March 2012
WOMEN TAKE THE REEL
A film festival celebrating Women's History Month


Opening Night
ORGASM INC.- the strange science of female pleasure
Director: Liz Canner
Thursday - March 1, 2012
7PM
MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue[6-120]

In the shocking and hilarious documentary ORGASM INC., filmmaker Liz Canner takes a job editing erotic videos for a drug trial for a pharmaceutical company. Her employer is developing what they hope will be the first Viagra drug for women that wins FDA approval to treat a new disease: Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD). Liz gains permission to film the company for her own documentary. Initially, she plans to create a movie about science and pleasure but she soon begins to suspect that her employer, along with a cadre of other medical companies, might be trying to take advantage of women (and potentially endanger their health) in pursuit of billion dollar profits. ORGASM INC. is a powerful look inside the medical industry and the marketing campaigns that are literally and figuratively reshaping our everyday lives around health, illness, desire - and that ultimate moment: orgasm. Upbeat, engaging, enlightening, and provocative, ORGASM INC. will change the way you think about sex.

CLUB NATIVE: How Thick Is Your Blood?
Director: Tracey Deer
Tuesday - March 6, 2012
1PM
UMASS Boston, Campus Center, 3rd Floor, Room 3540

In Kahnawake, the hometown of Mohawk director Tracey Deer (Mohawk Girls), there are two unspoken rules: Don't marry a non-Native, and never, ever have a child with a non-Native. In a community where tribal membership rests on the equivocal measurement of blood quantum (literally the measurement of blood "purity"), following one's heart requires risking one's Mohawk status, as well as one's family and community.

With warmth, intelligence and humor, Deer turns her camera on her own family and the lives of four proud Mohawk women deeply impacted by racism and prejudice rooted in Canada's highly discriminatory 1876 Indian Act, and exacerbated by lingering preconceptions about blood quantum that have left a divisive legacy in her community. Club Native raises critical questions about belonging and identity, the heartbreak of "marrying out" of the Mohawk Nation, and the unjust patriarchal laws that disenfranchise Native women. It is a candid and engrossing work about the pain, confusion, and frustration suffered by many First Nations women, but also a testament to the triumph of love and the resilience of the human spirit.

ELLA ES EL MATADOR- (She is the Matador)
Directors: Gemma Cubero and Celeste Carrasco
Spanish and Italian/English subtitles
Thursday - March 8, 2012
7PM
MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue[6-120]

For Spaniards-and for the world-nothing has expressed their country's traditionally rigid gender roles more powerfully than the image of the male matador. So sacred was the bullfighter's masculinity to Spanish identity that a 1908 law barred women from the sport.

Visually stunning and beautifully crafted, ELLA ES EL MATADOR (She is the Matador) reveals the surprising history of the women who made such a law necessary, and offers fascinating profiles of two female matadors currently in the arena, the acclaimed Maripaz Vega and neophyte Eva Florencia. These women are gender pioneers by necessity, confronting both bull and social code. But what emerges through this mesmerizing film is their truest motivation-a sheer passion for bullfighting, in the pursuit of a dream.

YOU AND ME (Women Lia)
Director: Liwen Ma
Tuesday - March 13, 2012
6-8PM
Northeastern, Location: Raytheon Theater (Egan Center)
Chinese, English subtitles

The film You and Me is the story of an old woman and a female college student who gradually develop an emotional bond as they spend more time together. From the first day that Xiao Ma moves into a small room owned by the old woman, the unlikely couple finds each other intolerable and stubbornly selfish. As the two feisty women continue to insult each other, they also develop a strange closeness when the spring sunshine gradually melts away the cold winter.



