at 30, she has survived a series of personal catastrophes. Her mother died in childbirth, and her father did little to care for his children. She was raped at 13, became a mother soon after, and supported herself with sex work on the streets of Douala. Now, she lives with a Belgian husband three times her age and their children, estranged from much of her family. Unable to find a job, Delphine styles hair at home and still turns to sex work from time to time to have some independence and money of her own.

In DELPHINE'S PRAYERS, she frankly shares her experiences with director Rosine Mbakam over several interview sessions, deftly switching between languages. Mbakam marks the start of each session with preparations for shooting: Delphine adjusting her makeup, tying her hair up in a scarf, or holding up a sheet to help the director adjust the white balance on her camera. The sessions are intimate-sometimes painful, sometimes funny-carried by Delphine's exuberant storytelling style and her clear bond of trust with Mbakam, whom she has known for years. In Cameroon, Delphine and Mbakam came from different cultures and classes. But they both arrived in Belgium within months of each other, neither with friends. The director gives the film over to her subject, appearing herself only in the final moments of the film, where she offers a succinct commentary on her relationship with Delphine and their experiences as West African women. Like so many of her generation, Delphine left the oppression of a patriarchal society looking for a new life in Europe-only to find herself enmeshed in sexual exploitation of a different kind.

DVD (Cameroon Pidgin; French; English With English Subtitles, Color) / 2021 / 91 minutes

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BARBARA LEE: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER

Directed by Abby Ginzberg

An intimate and inspiring portrait of Rep.Barbara Lee (D-CA), a champion of civil rights and the lone vote in opposition of the broad authorization of military force following the September 11th attacks.

BARBARA LEE: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER is an intimate and inspiring portrait of Representative Barbara Lee, a champion of civil rights and a steadfast voice for human rights, peace, and economic and racial justice in the U.S. Congress. In 2001, in the face of extreme backlash, she cast the lone vote in opposition to the broad authorization of military force following the September 11th attacks and issued a strident warning in the House of Representatives, "Let us now become the evil we deplore." Decades later, she continued that clarion call, demanding that Congress stand up to President Trump when he escalated tensions with numerous foreign governments while seeding division within his own country.

This feature documentary reveals the many challenges faced by Barbara Lee early in her life, including raising two sons as a single mother on food stamps and surviving domestic violence, which have provided her with the compassion, motivation, and commitment to use her position as an elected representative to improve the lives of her constituents. With unique access to a sitting member of Congress, this film not only introduces audiences to Barbara Lee, but to many others such as Senator Cory Booker, Representative John Lewis, Representation Ayanna Pressley, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, CNN commentator Van Jones, actor Danny Glover, and author Alice Walker, who all share insights about what makes Barbara Lee unique as a public servant and as a truth-telling Black woman in America. Uncompromising and conscientious to the core, Barbara Lee paves a path of integrity for future politicians.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2020 / 83 minutes

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CASE YOU, THE

By Alison Kuhn

Just how far is it acceptable to push actors in the name of cinema? And at what point do you cross the boundary where acting becomes sexual assault? These are the questions raised by the testimony of six young women who were manipulated and sexually abused during an audition. They knew beforehand that the film they were auditioning for was about incest, and they were familiar with the director's controversial work, but during the audition, without prior discussion, they were groped, beaten, and forced to undress. These traumatizing experiences resurfaced when a few years later it transpired that the footage of the auditions had been made into a documentary.

The women aren't just fighting back through the courts. They have banded together to tell their story on camera, in a sort of antidote to the toxic audition. The director of The Case You, Alison Kuhn, is one of them. This neutralizes the camera's potentially predatory eye and turns the lens into a liberating channel to express anger and demand justice.

DVD / 2020 / 80 minutes

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CELINE ARCHIVE, THE

By Celine Parrenas Shimizu

In 1932, Celine Navarro was buried alive by her own community in Northern California. This is an attempt to uncover the real story, revealing Navarro's feminism and resistance in a time when neither was embraced, as well as the silences that haunt Filipino-American communities to this day.

