*** Notice: For the protection of property rights, this catalog is available for online browsing only. Please drop us a line if you would like to receive a copiable version of this catalog. Thank You!

Women's Studies

FLY SO FAR

Directed by Celina Escher

A grave warning of how far state control of women's bodies can go, FLY SO FAR follows Teodora Vasquez, who was sentenced to thirty years in a Salvadorean prison after she suffered a stillbirth.

As states in the U.S. enact abortion bans, FLY SO FAR serves as a grave warning of how far government control of women's bodies can go. This brave film from Swiss-Salvadorean filmmaker Celina Escher is set in El Salvador, a country with some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, including the criminalization of those who experience miscarriages and other obstetric emergencies.

The narrative centers on Teodora Vasquez, who was in the ninth month of her second pregnancy when she fainted and suffered a stillbirth. When she woke up at the hospital, she was accused of murder and was sentenced to thirty years in prison for aggravated homicide. At Ilopango Women's Prison, she becomes the spokesperson for The Seventeen, a group of working-class women who were all incarcerated after having miscarriages. Many of these same women became pregnant after being sexually assaulted. While it exposes brutal human rights abuses, FLY SO FAR is unmistakably a story of collective resistance, activism, sisterhood, as well as the self-determination and agency of women.

DVD (Spanish, Color, Closed Captioned) / 2021 / 89 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

AMERICA'S WAR ON ABORTION

By Deeyah Khan

In this BAFTA award-winning film, two-time Emmy and Peabody award-winning filmmaker Deeyah Khan examines the erosion of reproductive rights in the United States, foregrounding the stories of those often forgotten in this 'war' who nonetheless find themselves on its frontline: impoverished women and women of color.

In this BAFTA award-winning film, two-time Emmy and Peabody award-winning filmmaker Deeyah Khan examines the erosion of reproductive rights in the United States, foregrounding the stories of those often forgotten in this 'war' who nonetheless find themselves on its frontline: impoverished women and women of color. Khan films at abortion clinics which are under siege from fundamentalist Christian protesters, and meets the doctors who face an ever-present threat of violence, even murder, from anti-abortion fanatics. She meets a man convicted of bombing clinics, and the women who face one of the most difficult decisions of their lives in choosing to have an abortion. In his time in office, Donald Trump wooed evangelical Christian voters by enacting anti-abortion policies; and with a political battle raging in the Supreme Court, the right of American women to choose is under threat. Deeyah Khan goes on the frontline to find the people who will be most affected by the abortion wars.

DVD (Color) / 2020 / 65 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

BELLY OF THE BEAST

By Erika Cohn, Angela Tucker, Christen Marquez, and Nicole Docta

Filmed over seven years with extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated people, BELLY OF THE BEAST exposes a pattern of illegal sterilizations, modern-day eugenics and reproductive injustice in California prisons.

When a courageous young woman and a radical lawyer discover a pattern of illegal sterilizations in California's women's prisons, they wage a near-impossible battle against the Department of Corrections. With a growing team of investigators inside prison working with colleagues on the outside, they uncover a series of statewide crimes -- from inadequate health care to sexual assault to coercive sterilizations -- primarily targeting women of color. This shocking legal drama captured over 7-years features extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated people, demanding attention to a shameful and ongoing legacy of eugenics and reproductive injustice in the United States.

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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

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

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

BIRTH ON THE BORDER

By Ellie Lobovits

This intimate and personal documentary follows two women from Ciudad Juarez as they cross the U.S.-Mexico border legally to give birth in Texas, putting their hearts and bodies on the line as they confront harassment at the hands of U.S. border officials.

One million people legally cross the U.S.-Mexico border every day in both directions. Among them are women who cross for the purposes of childbirth. With the threat of obstetrical violence in Mexican hospitals and the desire for natural birth with midwives, Gaby and Luisa make the difficult decision to cross the border to El Paso, seeking a safer future for their children. Even with papers, their journeys are uncertain.

Against the backdrop of oppressive U.S. border policy and growing debates over immigration, these women's stories of risk, strength, and resilience shed light on the realities and challenges of life on the border.