!WOMEN, ART REVOLUTION
Director: Lynn Hershmann-Lesson
Thursday - March 15, 2011
7PM
MIT [6-120]

Through intimate interviews, art, and rarely seen archival film and video footage, !Women Art Revolution reveals how the Feminist Art Movement fused free speech and politics into an art that radically transformed the art and culture of our times. For over forty years, Director Lynn Hershman-Lesson has collected hundreds of hours of interviews with visionary artists, historians, curators and critics who shaped the beliefs and values of the Feminist Art Movement and reveal previously undocumented strategies used to politicize female artists and integrate women into art structures. !Women Art Revolution elaborates the relationship of the Feminist Art Movement to the 1960s anti-war and civil rights movements and explains how historical events, such as the all-male protest exhibition against the invasion of Cambodia, sparked the first of many feminist actions against major cultural institutions. The film details major developments in women's art of the 1970s, including the first feminist art education programs, political organizations and protests, alternative art spaces such as the A.I.R. Gallery and Franklin Furnace in New York and the Los Angeles Women's Building, publications such as Chrysalis and Heresies, and landmark exhibitions, performances, and installations of public art that changed the entire direction of art.

LUNAFEST: short films by, for, about Women
Featuring films by Christy Turlington Burns, Susan Koenen, Lori Petchers, Shideh Faramand, Lake Bell, Andrea Dorfman, Laura Green, Mary Robertson and Saba Riazi

Film Listing

Tuesday - March 20, 2012
7PM
Simmons College, Main College Building C103
THE PRICE OF SEX: An Investigation of Sex Trafficking
Directed by Mimi Chakarova
Wednesday - March 21, 2012
7PM
Boston College, Cushing Hall 001
Subtitled (Russian/Turkish/Bulgarian/Romanian)

The Price of Sex is a feature-length documentary about young Eastern European women who've been drawn into a netherworld of sex trafficking and abuse. Intimate, harrowing and revealing, it is a story told by the young women who were supposed to be silenced by shame, fear and violence. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, who grew up in Bulgaria, takes us on a personal investigative journey, exposing the shadowy world of sex trafficking from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and Western Europe. Filming undercover and gaining extraordinary access, Chakarova illuminates how even though some women escape to tell their stories, sex trafficking thrives.

THE FAT BODY (IN)VISIBLE
Directed by Margitte Kristjansson
Thursday - March 22, 2012
7PM
MIT [4-270]
What happens when women decide to love their bodies, no matter what size? This documentary short by fat acceptance activist Margitte Kristjansson features two of her fellow fat acceptance activists, Keena and Jessica, who share their experiences of being judged by society for their decision to not bow to how women are expected to look - including being harassed and discriminated against because of their size. Undeterred, they talk about how the fat acceptance movement has allowed them to become empowered through fashion, explore the intersection of race and fatness, and how they found community support through social media and blogs.
Saturday - March 24, 2012
CULTURES OF RESISTANCE
Director: Iara Lee
Tuesday - March 27, 2012
6PM
Lesley University, Amphitheater, University Hall 2-150 1815 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA, 02138
English and Arabic, Burmese, Xhosa, Farsi, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese w/ English subtitles

Does each gesture really make a difference? Can music and dance be weapons of peace? In 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, director Iara Lee embarked on a journey to better understand a world increasingly embroiled in conflict and, as she saw it, heading for self-destruction. After several years, travelling over five continents, Iara encountered growing numbers of people who committed their lives to promoting change. This is their story. From IRAN, where graffiti and rap became tools in fighting government repression, to BURMA, where monks acting in the tradition of Gandhi take on a dictatorship, moving on to BRAZIL, where musicians reach out to slum kids and transform guns into guitars, and ending in PALESTINIAN refugee camps in LEBANON, where photography, music, and film have given a voice to those rarely heard, CULTURES OF RESISTANCE explores how art and creativity can be ammunition in the battle for peace and justice. Featuring: MedellĂ­n poets for peace, Capoeira masters from Brazil, Niger Delta militants, Iranian graffiti artists, women's movement leaders in Rwanda, Lebanon's refugee filmmakers, U.S. political pranksters, indigenous Kayapo activists from the Xingu River, Israeli dissidents, hip-hop artists from Palestine, and many more...