THE CELINE ARCHIVE is simultaneously an act of journalism, a journey into family and community memory and archives, a love poem, a story of grief and trauma, and a seance for the buried history of Filipino-Americans. Filmmaker and scholar Celine Parrenas Shimizu artfully weaves together her own story of grief with the story of the tragic death of Celine Navarro, which has become lore. In 1932, Navarro was buried alive by her own community of Filipino-Americans in Northern California, but the circumstances surrounding her death were and are unclear and have oft been spun, sensationalized, and dramatized. The filmmaker, a grieving mother with ties to the same community, finds resonance with Navarro's memory and long-lost story, and she sets out to first learn - and then tell - the truth about Navarro's death, ultimately portraying her as a feminist heroine.

Through animation, portraiture, site visits, archival materials, and interviews with scholars, family, and community members, the film shares the most widely circulated versions of the story. In one version, Celine Navarro committed adultery, but there is no proof beyond the accusations. In another, Navarro reported a crime committed by one the members of the fraternal organization Caballeros Dimas Alang, of which she was a part. The member ended up in San Quentin Prison, and for this she was labelled a traitor and punished. In a variation of this story, the crime she reported was one of gendered violence - rendering Celine a brave, pioneering feminist who refused to be silenced. A final version of her story, one that is documented by the Filipino American National Historical Society and believed by her family members, discloses that a community leader stalked and preyed upon her, ignoring Navarro's repeated refusal of his advances.

What does it mean to be descendants of violence, and in particular, gendered violence? How can women heal and make families whole? How can truth-telling help family members move through grief? Told with great care and respect for Navarro, her family, and her descendants, this film is a gift of love given to generations who have held Celine in heart and women fighting to have a voice in the face of violence.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2020 / 69 minutes

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GIRL WITH THE RIVET GUN, THE

Directed by Anne de Mare, Kirsten Kelly

Takes you beyond the iconic "We Can Do It" poster girl to the millions of real-life women who shook the foundations of the American workplace in WWII.

Built entirely by women filmmakers, THE GIRL WITH THE RIVET GUN is an unconventional animated documentary short based on the adventures of three real-life "Rosie the Riveters"-Esther Horne, Susan Taylor King and Mildred Crow Sargent. From vastly different backgrounds, these three women came of age in an America united by war but struggling with divisions of gender, economics and race.

THE GIRL WITH THE RIVET GUN serves as an entry point into a rich, layered, and adventurous rewriting of history as herstory, inspiring conversations about working women everywhere and taking viewers beyond the iconic "We Can Do It" poster girl to the millions of real-life women who shook the foundations of the American workplace-forever changing not only their own lives, but the very perception of what women can do.

DVD / 2020 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adults) / 15 minutes

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GLOW: A WILD RIDE TO HEAVEN

Director: Gabriel Baur

"Someone who glows so brightly is not going to grow old," Fellini once prophesied about Irene Staub, aka Lady Shiva, one of the greatest of all Swiss divas. Thanks to her aura and talent, many doors opened for Irene during Zurich's exuberant years between 1968 and the late 1980s. Discovered by a pioneer of Swiss fashion design, she made the break from streetwalking to being part of the fashionable art scene. Finding work as a model, she also pursued her dream of becoming a singer, starting out in a legendary Zurich underground band. But Lady Shiva lived life in the fast lane; torn between the stress and strain of success, a yearning for freedom, and self-destructive urges, she died far too young under circumstances that have never been fully explained.

Using never-before-seen archival footage and interviews with prominent contemporaries, director Gabriel Baur brings us back to a vibrant age of boundless possibilities, in which the sky seemed the only limit for people like Lady Shiva...an age that to this day still kindles a yearning in us.

DVD (German with English Subtitles) / 2020 / 100 minutes

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HER SOCIALIST SMILE

By John Gianvito

An experimental documentary essay on the political imagination of iconic humanitarian, author, and advocate for the blind Helen Keller. World famous by the age of 8 for having learned how to read and communicate through the finger alphabet, indelibly dramatized in William Gibson's play The Miracle Worker, Helen Keller (1880-1968) remained for the course of her 87 years the most revered blind-deaf woman on the planet.

Largely omitted or minimized within the voluminous literature her life generated however was the fact that Keller had become, by time she reached her thirties, a committed believer in the principles of Socialism. The product of years of research, Her Socialist Smile resurrects the radical Keller, serving as a rousing reminder that Keller's undaunted activism for labor rights, pacifism, and women's suffrage was philosophically inseparable from her battles for the rights of the disabled.

DVD / 2020 / 93 minutes

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HYSTERICAL GIRL

By Kate Novak

In 1900, Sigmund Freud began treating a 17-year old girl he called "Dora." Her parents brought her to therapy after she accused a family friend of sexual assault. Freud's account of his sessions with Dora was the only major case history he published of a female patient. Intercutting his published text with a scripted version told from Dora's point of view, Hysterical Girl revisits this landmark case.

Woven throughout are several decades of cinema, Congressional hearings, and media coverage. What emerges is a portrait of the grip that Freud's theory of hysteria has had on popular culture over the past century and into the present day.

DVD / 2020 / 27 minutes

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PAGEANT, THE

By Eytan Ipeker

The workers of the Yad Ezer Lechaver organization are busy making phone calls. They are trying to find contestants for the 2016 editionof the Miss Holocaust Survivor beauty pageant. In another room, potential contestants are interviewed by Heli Ben-David, Grace Queen in Miss Israel 1979. In order to participate, the survivors have to retell their traumatic story one more time.

Every year since 2011, a unique beauty contest takes place in Haifa. The contestants are female survivors of the Holocaust. In the midst of this flashy spectacle sponsored by an Evangelical Christian organization, the personal traumas of the survivors remain as deep as ever. A documentary about how memory, politics and spectacle are interconnected.

DVD / 2020 / 82 minutes

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SISTERS RISING

Directed by Willow O'Feral and Brad Heck

Native American survivors of sexual assault fight to restore personal and tribal sovereignty against the backdrop of an ongoing legacy of violent colonization.

SISTERS RISING is the story of six Native American women fighting to restore personal and tribal sovereignty in the face of ongoing sexual violence against Indigenous women in the United States.

Native American women are 2.5 times more likely to experience sexual assault than all other American women. 1 in 3 Native women report having been raped during her lifetime and 86% of the offenses are committed by non-Native men. These perpetrators exploit gaps in tribal jurisdictional authority and target Native women as 'safe victims'. The film follows six women who refuse to let this pattern of violence continue in the shadows: a tribal cop in the midst of the North Dakota oil boom, an attorney fighting to overturn restrictions on tribal sovereignty, a teacher of Indigenous women's self-defense, grassroots advocates working to influence legislative change, and the authour of the first anti-sex trafficking code to be introduced to a reservation's tribal court. Their stories shine an unflinching light on righting injustice on both an individual and systemic level.

SISTERS RISING is an urgent call to action, a gorgeous portrait of powerful women acting in solidarity, and a demand for tribal sovereignty and self-determination as the necessary step towards ending violence against Native women.

DVD (Color) / 2020 / 59 minutes

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UNLADYLIKE2020

By Charlotte Mangin, Sandra Rattley

UNLADYLIKE2020 calls into question American history as we know it, reaching back to the dawn of the 20th century to recognize unsung female leaders and women of color trailblazers. The series presents rich biographies of 26 trailblazing American women that everyone should know, who broke barriers in male-dominated fields over 100 years ago, such as politics, journalism, science, business, sports, and the arts, including the first woman to found a hospital on an American Indian reservation, serve in the U.S. Congress, become a bank president, earn an international pilot's license, lead scientific expeditions in the Arctic, swim the English Channel, sing opera on the main stage at Carnegie Hall, or direct a feature-length movie.

Presenting history in a bold new way, UNLADYLIKE2020 brings these extraordinary stories of daring and persistence back to life through captivating original artwork and animation, rare archival imagery, and interviews with historians, descendants, and accomplished women of today, who reflect on the influence of these pioneers.

The UNLADYLIKE2020 collection includes short documentary films ranging in length from 9 to 12 minutes profiling 26 different women. Also available is The Changemakers, an hour-long documentary highlighting the names, stories and legacies of 5 pioneers - "first women" - who organized campaigns for social change. Their profound and extraordinary achievements in politics, civil rights and suffrage, largely taken for granted by history, or absent from standard American history texts, underscore the importance of deconstructing and revising the historical record to include the contributions of women and women of color. The inspiring battles that they waged in the name of equality continue to be fought today.

