Women-filmmakers

A Sound Of My Own

After the death of her father, Marja Burchard followed in his footsteps and became the leader of the legendary krautrock collective Embryo. While carrying on his musical legacy, she also strives to forge her own path in a male-dominated industry. _A Sound of My Own_ immerses viewers in Marja's sonic world, where images and sounds from the past and present merge into a composition of her life—un...

Upstairs With David Amram

Before her illustrious career as one of Canada’s foremost documentary filmmakers, Alanis Obomsawin was an acclaimed singer and musician at the forefront of the Indigenous rights movement in North America. During this unprecedented time, she befriended fellow musician and activist David Amram, often described as the “Renaissance man of American music.” A legendary talent and multi-instrumentalis...

Christmas at Moose Factory

Filmed at Christmastime in a residential school in Northern Ontario, this first short film by Alanis Obomsawin is composed entirely of drawings and stories told by young Cree children. The film gives voice to the many children forced to attend this residential school, revealing their beauty and resilience.

Sol

Solomon Tapatsiaq Uyarasuk was a charismatic young Inuk – an amateur acrobat, musician and poet. A beautiful soul, tormented by his people’s lot, who died far too young. This film is a stirring tribute to the young man. Starting with a celebration of Sol’s life, which ended suddenly in a holding cell under suspicious circumstances, the filmmakers shift into an investigative mode, seeking to unc...

The First Indigenous Female Pornographer

_The First Indigenous Female Pornographer_ centers on Audrey Little-breast, a native woman whose life and work defies categorization. During a candid interview, she unravels the mysterious settler desire and sexual appetite for “imaginary Indians” that guided her pornographic work in the 1970s and contemplates its impact on Indigenous sexuality. This mockumentary blends and bends archival foota...

The Algerian Novel

_The Algerian Novel_ is a film devised in three chapters that offers a sensitive explanation of a nation’s complex relations with its history and the role of images in the construction of its national novel and archetypes.

The Andrea Doria's Last Message

An Italian grandmother tells the story of her immigration to North America, shaped by a last-minute decision that altered her fate. By changing her journey, she narrowly avoids a tragic voyage tied to the Andrea Doria, revealing how a single choice can shape generations.

Too Early/Too Late

Inspired by a letter by Friedrich Engels and a 1974 account of two militant Marxist writers who had been imprisoned by the Nasser regime, Straub-Huillet filmed this film in France and Egypt during 1980. They reflect on Egypt’s history of peasant struggle and liberation from Western colonization, and link it to class tensions in France shortly before the Revolution of 1789, quoting texts by Enge...

Whose Language You Don’t Understand

_Whose Language You Don’t Understand_, named after a novel by the late Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948-2007) is a video cycle exploring the limits of language. Fritz spent most of her life, over 30 years, working on a cycle of dense and complex novels she called _The Fortress_, consisting of over 10,000 pages and still unfinished at the time of her death. Her project is an unusual and asto...

Slet 1988

In _Slet 1988_, dancer Sonja Vukićević, aged 74, moves through socialist-modernist spaces; her body is an archive of the last mass performance in Yugoslavia. Her gestures echo past rhythms and present realities, intertwining with a 1988 teenage girl’s diary to reveal the shift from socialist collectivism to rising individualism, while a new national collective body is creeping in and will soon ...

Yugoslavia: How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body

The film deals with the question of how ideology performs itself in public space through mass performances. The author collected and analyzed film and video footage from the period of Yugoslavia (1945 – 2000), focusing on state performances (youth work actions, May Day parades, celebrations of the Youth Day, etc.) as well as counter-demonstrations (’68, student and civic demonstrations in the ‘90...

Landscapes of Resistance

97-year-old antifascist fighter Sonja was one of the first female Yugoslav Partisans and a member of the resistance in Auschwitz. By listening to Sonja’s stories, we travel through the landscapes of her revolutionary past, as her memories start to intertwine with the filmmakers’ own confrontation with the rising fascism in Europe today.