Women Make Movies

Once upon a time, the Venezuelan village of Congo Mirador was prosperous, alive with fisherman and poets. Now it is decaying and disintegrating—a small but prophetic reflection of Venezuela itself.

Exploring the fallout of MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini's startling discovery that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, and her journey to push for the first-ever legislation in the U.S. to govern against bias in the algorithms that impact us all.

In the 1970s, five men struggling with being gay in their Evangelical church started a bible study to help each other leave the "homosexual lifestyle." They quickly received over 25,000 letters from people asking for help and formalized as Exodus International, the largest and most controversial conversion therapy organization in the world. But leaders struggled with a secret: their own “same-sex attractions” never went away. After years as Christian superstars in the religious right, many of these men and women have come out as LGBTQ, disavowing the very movement they helped start. Focusing on the dramatic journeys of former conversion therapy leaders, current members, and a survivor, PRAY AWAY chronicles the “ex gay" movement’s rise to power, persistent influence, and the profound harm it causes.

In rural Afghanistan, people are storytellers who make up and tell each other tales of mystery and imagination to explain the world in which they live. The shepherd children own the mountains and, although no adults are around, they know the rules; they know that boys and girls are not allowed to be together. The boys practice with their slings to fight wolves. The girls smoke secretly and play at getting married, dreaming of finding a husband soon. They gossip about Sediqa; she’s eleven years old and an outsider. The girls think she is cursed. Qodrat, also eleven years old, becomes the subject of gossip when his mother remarries an old man with two wives. Qodrat roams alone in the most isolated parts of the mountains, where he meets Sediqa and they become friends.

A filmmaker ventures into the archives of her photographer mother to construct a personal story of love, loss, and finding someone in the work they leave behind.

If 18-year-old Sonita had a say, Michael Jackson and Rihanna would be her parents and she'd be a rapper who tells the story of Afghan women and their fate as child brides. She finds out that her family plans to sell her to an unknown husband for $9,000.

Cynthia Lowen’s powerful documentary Netizens highlights three women as each wages war against one of the internet’s most malevolent forces: prevalent and un-policed misogyny, harassment, and stalking. Directed at thousands of women daily by way of social media, it lies in plain sight, and its ramifications never remain only online. The film deftly depicts not only the forms digital abuse can take, from non-consensual pornography to invasion of privacy, but also the consequences for its victims.

“Sweet Bananas traces the contrasting lives of some working class and upper class women, who end up all getting along.” -- E. Ann Kaplan

A fearless sea captain, Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, sails a ship through loopholes in international law, providing abortions on the high seas, and leaving in her wake a network of emboldened activists who trust women to handle abortion on their own terms.

The film evolves around questions of identity, popular memory and culture. While focusing on aspects of Vietnamese reality as seen through the lives and history of women resistance in Vietnam and in the U.S, it raises questions on the politics of interviewing and documenting.

A nonfiction account of the Ferguson uprising told by the people who lived it, this is an unflinching look at how the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown inspired a community to fight back—and sparked a global movement.

An unsettling and eye opening exploration into the spread of the radical Islamic school Red Mosque, which trains legions of children to devote their lives to jihad, or holy war, from a very young age. With incredible access and chilling footage, Among the Believers is a timely and relevant look into the causes that have led to the growth of radical Islam in Pakistan and around the world.

The planet’s busiest maternity hospital is located in one of its poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. There, poor women face devastating consequences as their country struggles with reproductive health policy and the politics of conservative Catholic ideologies.

When a courageous young woman and a radical lawyer discover a pattern of illegal involuntary sterilizations in California’s women’s prison system, they take to the courtroom to 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 dangerously inadequate health care to sexual assault to coercive sterilizations - primarily targeting women of color. But no one believes them. This shocking legal drama captured over seven years features extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated women, demanding our attention to a shameful and ongoing legacy of eugenics and reproductive injustice in the United States.

Journalist Assia Boundaoui sets out to investigate long-brewing rumors that her quiet, predominantly Arab-American neighborhood was being monitored by the FBI.

At the age of 45, actress, writer, wife, and mother-of-two Laury Sacks had a reputation as the quickest wit in the room. At the age of 46, she began forgetting words. Soon she could barely speak. When a friend suggested making a film to capture her fast-changing new life, Laury jumped at the idea. Laury was always a storyteller and she wanted to tell her last story herself. This is her story.

Set in the Hasidic enclave of Borough Park, Brooklyn, "93Queen" follows a group of tenacious Hasidic women who are smashing the patriarchy in their community by creating the first all-female volunteer ambulance corps in New York City. With unprecedented-and insider-access, "93Queen" offers up a unique portrayal of a group of religious women who are taking matters into their own hands to change their own community from within.

What might be revealed in the process of inviting strangers to act out and respond to 1970s feminism forty years later? Between 2015 and 2017, hundreds of strangers in communities all over the US were invited to read aloud and respond to letters from the 70s sent to the editor of Ms. Magazine–the first mainstream feminist magazine in the US. The intimate, provocative, and sometimes heartbreaking conversations that emerge from these spontaneous performances make us think critically about the past, present, and future of feminism.

The first all-women Western. Set in a fictional 1850, the movie is about one woman's attempt to recruit others for an all-women commune. "..a Warholesque frolic" -- Daphne Davis, Women's Wear Daily " Some great comments about women, men and the pros and cons of living with either." -- Women & Film: International Festival, 1973 "A group of wonderfully idiosyncratic women improvise characters close to their real lives and fantasy lives. Funny, ambling, off-handedly lyrical, the film....is above all excellent for sharing warm feelings in a group." -- Ms. magazine

1985 Argentine documentary film directed by Susana Blaustein Muñoz and Lourdes Portillo about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.