THE SERIES INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING EPISODES:
Bessie Coleman (9 minutes 3 seconds)
Grace Abbott (9 minutes 5 seconds)
Maggie Lena Walker (9 minutes 40 seconds)
Lillian Gilbreth (10 minutes 21 seconds)
Ynes Mexia (9 minutes 18 seconds)
Anna May Wong (11 minutes 26 seconds)
Meta Warrick Fuller (11 minutes 25 seconds)
Louise Arner Boyd (10 minutes 00 seconds)
Lois Weber (12 minutes 13 seconds)
Williamina Fleming (9 minutes 34 seconds)
Tye Leung Schulze (10 minutes 18 seconds)
Rose Schneiderman (11 minutes 2 seconds)
Margaret Chung (10 minutes 19 seconds)
Gladys Bentley (11 minutes 52 seconds)
Annie Smith Peck (10 minutes 41 seconds)
Susan La Flesche Picotte (11 minutes 38 seconds)
Sissieretta Jones (11 minutes 9 seconds)
Queen Lili`uokalani (12 minutes 14 seconds)
Gertrude Ederle (11 minutes 55 seconds)
Sonora Webster Carver (10 minutes 2 seconds)
Mary Church Terrell (11 minutes 54 seconds)
Martha Hughes Cannon (12 minutes 23 seconds)
Jovita Idar (11 minutes 11 seconds)
Jeannette Rankin (12 minutes 39 seconds)
Zitkala-Sa (11 minutes 39 seconds)
Charlotta Spears Bass (12 minutes 34 seconds)

DVD / 2020 / 285 minutes

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UNLEARNING SEX

By Zanah Thirus

Told through a deeply personal lens, this film explores sexual assault and trauma - and how these experiences intersect with race, class, and sexual orientation - with complexity and sensitivity.

Sexual assault and trauma -- and how these experiences intersect with race, class, and sexual orientation -- are rarely discussed in our society. Zanah Thirus's bold new film, UNLEARNING SEX, explores these topics with complexity and sensitivity, simultaneously raising awareness and opening the door for important conversations. Thirus bravely takes us on her six-month journey through sexual trauma therapy and the reclamation of her body in hopes of lending strength and inspiration to others. While told through a deeply personal lens, including intimate audio recordings of Thirus's therapy sessions, the film tells a story that is at once unique and universal. The addition of video interviews with a neuroscientist, sex educators, and therapists lend expert insight into sexual trauma, misconceptions surrounding sexual assault, consent, intersectionality, and sex education. This film will inspire people of all backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, and races to speak candidly about this sensitive issues.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2020 / 81 minutes

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WITHOUT A WHISPER

A film by Katsitsionni Fox

WITHOUT A WHISPER - KONNON:KWE uncovers the hidden history of the profound influence Indigenous women had on the beginnings of the women's rights movement in the United States.

Before the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848, European colonial women lacked even the most basic rights, while Haudenosaunee women had a potent political and spiritual voice and authority in all aspects of their lives. The contact that the early suffragists had with Haudenosaunee women in New York state shaped their thinking and had a vital impact on their struggle for equality that is taken for granted today. The film follows Mohawk Bear Clan Mother Louise Herne and Professor Sally Roesch Wagner as they seek to correct the historical narrative about the origins of women's rights in the United States.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2020 / 27 minutes

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ZIYARA

By Simone Bitton

Celebrated documentary filmmaker Simone Bitton (Ben Barka, Wall, Rachel) returns with her most personal film to date. Inviting viewers on a cinematic pilgrimage to her homeland of Morocco, Bitton explores her Jewish roots through the sphere of the Muslim guardians of the nation's Jewish memory, centered around the tradition of "ziyara".

In the arid but beautiful landscape of rural Morocco, the country's youngest citizens have largely never themselves coexisted alongside Jews, although their presence is still felt in symbols, old shrines, synagogues and cemeteries. Many Muslims still maintain and find beauty in these commodities, seeing them as a timeless connection to the word of God.

Throughout the film, Bitton investigates the tradition of ziyara itself, a shared tradition between both Muslims and Jews. Pilgrims take a few days off in order to visit the tombs of saints, not only pray but more importantly to commune with nature, celebrate outdoors, meet new people and exchange ideas. The film is Bitton's opportunity to revisit her original identity through the eyes of maturity, rooted not in nostalgia, but in her willingness to tell the story of Jews and Muslims, as has been the consistent theme in her work for decades. And in revisiting Morocco and the "ziyara" tradition, Bitton finds a story of hope.