DVD (English, Spanish, Color, Closed Captioned) / 2018 / 28 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

62 DAYS

By Rebecca Haimowitz

62 DAYS is an emotional short film that tells the story of a brain-dead pregnant woman whose family was forced to keep her on life support against their will. Marlise Munoz was 33 years old and 14 weeks pregnant with her second child when she suffered a pulmonary embolism and was pronounced brain-dead in a hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. She and her husband Erick had discussed their end-of-life wishes and Marlise was clear: she did not want to be on mechanical support under any circumstances. But Marlise was kept alive because of a little-known law that states "a person may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment… from a pregnant patient." The film reveals that this is not an anomaly: there are currently 32 states (and counting) with similar or identical pregnancy exclusion policies.

The Munoz' story is the jumping-off point for an urgent examination of a growing trend of laws that seek to control a pregnant woman's body. Following this family as they journey from private loss, to unwanted media attention, and finally towards activism as they fight to change this law, 62 DAYS powerfully addresses critical issues surrounding bodily integrity and women's health.

DVD (Color) / 2017 / 29 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

BIRTHRIGHT: A WAR STORY

By Civia Tamarkin

BIRTHRIGHT: A WAR STORY is the real-life version of "The Handmaid's Tale." In America today, a radical movement has tightened its grip on state power, seeking to control whether and how women bear children. In this crusade, pregnant women are subject to state control, surveillance, and punishment. Even women who don't want an abortion face shocking risks-like the pregnant woman in Alabama who faced criminal charges for taking half a Valium. Or like the grieving woman in Nebraska who, already devastated by a bleak diagnosis at 22 weeks, was forced to continue an unviable and dangerous pregnancy because of a new "fetal pain" law. BIRTHRIGHT: A WAR STORY tells these stories of women caught up in a frightening new legal system, which criminalizes and physically violates women, threatens our lives, and challenges our constitutional protections.

DVD (Color, Closed Captioned) / 2017 / 100 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

HUSH

Director Punam Kumar Gill

The conspiracy has been coined as the biggest health cover up since cigarettes.

Hush is a liberating conversation about abortion and women's health. It additionally explores a conspiracy relating to the withholding of the information required for solid decision making.

When director Punam Kumar Gill and producers Drew and Joses Martin heard that the health information being given to women prior to an abortion was subject to the politics of the people involved, they determined to put aside individual ideology and take an honest, scientific look at the highly disputed and politicized information around abortions' long-term effects on women's health. What Punam discovers in the process is not just vital to the subject of reproductive health, but also critical to her own life and integral to the ongoing progress of women everywhere.

DVD / 2016 / 101 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

BEAUTIFUL SIN

By Gabriela Quiros

BEAUTIFUL SIN tells a surprising reproductive rights story, one with resonance for the United States and reproductive rights as a whole. What if you desperately wanted a baby, but your country and religion prohibited you from trying the one medical treatment that could help you? BEAUTIFUL SIN tells the decade-long story of three couples struggling with infertility in Costa Rica. In 2000, anti-abortion activists, with the help of the Catholic Church and a U.S. group, won a legal case that banned in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in Costa Rica and gave the embryo legal rights, making Costa Rica the only country in the world that has outlawed the treatment, in which doctors create embryos in the lab.

Filmmaker Gabriela Quiros charts the emotional journey of infertility and explores the legal ramifications of reproductive rights, by telling a universal story of what happens when state power and religious ideology clash with the desire to have a child.

DVD (Color) / 2014 / 56 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

AFTER TILLER

Directed by Martha Shane, Lane Wilson

Sheds a humanistic light on the heated abortion debate by going inside the lives of the last four doctors in America who openly provide third-trimester abortions.

Since the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas in May 2009, there are only four American doctors left who openly provide third-trimester abortions. AFTER TILLER paints a complex, compassionate portrait of these physicians--Dr. LeRoy Carhart, Dr. Warren Hern, Dr. Susan Robinson and Dr. Shelley Sella--who have become the new number-one targets of the anti-abortion movement, yet continue to risk their lives every day to do work that many believe is murder, but which they believe is profoundly important for their patients' lives.

The film weaves together revealing, in-depth interviews with the doctors with intimate verite scenes from their lives and inside their clinics, where they counsel and care for their anxious, vulnerable patients at an important crossroads in their lives. By sharing the moving stories of several of these patients, AFTER TILLER illuminates the experiences of women who seek late abortions and the reasons why they do so.

