New Time: The Future Is Feminist

October 24, 2021–January 29, 2022

Conceived in dialog with BAMPFA’s major exhibition New Time, The Future Is Feminist brings together a diverse range of works made since 2000 by women filmmakers representing an array of feminist voices and aesthetics, variously observational, confrontational, collaborative, analytical, or poetic.

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Girls / Museum
Terra Femme
Delphine and Carole
The Private Life of Fenfen
Chaos
Some Mistakes I Have Made
Nervous Translation
Spit on the Broom
Prism
Knives and Skin

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Films
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Past Films

Terra Femme
Courtney Stephens
United States, 2017–21
Sunday, October 24 4 PM
Courtney Stephens and Kathleen Quillian in Conversation
Featuring amateur travel films shot by women from the 1920s through the 1940s, Terra Femme considers whether there is something distinctive about these women’s way of looking. It is accompanied by a live lecture and two shorts.
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Delphine and Carole
Callisto McNulty
France, 2019
Friday, October 29 7 PM
An essential contribution to feminist film history, Delphine and Carole chronicles the collaboration of documentary film and video maker Carole Roussopoulos and actor and activist Delphine Seyrig, who used early video technology to document the women’s movement.
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The Private Life of Fenfen
Leslie Tai
United States, China, 2013
Wednesday, November 3 7 PM
Leslie Tai in Person
Blurring the boundaries between public and private and inner and outer states, this program illustrates the porous and precarious nature of identity and sanity in light of the challenges confronted by three women.
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Chaos
Sara Fattahi
Austria, Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, 2018
Friday, November 5 7 PM
The intimately filmed documentary Chaos by Sarah Fattahi—“one of the most original documentarians working today”—looks at the impact of the Syrian war on three women and in so doing “it addresses the very subject of memory” (Richard Brody, The New Yorker).
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Girls / Museum
Shelly Silver
Germany, 2020
Sunday, November 14 4 PM
Emily Chao in Person
Young girls take us on a tour of an art museum, raising questions about the depictions of women while revealing their generation’s concerns. With Eve Fowler’s documentation of women working in their art studios, to a voiceover reading of Gertrude Stein. Plus Emily Chao’s short tribute to Gentileschi.
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Persists, Resists, Exists
Wednesday, December 1 7 PM
Jeanne C. Finley and Janis Crystal Lipzin in Person
This program celebrates a range of materialist approaches to feminist filmmaking in the United States by Peggy Ahwesh, Nazli Dinçel, Jeanne C. Finely, Kelly Gallagher, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Jodie Mack, and Christina C. Nguyen.
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Nervous Translation
Shireen Seno
Philippines, 2017
Saturday, December 4 7 PM
Set in Manila in the late 1980s, Nervous Translation depicts the delicate world of childhood via Yael, an intelligent, shy eight-year-old living alone with her mother while her father works abroad.
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Utopian Visions
Thursday, January 20 7 PM
Introduced by Emily Chao
This program features six experimental films that suggest a communal vision for the future arising out of actions in the present by Marwa Arsanios, Emily Chao, Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich, Adele Horne, and Cauleen Smith.
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Prism
Rosine Mbakam, Eléonore Yameogo, An van. Dienderen
Belgium, 2021
Wednesday, January 26 7 PM
A prismatic inquiry into how skin color is seen on screen, this provocative essay film asks whether technology consciously or unconsciously orients itself to depicting white skin as the norm.
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Knives and Skin
Jennifer Reeder
United States, 2019
Saturday, January 29 7 PM
Riffing on genre conventions but from a feminist point of view, Knives and Skin is “a mesmerizing tapestry—mundane middle Americana meets magical realism” (Jen Yamato, Los Angeles Times).
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New Time: The Future Is Feminist

October 24, 2021–January 29, 2022

The Future Is Feminist brings together a diverse range of works made since 2000 by women filmmakers. Moving between interior states and social and political realities, the films’ concerns are far-ranging—from the effects of war, mental illness, and racism, to the lasting impacts of capitalism and colonialism, issues of sexual identity, and the possibilities of transgressive acts—but all extoll the power of creativity. Many are scaled to human experience—women speaking directly about their lives, girls talking back to art, a teenager gone missing, a mother caught shoplifting, a grandmother cooking, homes collectively built. Taken together, the films represent an array of feminist voices and aesthetics, variously observational, confrontational, collaborative, analytical, or poetic. Featuring ten programs, the majority of films showing at BAMPFA for the first time, the series opens with two that look to the past, while other programs elucidate the present, for some a means to imagine and collaborate in a communal, hopeful future. Conceived in dialog with BAMPFA’s major exhibition New Time, the film series uses as a jumping-off point the show’s eight themes—hysteria, the gaze, reexamination of historical narratives, the fragmentation of the female body, gender fluidity, women’s work, female anger, and feminist utopias. The twenty-five films defy easy categorization: an alternative gaze, an act of resistance, a shot of optimism, a controversial position, a committed cinema, but ultimately The Future Is Feminist avers just that.

Of related interest, please see No Ordinary Man, Hive, and Janie Geiser: Collage Animation.

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Organized by Kate MacKay and Kathy Geritz. Funded in part with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Thanks to Apsara DiQuinzio and Claire Frost, as well as Andrea Bussmann, Natalia Brizuela, Mary Ann Doane, Brett Kashmere, Anneka Lenssen, Wakae Nakane, and Miryam Sas for their suggestions.