Bitton conducts intimate conversations not only with those old enough to remember sharing their land with Jews, but with a new generation of Moroccans inspired by their heritage. These deeply personal insights include everyday people and specialists, all of them modest and magnificent heroes in a relentless quest for modernity, dignity, and social justice.

DVD (Arabic, French, Hebrew, English With English subtitles, Color) / 2020 / 99 minutes

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ABORTION HELPLINE, THIS IS LISA

By Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater and Mike Attie

At the Philadelphia abortion helpline, counselors field nonstop calls from women and teens who are seeking to end a pregnancy but can't afford to, illustrating how economic stigma and cruel laws determine who has access to abortion in America.

ABORTION HELPLINE, THIS IS LISA, winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Shorts at AFI Docs 2020, is a powerful short documentary that exposes how economic stigma and cruel legislation determines who in America has access to abortion.

At a women's health fund in Philadelphia, phone counselors-all called Lisa to protect their anonymity-arrive each morning to the nonstop ring of calls from people who are seeking to end a pregnancy and can't afford to. In 1976, only three years after Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, the Hyde Amendment was enacted with the explicit intention of denying poor individuals-those receiving Medicaid-access to abortion. By giving voice to those affected by discriminatory policies, the film exposes how legislation like the Hyde Amendment ties access to abortion to economic status and denies reproductive justice.

As we head into election season, ABORTION HELPLINE, THIS IS LISA is an essential tool for helping Americans understand the brutal legacy of the Hyde Amendment and why its repeal has become a litmus test for progressive politicians.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 13 minutes

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BLACK FEMINIST

By Zanah Thirus

BLACK FEMINIST is a lively and illuminating documentary that explores the double-edged sword of racial and gender oppression that Black Women face in America.

Frustrated by the lack of intersectionality in the women's movement and the misogyny plaguing the Black liberation movement, filmmaker Zanah Thirus set out to shine a light on the complexities and power of Black feminism. Featuring interviews with a wide range of scholars, writers, business owners, veterans and comedians including former Ebony Editor-in-Chief Kyra Kyles, professor Carrie Morris, and author Tami Winfrey Harris, the film lays bare the everyday lived experiences of Black Women everywhere.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 53 minutes

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BREACH OF TRUST

Directed by Mishal Mahmud

Told from the point of view of women advocating for accountability and change, this compelling documentary by USC Graduate Mishal Mahmud examines the sexual assault scandal at the University of Southern California, detailing crimes committed by former gynecologist Dr. George Tyndall and exposing the active cover-up on the part of the administration.

The high-profile sexual assault scandal at the University of Southern California involving Dr. George Tyndall, the only full-time gynecologist in the school's student health clinic from 1989 to 2016, first made headlines when journalists Harriet Ryan and Matt Hamilton exposed horrific abuses in a 2018 LA Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative report. USC recently announced it would pay $1.1 billion to patients, making it the largest sex abuse payout in higher education history. Told from the point of view of the women and sexual assault survivors advocating for change, BREACH OF TRUST offers an inside-look at the abuse, as well as the institution's complicity.

Despite hundreds of accusations and reports of misconduct, Tyndall continued his medical practice for decades, treating more than 17,000 women, without being held accountable. After USC supervising nurse Cindy Gilbert reported Tyndall to the campus rape crisis center in 2016, Tyndall was finally suspended and placed on paid leave. Anchored by stories of the survivors and Gilbert's whistleblower account, this film chronicles the timeline of Tyndall's crimes and his ultimate downfall. Director and USC graduate Mishal Mahmud compassionately brings the voices of hundreds of women to the forefront, allowing space for them to speak up and be heard.

BREACH OF TRUST offers important insight into an all-too-familiar story of male predators employed by high-profile universities (such as Larry Nassar at the University of Michigan and Jerry Sandusky at Penn State University) who used their positions of power to target students - and the administrations' ensuing complicity in allowing the abuse to go unaddressed and unpunished.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 24 minutes

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FORGET ME NOT

By Sun Hee Engelstoft

What makes a mother give away her baby? This is the big question in Sun Hee Engelstoft's poignant heartbreaker of a film about three Korean women who have become pregnant outside of marriage and are now hiding from the outside world until they give birth. They live in a shelter for unwed mothers on a South Korean island, where beautiful landscapes are in sharp contrast to the fierce dilemma that women go through: should they keep their children or give them up for adoption?

