Ms. Films DIY Guide to Film & Video, Third Edition

This anthology of DIY film techniques and ideas is nothing short of inspiring. It takes what I had thought of as a corporate and very difficult to break into medium and brings it to the level where anyone can become a filmmaker. Comprehensive and fascinating, with a lot of spirit, Ms. Films DIY Guide to Film & Video looks and feels like a zine, but is bound durably as a book. Geared toward women and girls, as women and girls are under-represented as film-makers, this book serves a meaningful purpose. I had never felt the desire to make films, but _Ms.

The Lookout

Before the accident, Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) had a beautiful girlfriend and was his high school’s star hockey player. Four years later, the victim of a serious head injury, he works as a night janitor at a bank and tends to forget things he’s told unless he writes them in his notepad. All he wants is to be who he was.

Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History

Caught between the somewhat clichéd “fleeting moment of stardom” and the somewhat fatalistic blow of having images captured on film for what could be an eternity or lost to everyone forever, to be a celebrity means cultivating and wearing a Janus-faced mask.

Bare Hands and Wooden Limbs: Healing, Recovery and Reconciliation in Cambodia

The documentary is a shocking, consciousness-raising and eyes-opening movie. It is the true story of people living in post-war Cambodia, who try to re-build their country after years of dictatorship and fear. It is shows how they prepare the land to build new houses, how they clean the ground from millions of landmines and, finally, how they managed to make both ends meet. The viewer sees how the people learn new professions to survive and earn the living – some learn how to deal with livestock, some learn how to plough and others make tools.

Into the Field

The focus of Into the Field is the secular lives of the women living in the Romanian monastery, Varatec, rather than their spiritual ones. The everyday life of nuns is skimmed over by filmmaker Alyssa Grossman. Presumably, Varatec is as self-sustaining as possible due to its isolated location, and there are many shots of nuns working in the fields.

Return to the Land of Wonders

I was riveted by Maysoon Pachachi’s documentary about her homeland: Return to The Land of Wonders. She returns to Baghdad after a thirty-five year absence, soon after the U.S. invasion. The Baghdad she brings to the viewer is not one seen on CNN; she offers a rare insight into the committee (headed by her father, Adnan) working on the drafting of a temporary Iraqi Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The Abortion Diaries

In this 30-minute documentary short, director Penny Lane gathers a group of women around a kitchen table to share women’s stories about an experience that still does not get discussed openly: abortion. The interviews, interspersed with excerpts from Lane’s own diary about her abortion, are conversation snippets with twelve women who are Lane’s dinner party guests and other individual women lounging on couches and sitting in their yards.

Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema

This hefty anthology is a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in film, history or women’s studies. Substantial at 872 pages, it covers the years 1895 to 1950. The relationship between women and film is complex and fascinating, which explains the length of Red Velvet Seat, and the relationship has gone mostly unexplored, which suggests the book’s importance. Scholars, in particular, will be excited to see so many insightful texts gathered into one volume.