This conversation between curator Nellie Killian and actor and comedian Jenny Slate, discussing the films in the Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories series, was recorded in 2020.

Recorded in 2020, this conversation features curator Nellie Killian talking with Liane Brandon and Amalie R. Rothschild, who were two of the four founders of New Day Films, a co-op film distribution company that began in 1971.

Directed by Julia Reichert and Jim Klein • 1971 • United States

Hailed by Susan Sontag (“One of those painful experiences that’s good for you”), Gloria Steinem (“A true and piercing look at American womanhood”), and Elizabeth Hardwick (“In its unadorned truthfulness there is a sad and simple poe...

Directed by Geri Ashur, Peter Barton, Marilyn Mulford, and Stephanie Palewski • 1971 • United States

The Newsreel collective’s JANIE’S JANIE breaks with the group’s usual format for a more personal approach, following a woman’s journey to self-determination; or, as Janie says, “First I was my fa...

Directed by Joyce Chopra and Claudia Weill • 1972 • United States
Starring Joyce Chopra

In feminist filmmaker Joyce Chopra’s JOYCE AT 34 (codirected with Claudia Weill, who would later direct the great unsung GIRLFRIENDS), Chopra examines the demands of juggling a baby and a professional career.

Directed by Liane Brandon • 1972 • United States

This poignant tale of beauty, identity, and a dress is considered a classic of documentary filmmaking. It was the first independent film of the women’s movement to explore the issues of body image, self-worth, and appearance in American society. I...

Directed by Amalie R. Rothschild • 1972 • United States

Released a year before Roe v. Wade, this short film by Amalie Rothschild lays out the dire realities of illegal abortion, interviewing women from a variety of backgrounds who made the choice to terminate a pregnancy.

Directed by Mirra Bank • 1974 • United States

Yudie, an elderly Lower East Side lifer, looks back at a life lived on her own terms.

Directed by Bonnie Friedman and Deborah Shaffer • 1975 • United States

Two young, frustrated single mothers join forces to make a new kind of family unit for themselves and their children.

Directed by Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio • 1978 • United States

Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio offer a rare look at the degradation faced by women in prison, interviewing women who suffer daily within a system that disregards their humanity and neglects their basic needs.

Directed by Vivienne Dick • 1978 • United States
Starring Beate Nilsen, Ikue Morie, Lydia Lunch

Through single-reel portraits, Vivienne Dick captures the lives of New York No Wave icons, including Pat Place and Lydia Lunch.

Directed by Chick Strand • 1979 • United States

Made in collaboration with its subjects, Chick Strand’s masterpiece SOFT FICTION gives five women the space to, in Strand’s words, perform “an exorcism of [an] experience.” Strand captures the slippery, vivid memories of erotic fantasy, confusing s...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1980 • France

For a French television series about grandmothers, Chantal Akerman interviews elderly women who survived the Shoah, including her own mother, whose experience in the Holocaust reverberated throughout the artist’s life and work.

Directed by Katja Raganelli • 1980 • United States
Starring Barbara Loden

This documentary by Katja Raganelli, filmed in 1980, features an interview with WANDA director Barbara Loden and brief interviews with cinematographer Nicholas T. Proferes and acting teacher Paul Mann.

Directed by Margaret Tait • 1981 • United Kingdom
Starring Mary Graham Sinclair

Margaret Tait follows her neighbor Mary Graham Sinclair, a poet (or “makar”) of the land, through the seasons as she works her farm.

Directed by Roberta Cantow • 1981 • United States

Through oral histories and images of clothes crisscrossing backyards, Roberta Cantow looks at laundry as a form of folk art, a fraught social signifier, and a medium for women to reflect on the joys, pains, and ambivalences of household chores.

Directed by Camille Billops and James Hatch • 1982 • United States

One of the many films that Camille Billops and James Hatch made centering on Billops’s family, SUZANNE, SUZANNE presents a devastating portrait of the artist’s niece, haunted by the abuse she suffered as a child and the passivity...

Directed by Barbara Hammer • 1982 • United States

An incredible document of the LGBT film scene in the early 1980s (as well as artist Barbara Hammer’s off-the-charts charisma), AUDIENCE finds Hammer working in a more straightforward documentary mode than usual. Hammer interviews her largely lesb...

Directed by Su Friedrich • 1984 • United States

Su Friedrich creates a dialogue between past and present, pairing her mother’s recollections of growing up in Germany during the rise and fall of Nazism with images of contemporary Germany and the artist’s current life in Chicago. The result is an ...

Directed by Carlos Aparicio and Susana Aikin • 1990 • United States

Released the same year as PARIS IS BURNING, Susana Aikin and Carlos Aparicio’s THE SALT MINES focuses on three homeless Lantinx trans women living in a parking lot of old garbage trucks on Manhattan’s West Side. Aikin and Aparic...

Directed by Carlos Aparicio and Susana Aikin • 1995 • United States

In THE TRANSFORMATION, Susana Aiken and Carlos Aparicio find one of the most engaging subjects of their previous documentary THE SALT MINES living as a man in Texas, forced to transition back by an evangelical missionary that of...

Directed by Lourdes Portillo • 1999 • United States

Interrogating the Selena phenomenon, Lourdes Portillo brings together a group of Chicana cultural critics to talk about the Tejana music icon. Delving into their reactions to Selena’s groundbreaking rise, widespread influence, and tragic death,...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 2015 • France, Belgium
Starring Natalia Akerman, Chantal Akerman, Sylvaine Akerman

The final film from groundbreaking auteur Chantal Akerman is a deeply personal, heart-woundingly intimate portrait of her relationship with her mother, Natalia, a Holocaust survivor a...

Directed by Leilah Weinraub • 2018 • United States

Charting the eight-year run of Shakedown, a peripatetic black lesbian strip club in Los Angeles, director Leilah Weinraub attempts “to portray the before and after of a utopic moment.” Weinraub presents a world unto itself, shaped by the desires...