Engelstoft has been given unique access to this particular shelter run by the strong-willed Mrs. Im, who fights for the girls' independence but is up against a social structure and family tradition that leaves women in an impossible situation. Engelstoft's sensitive portrait brings us close to a forbidden world and through her own experience as a Korean adoptee, she gives a deeply personal and extraordinary insight into a culture in which women can't choose their own fate.

DVD / 2019 / 83 minutes

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NICE CHINESE GIRLS DON'T: KITTY TSUI

By Jennifer Abod

Nice Chinese Girls Don't is a portrait of Kitty Tsui -- an iconic Asian American lesbian, poet, artist, activist, writer, and bodybuilder who came of age in the early days of the Women's Liberation Movement in San Francisco.

In Nice Chinese Girls Don't, Kitty Tsui recounts her emergence as a poet, artist, activist, writer, and bodybuilder in the early days of the Women's Liberation Movement in San Francisco. She narrates her experience of arriving to the States as an immigrant from Hong Kong by way of her own original poetry and stories.

Tsui wrote the groundbreaking Words of a Woman Who Breathes Fire, the first book written by an Asian American lesbian. She is considered by many to be one of the foremothers of the API, Asian Pacific Islander, lesbian feminist movement.

In 2018, APIQWTC, Asian Pacific Islander Queer Women & Transgender Community honored her with the Phoenix Award for lifetime achievement. In 2019, her alma mater, San Francisco State University inducted Tsui into the Alumni Hall of Fame. Her forthcoming books include Nice Chinese Girls Don't, Battle Cry: Poems of Love & Resistance, and Fire Power: Poems of Love & Resilience. Tsui currently lives in Oakland, California, and is writing a screenplay, Unmasked.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 20 minutes

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NORMAL GIRL, A

Directed by Aubree Bernier-Clarke
By Shawna Lipton, Pidgeon Pagonis

A NORMAL GIRL brings the widely unknown struggles of intersex people to light through the story of intersex activist Pidgeon Pagonis.

Activist Pidgeon Pagonis was born intersex, not conforming to standard definitions of male or female, and experienced genital mutilation as a child. Now Pidgeon is fighting the medical establishment, seeking to end medically unnecessary surgeries and human rights abuses on intersex people in the United States and around the world.

An estimated 1.5% of the population is born with intersex traits. While most of these babies are healthy, their bodies are treated as a medical emergency. It is common practice for doctors to perform genital surgeries on intersex infants--often with disastrous results including total loss of genital sensation, lifetime synthetic hormone dependence, and being assigned a gender with which they do not identify.

Through the story of Pidgeon's remarkable journey and fight for bodily self-determination, A NORMAL GIRL brings the widely unknown struggles of intersex people to light.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 14 minutes

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PAULETTE

By Heather Rae

PAULETTE follows the historic campaign of Paulette Jordan, the first Native American candidate - as well as the first woman -- to win the Idaho Primary for Governor.

PAULETTE is an inspiring short film that follows the historic campaign of the first Native American candidate -- as well as the first woman -- to win the Idaho Primary for Governor.

Coeur d'Alene tribal member Paulette Jordan comes from a long line of ancestral leadership deeply connected to the land of Idaho. The single mother of two ran for Governor in 2018, winning the Democratic Primary by a landslide. A victory in November would have made her the first woman to serve as governor in the state -- and would have marked the first time in U.S. history that a Native American has held the governorship of any state.

Despite a hard-hitting loss in the general election to a conservative Republican male opponent, Jordan's groundbreaking bid for Governor represented a growing movement for Native people, people of color, and women fighting to have a voice and visibility in American politics. Forging ahead and staying true to her path as an Indigenous leader, Paulette Jordan is currently campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate and won Idaho's Democratic primary in June 2020.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2019 / 18 minutes

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THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL

By Alexe Poukine

Ada, just 19 years old, went to the house of a young man she knew. She didn't fight back, and it all happened very quickly, but the trauma remains.

With humility and frankness, the powerful documentary That Which Does Not Kill tackles the delicate and intimate matter of rape. Filmmaker Alexe Poukine's approach is novel: she has different people read Ada's account. It is an appropriation that creates a trusted space for speaking out, and other heartbreaking stories soon emerge.

