CURRENT

FemExFilmArchive interview with Lynne Sachs by Nadia Zafar

This collaborative project is an ongoing collective archive of interviews with feminist experimental filmmakers started in 2017 by feminist filmmaking students at UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis. Our students were invited to each select a filmmaker, research their work in detail, and invite the filmmaker to have a conversation with them.

That’s so Shanghai: YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT at China Women’s Film Festival

While the women’s film festival in Taiwan has an almost-20-year history, and many female directors in Hong Kong have been making their marks since the 1930s, women’s cinema is still in its infancy in mainland China. Although they came from different backgrounds, Ying Xin, Dan Li, Juan Jiang and Zhao-Yu Li shared a common desire to do something about women and arts, so the four first launched the first China Women’s Film Festival covering four cities in 2013.

In Search of a ‘Feminist Sensibility’

These two shorts give us insight into seven women: Barbara Hammer, Maya Deren, Carolee Schneemann, and Gunvor Nelson as subjects and speakers; Lynne Sachs and Deborah Stratman from behind the camera. Watching both films, I wonder what connections there are to be drawn. Does the recent surge in filmic portraits of female trailblazers point towards a ‘feminine sensibility’, long overdue for historical recognition?

A Year in Notes and Numbers

A year’s worth of to-do lists confronts the unavoidable numbers that are part and parcel of an annual visit to the doctor. The quotidian and the corporeal mingle and mix. Family

Thoughts on Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas died yesterday, but with this close to a full, feisty and mostly extraordinarily fun life, he leaves us all with so much. From an early age, Jonas came to understand that living the life of an artist to the very fullest meant that you were expected to create something that would last beyond your last breath. Before anyone was really using the word “community”, Jonas was building a formidable infrastructure that would be the very foundation for the survival of the personal cinema he loved so dearly.

Berrigan Forum at Fordham presents “Investigation of a Flame”

In December, 2018, I screened INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME with artist Darius Clark Monroe who showed his film BLACK FOURTEEN as part of the Berrigan Forum (named for the the brave and inimitable DANIEL BERRIGAN, peace activist and poet) at Fordham University.