Film Categories: Work by Women

  • New Jersey Nights

    “New Jersey Nights” is a film about lingering emotional memories. It is a narrative film which operates at the level of a dream. Three people converse without real conversation: the dialogues between a woman and two men are constructed from random statements and monologues which overlap, almost meet and then move apart. The images were chosen for their ability to evoke private memories which have universal meaning. These images represent moments that have become locked in memory and which act as keys to persons, places, and events. The optical effects suggest the relentless tearing of photographs, the images dissolving into…

  • New Shoes: An Interview in Exactly 5 Minutes

    “New Shoes” is an interview in exactly five minutes, which gives a candid portrait of a male-female relationship that terminated with dire consequences. Symbolic imagery of a fairy princess intercut with the interview and a temporal distance from the experience itself bring a quick sense of irony to the event. Originally produced as a segment of “Five Feminist Minutes.”

  • New View, New Eyes

    A rare combination of personal diary and travelogue, “New View, New Eyes” traces the filmmaker’s efforts to carve out her own identity, as she makes her first visit to her father’s homeland of India. The journey is an uncomfortable one, as she struggles with “western” preconceptions of India – poverty, beggars, disease – and realizes that she herself has come there as a stranger.

  • At Present

    “What’s involved in love?-power, control-is that what we’re talking about?” This film is about love-relations between men and women, conversations in the air. Men are heard in voice-over speaking a love-talk which is personal, though anonymous, or singular. Another voice-over reads parables, which present a context for the possibility of love or spirit in the world at large. The film ends optimistically: a smile slowly spreads on a man’s face; women addressing men in their own voices. “He stored the Divine Light in a vessel, but the vessel, unable to contain the Holy Radiance, burst, and its shards, permeated with…

  • Nice

    Yet another girl sitting by the phone waiting for a roving boy to ring. The same old story – until she meets his latest girlfriend…

  • Nice Girls Don’t Do It

    “Nice Girls Don’t Do It” is a not-quite-conventional documentary about female ejaculation. While referencing some of the codes of pornography (i.e. out-of-focus, leather, explicit close-ups), the film clearly works against conventional pornography in its use of black and white film, text, and in its positioning of the spectator. The film serves less as a treatise than as an invitation to its spectators to fill in the gaps created by the film – to query, challenge, investigate, object, corroborate, perhaps inveigh against, but ultimately to create a space for others to speak about a part of female experience long-shrouded in silence.

  • Night Stream

    “Night Stream”, a short experimental film about rebirth and fertility, succinctly evokes the flow of tension and trance within the dream state. Selected screenings: New York International Independent Film Festival, New York,1999; Bangladesh International Film Festival, 1999; Madrid Experimental Film Festival, Madrid, Spain,1997; Ann Arbor Festival of Independent and Experimental Film, Ann Arbor, MI,1996.

  • 1933

    “1933. The year? the number? the title? Was it (the film) made then? It’s a memory! (i.e. a Film.) No, it’s many memories. It’s so sad and funny: the departed, departing people, cars, streets! It hurries, it’s gone, it’s back! the film (of 1933?) was made in 1967. You find out, if you don’t already know, how naming tints pure vision.” – Michael Snow “The repeated images are such that they appear to be different each time; to be expanding. ‘1933’ has a machine-mechanical doll rhythmic-like structure.” – Robert Cowan, Take One

  • No Choice

    “No Choice” is a short documentary that deals with the abortion issue and how it relates to women living in poverty. Five women, ranging in age from twenty to forty-five, speak about the lack of choice available to poor people and how, because of their poverty, their reproductive capabilities are often controlled by extraneous factors. Part of “Five Feminist Minutes.”

  • Northbound Cairo

    “It’s no bag of pretzels!” Little does Max realize that it is a bag of pretzels, and much, much more. His planned trip to Georgian Bay to document a self-absorbed artist’s work is turned into a personal nightmare by the artist’s doting wife, indifferent children, and Mara, a young woman who has appeared out of an Egyptian dream to taunt him and to confront his neo-macho self-image. An idyllic drive into cottage country is transformed into a metaphorical journey through unfamiliar territory and cinematic absurdity. “Northbound Cairo” is a half-hour experimental comedy. Mara, a vivacious, young woman, has an inexplicable…