By exploring the diversity of experiences and perspectives, the film examines stubborn prejudices without sanctimony or condescension, provoking the sort of collective introspection - and discussion - the #MeToo movement has necessitated.

DVD / 2019 / 95 minutes

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VITALINA VARELA

By Pedro Costa

Portuguese director Pedro Costa has continually returned in his films to the Fontainhas neighborhood, a shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon that's home to largely immigrant communities. Not merely a chronicler of the poor and dispossessed, Costa renders onscreen characters that exist somewhere between real and fictional, the living and the dead.

His latest, a film of deeply concentrated beauty, stars nonprofessional actor Vitalina Varela in a truly remarkable performance. Reprising and expanding upon her haunted supporting role from Costa's Horse Money, she plays a Cape Verdean woman who has come to Fontainhas for her husband's funeral after being separated from him for decades due to economic circumstance, and despite her alienation begins to establish a new life there.

The grief of the present and the ghosts of the past commingle in Costa's ravishing chiaroscuro compositions, a film of shadow and whisper that might be the director's most visually extraordinary work. (synopsis courtesy of the New York Film Festival)

DVD / 2019 / 124 minutes

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AMA

Directed by Lorna Tucker

The untold story of the involuntary sterilization of Native American women by the Indian Health Service well into the 1970s.

Ama tells an important and untold story: the abuses committed against Native American women by the US Government during the 1960s and 70s. The women were removed from their families and sent to boarding schools. They were subjected to forced relocation away from their traditional lands and, perhaps worst of all, they were subjected to involuntary sterilization.

The result of nine years painstaking and sensitive work by filmmaker Lorna Tucker, the film features the testimony of many Native Americans, including three remarkable women who tell their stories - Jean Whitehorse, Yvonne Swan and Charon Asetoyer - as well as a revealing and rare interview with Dr. Reimert Ravenholt whose population control ideas were the framework for some of the government policies directed at Native American women.

It is estimated over a twenty-year period between 1960 and 1980 that tens of thousands of Native American women were sterilized without their knowledge or consent. Due to poor record keeping during this era the number may in fact be much higher. Many of these women went to their graves having suffered this incredible abuse of power.

The film ends with a call to action - to back a campaign to get a formal apology from the US government, which would then open the door for the women to bring a lawsuit.

DVD / 2018 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 74 minutes

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WE ARE THE RADICAL MONARCHS

Directed by Linda Goldstein Knowlton

Follows the Radical Monarchs, a group of young girls of color on the frontlines of social justice.

Set in Oakland, a city with a deep history of social justice movements, WE ARE THE RADICAL MONARCHS documents the Radical Monarchs--an alternative to the Scout movement for girls of color, aged 8-13. Its members earn badges for completing units on social justice including being an LGBTQ ally, the environment, and disability justice.

The group was started by two fierce, queer women of color, Anayvette Martinez and Marilyn Hollinquest as a way to address and center her daughter's experience as a young brown girl. Their work is anchored in the belief that adolescent girls of color need dedicated spaces and that the foundation for this innovative work must also be rooted in fierce inter-dependent sisterhood, self-love, and hope.

The film follows the first troop of Radical Monarchs for over three years, until they graduate, and documents the Co-Founders' struggle to respond to the needs of communities across the US and grow the organization after the viral explosion of interest in the troop's mission to create and inspire a new generation of social justice activists.

DVD / 2018 / (Grades 4-12, College, Adults) / 86 minutes

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FINE LINE, A (EDUCATIONAL VERSION)

Directed by Joanna James

Explores why less than 7% of head chefs and restaurant owners are women, when traditionally women have always held the central role in the kitchen.

Featuring intimate interviews with world-renowned chefs like Dominique Crenn, Lidia Bastianich, Cat Cora, Elena Arzak, Elizabeth Falkner, Maria Loi, Sylvia Weinstock, Michael Anthony and others, A FINE LINE explores pressing issues faced by women in the culinary arts and across all industries, including sexual and workplace harassment, access to capital, unequal pay, and lack of paid family leave and affordable childcare.

An uplifting American success story about perseverance, family, and food, A FINE LINE follows the personal story of Valerie James, a small town restaurateur with a larger than life personality who raised Joanna as a single mother on a mission to do what she loves while raising two kids and the odds stacked against her.

DVD / 2017 / (Grades 7-12, College, Adults) / 56 minutes

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