NO WAY OUT BUT ONE

The Courts Called Her Crazy.
The FBI Called Her a Kidnapper.
Her Kids Called Her Their Hero.

Suppose a family court judge gave custody of your children to a man you knew was beating them. What would you do? Until 1994, Holly Collins had played by the rules. That changed when a judge gave custody of her children to their father, the man who had fractured her son's skull. No Way Out But One explores a shocking national scandal that is also a national secret - that men who beat their wives and children usually get custody when they go after it in family courts. Holly Collins was able to do what few women have been able to do. She successfully kidnapped her children and went underground. Ultimately she became the first American to be granted asylum by the Dutch government on grounds of domestic violence. BU's Professor Garland Waller is the producer.

MISS REPRESENTATION
Director: Jennifer Siebel Newsom
Thursday - March 29, 2012
7-9PM
Brandeis, Golding 110

Like drawing back a curtain to let bright light stream in, Miss Representation uncovers a glaring reality we live with every day but fail to see. Directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the film explores how mainstream media contributes to the under-representation of women in influential positions in America and challenges the media's limiting and often disparaging portrayals of women, which make it difficult for the average girl to see herself as powerful.

FILM FESTIVAL CLOSING NIGHT
Saturday - March 31, 2012
MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue[6-120]

THE HURT LOCKER
Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow
3PM

The Hurt Locker is a riveting, suspenseful portrait of the courage under fire of the military's unrecognized heroes: the technicians of a bomb squad who volunteer to challenge the odds and save lives doing one of the world's most dangerous jobs. Three members of the Army's elite Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad battle insurgents and one another as they search for and disarm a wave of roadside bombs on the streets of Baghdad-in order to try and make the city a safer place for Iraqis and Americans alike. Their mission is clear-protect and save-but it's anything but easy, as the margin of error when defusing a war-zone bomb is zero. This thrilling and heart-pounding look at the psychology of bomb technicians and the effects of risk and danger on the human psyche is a fictional tale inspired by real events by journalists and screenwriter Mark Boal, who was embedded with a special bomb unit in Iraq. In Iraq, it is Soldier vernacular to speak of explosions as sending you to "the hurt locker." 131 minutes.

WEAPON OF WAR
Directed by: Ilse van Velzen & Femke van Velzen
5:30PM

In no other country has sexual violence matched the scale of brutality reached in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). During nearly two decades of conflicts between rebels and government forces, an estimated 150,000 Congolese women and girls fell victim to mass rape. That figure continues to rise. Weapon of War, an award-winning film honored by Amnesty International, journeys to the heart of this crisis, where we meet its perpetrators. In personal interviews, soldiers and former combatants provide openhearted but shocking testimony about rape in the DRC. Despite differing views on causes or criminal status, all reveal how years of conflict, as well as discrimination against women, have normalized brutal sexual violence. We also see former rapists struggling to change their own or others' behavior, and reintegrate into their communities. French/Swahili English Subtitles. 59 minutes.

PARIAH
Director: Dee Rees
Location/Date/Time TBD
7:45PM
Emerson College

Adepero Oduye, who had earlier starred in the short film, portrays Alike (pronounced ah-lee-kay), a 17-year-old African-American woman who lives with her parents Audrey and Arthur (Kim Wayans and Charles Parnell) and younger sister Sharonda (Sahra Mellesse) in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood. She has a flair for poetry, and is a good student at her local high school. Alike is quietly but firmly embracing her identity as a lesbian. With the sometimes boisterous support of her best friend, out lesbian Laura (Pernell Walker), Alike is especially eager to find a girlfriend. At home, her parents' marriage is strained and there is further tension in the household whenever Alike's development becomes a topic of discussion. Pressed by her mother into making the acquaintance of a colleague's daughter, Bina (Aasha Davis), Alike finds Bina to be unexpectedly refreshing to socialize with. Wondering how much she can confide in her family, Alike strives to get through adolescence with grace, humor, and tenacity - sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, but always moving forward.