DVD (Closed Captioned) / 2013 / (Grades 10-12, College, Adult) / 88 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

MOTHERHOOD ARCHIVES, THE

By Irene Lusztig

Archival montage, science fiction and an homage to 1970s feminist filmmaking are woven together to form this haunting and lyrical essay film excavating hidden histories of childbirth in the twentieth century. After several years of buying films online and working in historical archives, award-winning filmmaker Irene Lusztig amassed an unusual and fascinating collection of found footage aimed at teaching women how to be pregnant, give birth, and look after babies, along with training films for obstetricians and health care professionals, and a handful of home movies. Assembling her extraordinary trove from over 100 different sources, including newly rediscovered Soviet and French childbirth material tracing the evolution of Lamaze, The Motherhood Archives inventively untangles the complex, sometimes surprising genealogies of maternal education. This extraordinary achievement illuminates our changing narratives of maternal success and failure while raising important questions about our social and historical constructions of motherhood.

DVD (English, French, Color, With English subtitles) / 2013 / 91 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

MIDDLE OF EVERYWHERE: THE ABORTION DEBATE FROM AMERICA'S HEARTLAND

By Rebecca Lee & Jesper Malmberg

South Dakota is America's heartland-waving cornfields, hard-working farmers, family values and a population of 750,000, the majority of whom identify as conservative and anti-abortion. Native daughter Rebecca Lee returns home in 2006 on the brink of a historic state vote: House Bill 1215 could make South Dakota the first state to outlaw most abortions since Roe vs. Wade passed almost 30 years earlier. In The Middle of Everywhere, Lee discovers the debate to be complex, with both sides claiming compassion for women and the same desire to stop the need for abortion.

When 1215 fails to pass, Lee sets out to uncover what would make a self-proclaimed pro-life state vote against the very measure that would end most legal abortions. South Dakotans appear conflicted in their beliefs: passing the Pharmacist Refusal Law, allowing pharmacists and doctors the right not to dispense birth control if doing so goes against their religious views, yet voting along pro-choice lines to keep abortion safe and legal. Was the vote a simple misunderstanding of what it means to be pro-choice? Was it a deeply-held resentment against government intrusion into people's private lives? Whatever the final reason, The Middle of Everywhere reveals that the issue goes beyond the simple choices of being for or against abortion to the much deeper question of what values we hold dear as Americans and as humans beings.

DVD (Color) / 2008 / 52 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

I HAD AN ABORTION

By Gillian Aldrich and Jennifer Baumgardner

Underneath the din of politicians posturing about "life" and "choice" and beyond the shouted slogans about murder and rights, there are real stories of real women who have had abortions. Each year in the US, 1.3 million abortions occur, but the topic is still so stigmatized it's never discussed in polite company. Powerful, poignant, and fiercely honest, I HAD AN ABORTION tackles this taboo, featuring 10 women – including famed feminist Gloria Steinem – who candidly describe experiences spanning seven decades, from the years before Roe v. Wade to the present day. Filmmakers Jennifer Baumgardner (author of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future) and Gillian Aldrich insightfully document how changing societal pressures have affected women's choices and experiences.

Cutting across age, race, class and religion, the film unfolds personal narratives with intimate interviews, archival footage, family photos and home movies. Arranged chronologically, the stories begin with Florence Rice, now 86, telling without regret about her abortion in the 1930s. Other women speaking out include Marion Banzhaf, who, inspired by both the Miss America protests and the Stonewall rebellion, fundraised on her campus to pay for her abortion, and Robin Ringleka-Kottke, who found herself pregnant as an 18-year-old pro-life Catholic. With heartfelt stories that are never sentimentalized, I HAD AN ABORTION personalizes what has become a vicious and abstract debate.

DVD (Color) / 2005 / 55 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

JANE: AN ABORTION SERVICE

By Kate Kirtz and Nell Lundy

This fascinating political look at a little-known chapter in women's history tells the story of "Jane", the Chicago-based women's health group who performed nearly 12,000 safe illegal abortions between 1969 and 1973 with no formal medical training. As Jane members describe finding feminism and clients describe finding Jane, archival footage and recreations mingle to depict how the repression of the early sixties and social movements of the late sixties influenced this unique group. Both vital knowledge and meditation on the process of empowerment, Jane: An Abortion Service showcases the importance of preserving women's knowledge in the face of revisionist history.

"Jane: An Abortion Service" was funded by the Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funds provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

DVD (Color) / 1996 / 58 minutes

[Go top]

>>> Add Cart <<<

***Price on web-site may not be current and is subject to modification by quotation***

Email :
inquiry@learningemall.com

Websites :
http://www.learningemall.com [ English ]
http://www.learningemall.com.hk [ Chinese ]

Follow us: