Since its first season in 1988, POV has presented 25 WMM films beginning that year with its PBS broadcast premiere of Susana Blaustein and Lourdes Portillo’s Academy Award®-nominated Las Madres: The Mothers of Plaza De Mayo, continuing up to POV’s 2015 broadcast of Don’t Tell Anyone (No Le Digas a Nadie) by Mikaela Shwer.
To celebrate our multi-year partnership, POV is streaming four critically acclaimed WMM films from our archive, also available in the lending library for select community screenings, from January 11, 2016 through April 10, 2016.
About the films:
A Healthy Baby Girl (POV 1997)
Filmmaker Judith Helfand turns the camera on herself to document her battle with cancer caused by DES, a drug prescribed to her mother during pregnancy. Refusing to confine the tears, rage, laughter and hope to dinner table conversations, Helfand invites us to witness her personal journey from radical hysterectomy patient to vocal opponent of toxic exposure. From her suburban home to the halls of Congress, the intensely private becomes widely public, and an American family is transformed and strengthened. Winner, 1997 George Foster Peabody Award.
Georgie Girl (POV 2003)
Born George, one-time prostitute-turned-politician Georgina Beyer was elected to New Zealand’s Parliament in 1999, becoming the world’s first transgender person to hold a national office. Amazingly, a mostly white, conservative, rural constituency voted this former sex worker of Maori descent into office. Chronicling Georgina’s transformations from farm boy to celebrated cabaret diva to grassroots community leader, Annie Goldson and Peter Wells’ Georgie Girl presents a remarkable account of Beyer’s precedent-setting accomplishments, revealing her intelligence, charisma and humor.
Love & Diane (POV 2004)
Jennifer Dworkin’s Love & Diane is a frank and astonishingly intimate real-life drama of a mother and daughter desperate for love and forgiveness. During the 1980s, a crack cocaine epidemic ravaged and impoverished many inner-city neighborhoods. As parents like Diane succumbed to addiction, a generation of children like Love entered the foster care system. Shot over ten years, the film centers on Love and Diane after the family is reunited and is struggling to reconnect. Now 18 and a mother herself, Love must reconcile her anger and confront the ways in which her mother’s past mistakes haunt her life. Diane, in turn, makes new choices for herself, seeking to break the treadmill of addiction and poverty. Powerful and immediate, Love & Diane shatters stereotypes and offers hope amidst seemingly impossible odds. Winner, Truer Than Fiction Award, 2003 Independent Spirit Awards; and MTV News Docs Prize, 2003 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.
Ella Es el Matador (POV 2009)
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. Ella Es el 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 Mari Paz Vega and neophyte Eva Florencia. These women are gender pioneers, but what emerges as their truest motivation is their sheer passion — for bullfighting and the pursuit of a dream. Winner, 2008 Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award for Documentary
More about Women Make Movies:
Established in 1972 to address the under-representation and misrepresentation of women in the media industry, Women Make Movies is a multicultural, multiracial, non-profit media arts organization which facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women. The organization provides services to both users and makers of film and video programs, with a special emphasis on supporting work by women of color. Women Make Movies facilitates the development of feminist media through an internationally recognized Distribution Service and a Production Assistance Program.
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